Race and its reformulation in Max Weber: Cultural Germanism as political imperialism

Abstract

Weber rejected the notion of race founded on innate characteristics, and instead developed one based on cultural and political factors. The importance of Weber’s distinctive characterization of race cannot be appreciated when consideration is given only to his treatment of minorities. Examination, however, of Weber’s account of the German people as a Herrenvolk, master race, consolidated by shared cultural values and realized through the expansive practices of a Machtstaat or power-state, indicates a complex ethnonational conceptualization of race. Weber’s approach to race as an ethnonational manifestation is important for understanding his sociology as well as his commitment to German imperialism.

Race may not be an obvious category through which Weber’s approach in sociology and politics can be apprehended. Apart from a section of Economy and Society, in which ‘race’ is considered together with ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation’ (Weber, 1978/1922: 385–398), there is little extended discussion of race in Weber’s writing. Weber mentions particular social groups in terms of racial characteristics, including Black Americans, taken to be indicative of his general attitude to race (Banton, 2007: 24–5; Manasse, 1947: 196–200; Stone, 1995: 392–393; Zimmerman, 2006: 56, 64–65, 67), and Poles in East Prussia (Abraham, 1991; Manasse, 1947: 192–196; Zimmerman, 2006: 57–63). Weber’s discussion of the Jews in European capitalism is seen as another case of race analysis (Manasse, 1947: 202–207; Stone, 1995: 394–395), even though Weber (1978/1922: 493–499, 611–623) regards the Jews as a religiously identified economic group, a ‘pariah’ or ‘guest people’ without ‘residential anchorage and hence completely occupied economically in meeting demands of other settled peoples’ (Weber, 1960/1916: 11–13), a category applied also to ‘impure’ Hindu castes, and gipsies.

In contrast to these cases, Weber’s treatment of the German ‘national people’ as a racial category has drawn little attention in anglophone sociology, even though it arguably underwrites much of his sociological and political thought. This absence partly arises from the de-politicization and simplification of Weber in standard translations of his work and his reputation as a sociological classic, through which Weber’s milieu is no longer the Empire of Kaiser Wilhelm II but English-language university sociology departments. In this metamorphosis Weber’s nationalism and its imperial framework, and their representation in his writing, become invisible and irrelevant. Such possibilities are reinforced by indifference to the political context of Weber’s usefulness to the post-war rebuilding of intellectual traditions in Germany, acknowledgement of which distracts from his supposed liberal credentials (Mommsen, 1990: 416). Mainstream accounts therefore tend to ignore Weber’s racialized analysis or, when acknowledging it, insist that it is confined to a single source, such as the 1895 inaugural lecture, and otherwise irrelevant for an understanding of his contribution. This is in contrast with accounts which explore Weber’s ethnonational and racial orientation, and its significance (Bhambra, 2016; Boatcă, 2013; Hund, 2014; Müller, 2020; Schöllgen, 1998; Zimmerman, 2006). One possible justification for this relative neglect is the assumption that race necessarily requires a biological rationale. But ‘race’ is a polymorphous category, with different possible foundations.

Weber’s approach to the German Kulturgemeinschaft, cultural community, indicates an apprehension of race commensurate with the political significance of such collective identities, an idea found in his writing from at least 1904 when he explicitly rejects a natural science approach to innate racial qualities (Weber, 2014/1904: 112), if not earlier, in his equivocal critique of the evolutionary notion of race outlined in his 1895 inaugural lecture, discussed below. While Weber (1978/1922: 8) indicates that the term ‘race’ denotes a ‘hereditary biological constitution’ he notes that ‘race identity’ operates in terms of a ‘subjectively perceived . . . common trait’ which forms the ‘basis of joint (mostly political) common action’ (p. 385). As we shall see, this is consistent with the idea that the German ‘national people’ could provide authority to the Reich as an expression of a unitary German Machtstaat or power-state, a view Weber held throughout his adult life. Another reason Weber’s idea of a German race may be overlooked is that race is often thought to refer to subordinate minority groups, as in the case of American Blacks or European Jews. A third reason for the mainstream anglophone neglect of Weber’s ethnonationalist conceptualization of a German race is the ostensibly similar idea, from the late 1930s, regarding a German Herrenvolk. Each of these will be discussed below.

During 1904 Weber attended a Congress of Arts and Science in St Louis, and from September to December visited different regions of America. His account of American race relations has drawn favourable commentary (Manasse, 1947: 196–199; Scaff, 2011: 108–112), although its analytic limitations and ‘disappointment’ with Weber’s discussion have been noted (Banton, 2007: 24–25), including elements of racial denigration in his commentary (Zimmerman, 2006: 56, 66–68). In his account of the situation of Black Americans Weber draws on culturally-informed perceptions of participants. For instance, different ‘evaluation[s]’ by white Americans of Blacks and indigenous Indians is based, Weber says, on the perception that while Blacks ‘submit[ted] to slavery’, Indians could not ‘endure the quantity of work demanded by the plantation capitalists’; among unionized whites, Black workers were seen as strike-breakers, whereas middle-class whites ‘despise’ them in order to elevate their own status (Weber, 1971/1910: 38–39; see also Weber, 1978/1922: 386–387). Weber does, though, indicate innate qualities when reporting favourably on ‘the numerous half-Negroes, quarter-Negroes, and one-hundredth part Negroes whom no non-American can distinguish from whites’, to which belong ‘the educated and often nine-tenths white Negro upper class’ (quoted in MA Weber, 1975/1926: 296), including ‘the most important sociological scholar anywhere in the Southern States in America, with whom no white scholar can compare . . . Burckhardt Du Bois’ (Weber, 1973/1910: 312). These cases are contrasted with the ‘semi-apes one encounters on the plantations and in the Negro huts of the “Cotton Belt”’ (quoted in MA Weber, 1975/1926: 296).

Weber’s appreciation of the Black scholar W.E.B Du Bois has been taken to indicate ‘Weber’s resolutely antiracist personal attitude and his opposition, as a researcher, to so-called “scientific” racial theories’, an attitude which ‘also appears in his relationship with his Jewish colleagues like Georg Simmel’ (Löwy and Varikas, 2021: 74). While enjoying friendly personal relations with Simmel, and supporting Jewish academics against exclusion from university careers, Weber opposed recruitment of Jews to the officer corps and objected to Jewish migration (Radkau, 2009: 434, 433). Although evidence exists of Weber’s opposition to antisemitism, ‘a lot can be adduced that points in the other direction’ (Radkau, 2009: 427). Löwy and Varikas (2021: 74) acknowledge that in the 1890s Weber ‘revealed a virulent nationalism bordering on cultural racism’ directed towards Polish migrant workers east of the Elbe. But Weber’s vigorous antipathy to the Poles, ‘Polish pigs’, and his fixation on the ‘Polish question’, the ‘only thing that interests me’ (quoted in MA Weber, 1975/1926: 77, 570), continued throughout his adult life (quoted in MA Weber, 1975/1926: 202, 221–222, 224–225, 401–402, 631–632). It will be shown that Weber’s ideas of a cultural basis underlying a German race similarly extends through his writings over his entire intellectual career. The present discussion is concerned with Weber’s characterization of the concept of race – cultural rather than biological – and his application of it to the German people.

The purpose here is to identify the elements of Weber’s reconstitution of the notion of race in cultural-political terms. The article is in three parts. The first considers Weber’s argument against a biological conception of race and his development of an alternate cultural-political foundation. An exploration of the rationale through which Weber develops his characteristically cultural-political notion of race is provided in the second section. Weber’s understanding of the German Herrenvolk entails a particular set of relationships between the people, the nation, and the state, which are outlined in the third section.

Race and its refinement

During a meeting of the German Sociological Association in 1910 Weber argued with Alfred Ploetz, a physician and eugenicist who coined the term ‘Rassenhygiene’, race hygiene, a notion he developed in the mid-1890s and which contributed to Nazi ideology and the Sterilization Law of 1933 (Proctor, 2002: 15–17, 28–29, 95–117). In 1910, though, Ploetz was invited to speak by the President of the Association, Ferdinand Tönnies, on the theme of ‘the concepts of race and society’. Ploetz’s address was followed by six other speakers, including Weber. Ploetz provided an evolutionary account of society, defined as a biological entity which functions to maintain life but subject to degenerative social influences, including alcohol and birth control (Weindling, 1993: 141). Weber objected to Ploetz’s use of biological categories in sociology on the grounds that biological and social organization do not correspond in the manner assumed by Ploetz: the idea ‘that the most fruitful development . . . of social conditions . . . is continually dependent upon the flowering of the race . . . is a totally unproven assertion no matter which concept of “society” and “race” is utilized’ (Weber, 1971/1910: 34). Weber (1971/1910: 37) went on to ask:

. . . does there exist even today a single fact that would be relevant for sociology – a single concrete fact which in a truly illuminating, valid, exact and incontestable way traces a definite type of sociological circumstance back to inborn and hereditary qualities which are possessed by one race or another? The answer is definitively – note well – definitively no!

Weber objected that Ploetz’s argument ‘combined a number of precise concepts into a single vague one’ (Weindling, 1993: 141).

Although few attendees accepted the notion of ‘race hygiene’ an interest in the question of social biology was prevalent. According to Weindling (1993: 141), the ‘majority of sociologists agreed with Sombart’s defense of his friend Ploetz, that “the strong opposition expressed against Dr Ploetz did not mean that the [Association] did not have an interest in biology. We are interested”’. Indeed, Weber’s remarks concerning conceptual imprecision object to the conflation of categories and the drawing of unwarranted inferences, but not necessarily to the concept of race itself. While Weber (1978/1922: 398) was concerned that with ‘race theories you can prove and disprove anything you want’, as he wrote 2 years after this encounter with Ploetz, the concept of race itself was employed by him in his treatment of migratory Polish agrarians in 1895, and continued to hold some interest for him. Writing 10 years after his debate with Ploetz, Weber indicates that he is ‘inclined to think the importance of biological heredity very great . . . [even though] I see up to the present no way of . . . measuring either the extent or, above all, the form of its influence’ on sociological formations (Weber, 1991/1920: 30). This formulation is similar to remarks he made in 1895 when, after indicating his lack of knowledge of natural science research on selection and his objection to the errors and implicit apologia generated in endeavours to develop ‘a “natural-scientific theory” of the social order’ Weber acknowledges that in spite of his ‘reservations’ anthropological extensions of Darwinian evolution to the ‘field of economic investigation’ in certain instances ‘deserve more attention than they have been given’ (Weber, 2000/1895: 10–11 note).

While Weber rejected the notion of race propagated by Ploetz and can find no application in sociology for a biologically-grounded concept of race, he returned to the notion several times. In 1911 he notes that while ‘serious research on the sexual attraction and repulsion between different ethnic groups is only incipient’ there is nevertheless ‘not the slightest doubt that racial factors, that means, common descent, influence the incidence of sexual relations and of marriage, sometimes decisively’ (Weber, 1978/1922: 385–386). How they do so, however, remains unresolved and the ‘assumption of a “natural” racial antipathy’ is unsupported (Weber, 1978/1922: 386). These statements are in a fragment published in Economy and Society, ‘Ethnic Groups’, that while incomplete nevertheless provides a sociological account which summarizes much of Weber’s enduring framework for thinking about political processes. He begins by noting that ‘race identity’, namely perceived awareness of ‘inheritable traits’, tends to arise in situations of ‘joint (mostly political) action’ characterized by ‘some antagonism’ (Weber, 1978/1922: 385). Weber (1978/1922: 387) shows that whether the so-called ‘“racial” differences are based on biological heredity or on tradition is usually of no importance’, either for the subsequent actions or their sociological analysis. Indeed, Weber’s (1978/1922: 392–393) account assimilates the sociological analysis of race into the broader category of ethnicity which, while vague and ambiguous, he says, implies either a present political community or collective memories of one. He goes so far as to say that ‘All history shows how easily political action can give rise to belief in blood relationship, unless gross differences of anthropological type impede it’ (Weber, 1978/1922: 393). While race transmutes to ethnicity in this account, so ethnicity metamorphizes to nation, ‘as soon as we attempt a sociological definition’ (Weber, 1978/1922: 395).

The notions of ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ are central to Weber’s own appreciation of his political commitments. In his brief discussion in ‘Ethnic Groups’ Weber provides a sketch of the operative constitution of political community which both indicates its sociological elements and also his own political anchor points. The first thing to note is the role of ethnicity in nationality:

The concept of ‘nationality’ shares with that of the ‘people’ (Volk) – in the ‘ethnic’ sense – the vague connotation that whatever is felt to be distinctively common must derive from common descent. In reality, of course, persons who consider themselves members of the same nationality are often much less related by common descent than are persons belonging to different and hostile nationalities (Weber, 1978/1922: 395).

Common to persons who share a sense of nationality, then, is not biological descent but cultural or political identity. Rather than shared biological origins, as we shall see, it is a common political commitment to cultural values that is primary, according to Weber, in generating a sense of common descent. Weber (1978/1922: 396) demonstrates this point in his discussion of Polish residents in Silesia:

Until a short time ago most Poles in Upper Silesia had no strongly developed sense of Polish nationality that was antagonistic to the Prussian state, which is based essentially on the German language. The Poles were loyal if passive ‘Prussians’, but they were not ‘Germans’ interested in the existence of the Reich; the majority did not feel a conscious or strong need to segregate themselves from German-speaking fellow citizens. Hence, in this case there was no sense of nationality based on common language, and there was no Kulturgemeinschaft in view of the lack of cultural development.

These Poles, then, were not a national group contrasted with Prussian nationality, for they lived alongside their ‘German-speaking fellow citizens’. At the same time, though, the Silesian Poles were not a part of the cultural community, a Kulturgemeinschaft or German ‘national people’ which gave authority to the Reich, the realm of a unitary German nation-state. For Weber (1978/1922: 398), the ‘concept “nation” directs us to political power’.

The conjoining of nation and political power, the state, in Weber’s discussion above is hesitant. He writes that the concept of nation ‘seems to refer – if it refers at all to a uniform phenomenon – to a specific kind of pathos which is linked to the idea of a powerful political community of people who share a common language, or religion, or common customs, or political memories; such a state may already exist or it may be desired’ (Weber, 1978/1922: 398). If such a state ‘may be desired’ then not only political memories but political aspirations are important in understanding the nation in this sense. Indeed, Weber immediately adds that the ‘more power is emphasized, the closer appears to be the link between nation and state’. As noted, ‘Ethnic Groups’, is an unfinished text, possibly why Weber’s discussion does not go beyond ‘the Germans 150 years ago’, but his formulation of the likely incidence of ‘nation’ seems distant from his earlier enthusiasm for the nation state, in his 1895 inaugural lecture, to which we shall turn below. This is not because his outlook had significantly changed, as we shall see. But in ‘Ethnic Groups’ Weber (1978/1922: 398) is content to remark:

This pathetic pride in the power of one’s own community, or this longing for it, may be much more widespread in relatively small language groups such as the Hungarians, Czechs and Greeks, than in a similar but much larger community such as the Germans 150 years ago, when they were essentially a language group without pretensions to political power.

Such pride in the political power of one’s community is ‘pathetic’ not in the current sense of pitiable or inadequate, but in the sense of producing an effect on the emotions, of moving strong feelings. We shall see that Weber set himself the mission in 1895 to generate such pride in the German Kulturgemeinschaft, but in order to achieve it there was need for political education, the inculcation of ‘pathetic pride’ in the leading political and economic sectors of the national society.

If the German master race is to achieve a presence, then it has to be politically and culturally realigned, which would be unnecessary if race were simply based on biological descent. The term ‘master race’, Herrenvolk, is drawn from Weber’s discussion when, towards the end of the First World War, he claims that only a nation taking the form of a ‘Herrenvolk . . . can and may engage in “world politics” – [it] has no choice in this matter’ (Weber, 2000/1917: 129), and argues for the capacity of the German people or nation, as a Herrenvolk, to exercise a ‘will to power’ in the world of nations (Weber, 2000/1917: 269–270). Herrenvolk is usually translated as ‘master race’ (Aron, 1971: 85), but in their translation of Weber’s Suffrage and Democracy in Germany, Lassman and Spiers decollectivize it by rendering the term as a ‘nation of masters’. They hold that Weber’s use of the word Herrenvolk ‘ought not to be confused with the National Socialist later misappropriation of Nietzschean vocabulary’, and disingenuously claim that ‘Weber’s usage does not have imperialistic implications but rather conceives of a nation in which each individual is master of his own life and responsible for his own political fate’ (Weber, 2000/1917: 129 note 42), an interpretation demonstrated by Schöllgen (1998: 112–114) to be wholly inconsistent with the facts. Weber only ever treats Herrenvolk as a collective noun, ‘a politically mature people . . . controlling the administration of its affairs itself’ who are ‘called upon to thrust their hands into the spoke of the world’s development’ with ‘a responsibility . . . [it] has towards its descendants’ (Weber, 2000/1918: 269–270), indicating a people or national group inherent in the instrument of an imperial state power. Indeed, this seems to be precisely Nietzsche’s (1992: 476) usage, ‘the conqueror and master race, the Aryan’.

Race and the basis of ‘selection’

While Weber rejected a biological notion of race, he found a characteristic use for the concept of race if not always the word, which he explicates in cultural and political terms. The most explicit use of ‘race’ in Weber’s writing is in the 1895 lecture delivered after his professorial appointed at the University of Freiburg. The lecture examines a ‘tremendous crisis of agriculture’ (Weber, 2000/1895: 10) which arose in East Prussia as a result of the traditional Junker landowners employing cheaper Polish labourers rather than supporting German smallholders. The national differences between Poles and Germans are held to be not only overlain with a religious element, Catholicism among the Poles and Protestantism among the Germans, but also a racial dimension. Of interest here is Weber’s understanding of the bases of these racial differences, including a certain ambiguity regarding the significance of inherited characteristics.

This lecture is to indicate ‘the role played by physical and psychological racial differences between nationalities in the economic struggle for existence’ (Weber, 2000/1895: 2). Weber’s language is superficially Darwinian, but his analysis repudiates evolution by natural selection for understanding these ‘racial differences’. Survival of the fittest through natural selection, core to Darwinian evolutionism, is the obverse of the outcome of social selection in the economic struggle between the races in East Prussia, according to Weber. The ‘struggle for everyday economic existence’ between German and Polish agrarians leads to the success of ‘an inferior race’ (Weber, 2000/1895: 14). In contrast to Darwin, the ‘free play of the forces of selection does not always operate . . . in favour of the nationality which is economically the more highly developed or better endowed’ (Weber, 2000/1895: 11). The difference here is that whereas Darwin understands successful adaptation in terms of the outcome of the struggle, so that who is the ‘fittest’ is determined by their ‘survival’, Weber’s assignment of who is the ‘fittest’ is determined independently of the struggle. While the economic ‘victory’ of Polish agrarians results from their adaptation to a changing environment in which the ‘growth of sugar-beet cultivation and the unprofitability of cereal production for the market are parallel developments pulling in the same direction: the former breeds the Polish seasonal worker and the latter the small Polish peasant’ (Weber, 2000/1895: 11), the Poles are held to be inferior to the Germans because they are ‘less developed types of human being’ compared to the ‘fine flowers of intellectual and emotional life’ that are the German smallholders, whom they displace (Weber, 2000/1895: 11).

Polish peasants gain ground over German freeholders, according to Weber (2000/1895: 10), because the Polish peasant ‘can minimise his own requirements . . . [and therefore] makes the fewest physical and ideal demands on the quality of life, who is in the most favourable position . . . [because] he is prepared even to eat grass . . . [so that it is] not despite but rather because of his habitually low physical and intellectual standard of living’ that the Pole can succeed where the German fails. German and Polish agrarians belong to different races, according to Weber, distinguished by their capacity to adapt to different economic and social conditions of existence, especially the ‘lower expectations of the standard of living’ on the part of the Poles (Weber, 2000/1895: 8). Weber (2000/1895: 10) seems indifferent as to whether this is ‘natural’ or ‘arises in the course of history’ but immediately adds that what now seems fixed ‘could perhaps shift again as a result of further generations of breeding of the kind which may have produced the difference in the first place’ even though he insists that ‘at present it simply has to be taken account of as a fixed given for the purpose of analysis’. Perhaps aware of the ambiguity in the claim that the relevant differences have ‘been bred into’ these populations ‘in the course of history’ Weber provides a clarifying footnote.

Weber (2000/1895: note 10) writes that ‘the disputes in natural science over the significance of the principles of selection, or over the general application in natural science of the concept of “selective breeding”, and all the discussions relating to it in this area (with which I am not familiar), have no relevance to these remarks’ concerning his ‘analysis’. His explanation of the propensity of the Polish agrarian’s acceptance of poor employment conditions is provided in an essay of 1894, in which the migratory status of Polish seasonal workers is seen to influence their behaviour:

The migrant would not accept at home the kind of living conditions (and diet is not the only, or even principle, factor here) that are offered to him by a distant place of work. Because of this lower standard and because of the lack of the usual additional tasks that face him in his home he is able to save significant amounts from his wages even when they are no higher than the local rates, something that would not have been possible had he not migrated (Weber, 1989/1894: 175).

The determination of the Polish agrarian’s racial ‘inferiority’ and ‘low physical and intellectual standard of living’ are on this account not entirely inherent. Weber’s understanding of the basis of race is especially clear when he turns to the imperative needs of the German race. He writes that present endeavours are generative of the ‘future race’, and asserts that rather than ‘well-being in people’ the present task is to ‘breed . . . those characteristics which we think of as constituting the human greatness and nobility of our nature’ (Weber, 2000/1895: 15). Weber (2000/1895: 16) clarifies what is meant by ‘greatness’ and ‘nobility’ when he goes on to say that what is to be handed ‘down to our descendants . . . [is] the eternal struggle to preserve and raise the quality of our national species’. The generational continuity constitutive of race or the ‘national species’ and the characteristic features of the German race, Weber (2000/1895: 16) makes clear in a subsequent claim: ‘Our successors will hold us answerable to history not primarily for the kind of economic organisation we hand down to them, but for the amount of elbow-room in the world which we conquer and bequeath to them’.

The German race, in this account, is instrumentally defined in terms of a German national and imperial state, for this is the ‘bearer’ of the ‘economic and political power-interests of our nation’ which is also its ‘criterion of value’ (Weber, 2000/1895: 17, 15). Weber’s (2000/1895: 15–17) argument is not merely normative, that this should be the orientation of German political economy, but rather that this defining instrumentality is located in the very character of the German nation:

At great moments, in time of war, for example, [the broad masses of the nation’s] souls become aware of the significance of national power, and at such times it becomes evident that the nation state rests on deeply rooted psychological foundations in the broad, [affecting] economically subordinate strata of the nation as well . . . [In] normal times this political instinct sinks below the level of consciousness among the masses. Then it is the specific function of the leading economic and political strata to be the bearers of the nation’s sense of political purpose. In fact this is the only political justification for their existence (Weber, 2000/1895: 21).

The intellectual and moral energy underlying Weber’s exposition in ‘The Nation State and Economic Policy’ comes from his sense that at this time the German political class is not satisfying the ‘justification’ for its existence:

It is dangerous, and in the long run incompatible with the interests of the nation, for the economically declining class to exercise political rule (Herrschaft). But it is more dangerous still when classes that are moving towards economic power, and therefore expect to take over political rule, do not yet have the political maturity to assume the direction of the state. Germany is currently threatened by both of these things (Weber, 2000/1895: 21–22).

The Junker’s political capacities are largely a thing of the past, according to Weber (2000/1895: 22), the working class suffers from political ‘philistinism’ (pp. 25–26), and the ‘broad strata of the German bourgeoisie’ is marked by ‘political immaturity’ (p. 25) unable to discharge the ‘vocation for political leadership’ (pp. 20, 26). Here, then, is the raison d’être for this lecture, to advocate ‘the ultimate goal of our science’, namely, ‘this task of contributing to the political education of our nation’ (Weber, 2000/1895: 27), a task that is not merely a professional undertaking, but more especially a deeply felt personal one. Through this vision of German national political leadership, expression is given to ‘the great passions nature has implanted in us’ (Weber, 2000/1895: 28).

Much of the English-language literature on Weber and his political commitments holds that the ideas in the 1895 lecture are discontinuous with his subsequent writing. In the inaugural lecture Weber (2000/1895: 12) advocates a return to Bismarck’s pre-1890 policy of closing the Eastern frontier to migratory Polish agrarians and, secondly, for ‘the state to buy up land systematically . . . [for] systematic colonisation by German peasants on suitable soil’. These policy suggestions scandalized Weber’s audience not because they were explicitly anti-Polish but because they would undermine the economic position of the traditional German land-owning class, the Junkers. Weber (2000/1895: 12) justifies such policies: ‘From the standpoint of the nation, large-scale enterprises which can only be preserved at the expense of the German race deserve to go down to destruction’. Weber was unsuccessful in securing these policies, but they were prosecuted in 1940. Mazower (2008: 235) comments that ‘Weber simply could not have envisaged the degree to which Hitler’s Reich could use the power of the state against the Poles’. In its doing so, Weber’s research and recommendations on the Polish question were drawn upon by a Nazi sociologist, Reinhard Höhn, Director of the Instituts für Staatsforschung (State Research Institute), an SS organization directly managed by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. Mazower (2008: 235) goes on to say that Höhn’s argument, ‘that Prussia had been unable to protect German land against the Poles’ followed Weber’s, namely that there was a ‘lack of a unified government, the hegemony of the Junkers and a liberal reluctance to intervene in the market’. But the race sentiment Weber identified and the one advocated by the Nazis are not the same, even though elements of them overlap. The Nazis exemplified the Rassenhygiene doctrine that Weber rejected in his critique of Ploetz in 1910. Weber’s racial analysis of Poles and Germans in his 1895 lecture is based on a commitment to the German race as a national political force, the political education of which would have been unnecessary on the basis of a biological understanding of race. For Weber, a race is in need of cultural and political rectification if it is to achieve its historically-fashioned destiny.

It can be noted that Weber’s position on the Polish question did change fundamentally from the one he held in 1895. In 1915 he supported an independent Polish state as a protective bulkhead for Germany against Russia (Mannion, 2016: 709; Mommsen, 1990: 205–207, 212–225; MA Weber, 1975/1926: 553–558). There is consistency, though, in the fact that on each occasion Weber’s position was based on an understanding of the German national interest. His attitude to the German race vis-à-vis the Polish remained unchanged, what changed was Weber’s strategically political orientation resulting from the onset of war in 1914.

The notion of race entertained by Weber pivots on his commitment to the German Reich, in which Kulturgemeinschaft was an essential component. This notion of race, as cultural and political, is not in itself exceptional. Race has historically been conceived in quite different terms. Banton (1998) identifies seven distinct conceptualizations of ‘race’. Weber provides a version of race that loosely corresponds to what has been called an ‘ethnonational’ foundation (Connor, 1993), which Weber continued to accept after 1895 with slight modification, as shown below. It is of interest that parallel (re)conceptualizations of race were debated among contemporary American social scientists, including Franz Boas, W.E.B Du Bois, and W.I. Thomas, although in response to different contextual imperatives (Liss, 1998; Williams, 1996).

The general political situation outlined by Weber in 1895, and his commitment to an expansive German state interest expressed at that time, are restated in 1918 in Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order, in which the political incapacities of the leading classes are lamented, the need for political education repeated, and the destiny of the Herrenvolk to fulfil the ‘responsibility’ it ‘has towards its descendants’ exhorted (Weber, 2000/1918: 269–270). Each of these propositions are repeated in Weber’s (2021/1918: 23) speculative construction of variant configurations of how best to achieve a post-war state formation, a ‘greater German form of state’. The ‘politically uneducated’ condition of the nation is again regretted, while Weber’s (2021/1918: 24, 29) imaginative contriving supposes ‘the form of state that permits the highest possible number of Germans to unite in one association . . . [which would include] Austria and Bavaria’. Such an improbable union makes sense to Weber (2021/1918: 30) because ‘the fatherland is not the land of the fathers but of the descendants, and because we have, and must have, more confidence in the descendants than in the older generation’.

The power-state/nation/people/race nexus in Weber

Weber’s understanding of the German race, as an aspirant power-community, requires a political vocation in leadership which does not naturally attach to groups with the strongest economic or ideological resources. The complexity of Weber’s position has made it difficult to comprehensively identify its elements and the ways in which they relate together. While some of the major components of it indicated here are represented in different ways by various authors (Anter, 2014; Aron, 1971; Beetham, 1989; Mommsen, 1990; Norkus, 2004), its complexity makes comprehensive capture difficult. The following discussion begins with Weber’s notion of the state and finishes with the idea of group identity as belonging to the German race entailed in that state.

When Weber discusses the state, the nation is close at hand; and, as we shall see, different types of state relate to different types of nation. In his inaugural lecture of 1895 Weber (2000/1895: 16–17) says that ‘the nation state is not something vague . . . Rather, it is the worldly organisation of the nation’s power’. He goes on to indicate that the nation has ‘enduring economic and political power interests’, which, with political maturity, are placed ‘above all other considerations’ (Weber, 2000/1895: 20–21). This view of the state and nation is elliptically repeated in Weber’s (1970/1906: 384–385) Address to the St Louis Congress in 1904 when referring to Germany’s history and culture, and its destiny as ‘an armed camp within a world bristling with arms’. In an article published in the same year Weber (2014/1904: 136) writes with increased clarity that ‘the state’:

. . . is often nothing more than the cover address for an extremely complicated tangle of value ideas . . . [including] purely military external security; securing the dominant internal position of a dynasty or of particular classes; in preserving and enlarging the formal political unity of the nation, for its own sake or in the interest of preserving certain objective, but again quite divergent, cultural values that we, as a people united in a state, believe that we represent.

This passage is written in a partly sardonic register, understandably so as it appeared in the first issue of Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik through which Weber and his co-editors sought to recruit diverse contributors from a range of academic disciplines (MA Weber, 1975/1926: 277–279). At the same time, though, Weber’s abiding concern regarding the association of the state with national power and cultural values is clear. These themes are starkly outlined in a short article written as an open letter to the editor of a journal, Die Frau, published in 1916 as ‘Between Two Laws’, the title referring to the choice between the ‘gods of this world’, associated with the German Machtstaat (power-state), and the ‘God proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount’ (Weber, 2000/1916: 79). Weber repeated the substance of this article, which appeared in February, in a speech delivered in October 1916, ‘Germany among the European World Powers’, given to an audience drawn from the Progressive People’s Party (MA Weber, 1975/1926: 580–581).

Weber’s submission to Die Frau contributes to the ‘discussion about the meaning and purpose of our war . . . by placing more emphasis on . . . the importance of . . . our responsibility before history . . . [about which the] facts themselves are plain enough’ (Weber, 2000/1916: 75). The principal ‘fact’ is that:

Any numerically ‘large’ nation organised as a Machtstaat finds that, thanks to these very characteristics, it is confronted by tasks of a quite different order from those devolving on other nations such as the Swiss, the Danes, the Dutch or the Norwegians . . . it is simply that such nations, by their very nature, have different obligations and therefore other cultural possibilities (Weber, 2000/1916: 75).

The ‘demands placed on a people organised as a Machtstaat are inescapable’ Weber (2000/1916: 76) says:

Future generations, and particularly our own successors, would not hold the Danes, the Swiss, the Dutch or the Norwegians responsible if world power – which in the last analysis means power to determine the character of culture in the future – were to be shared out, without a struggle, between the regulations of Russian officials on the one hand and English-speaking ‘society’ on the other . . . They would hold us responsible, and quite rightly so, for we are a Machtstaat and can therefore, in contrast to those ‘small’ nations, throw our weight into the balance on this historical issue (see also Weber quoted in MA Weber, 1975/1926: 581).

Small nations, then, are ‘communities which renounce political power’ and by virtue of that fact ‘provide the soil on which . . . may flourish . . . bourgeois virtues of citizenship and true democracy . . . [as well as the] much more intimate and yet eternal values, including artistic ones’ (Weber, 2000/1916: 76). These virtues and values are not lost to the German Machtstaat, however, because of another ‘fact’ that Weber (2000/1916: 75–76) observes, namely that ‘a branch of the German race exists outside the boundaries of the national Machtstaat’. The Swiss writer Gottfried Keller is thus described as a ‘true’ German. The complex nexus between the state, the responsibilities of a people constituted as a nation whose interests are politically embodied in the state, and the cultural-racial extension beyond a national boundary and, finally, the cultural bounce emanating from that extension, which enriches the Machtstaat, are encapsulated in this brief exposition of Weber’s justification for the war, its ‘meaning and purpose’.

Weber’s attitude to the war was more or less consistent over its course and even after Germany’s defeat by the Allies in 1918. Regarding Germany’s war aims Weber was not chauvinistic, nor did he support the idea of ‘power for its own sake’; indeed, Weber criticized the German government on many occasions (Mommsen, 1990: 190–211). But his commitment to the German nation as he conceived it remained firm even in defeat, from November 1918 to January 1920 (Weber quoted in MA Weber, 1975/1926: 636–637, 638, 644, 673). A constant theme, continuous from 1895 to 1920, his last year, is the preservation of the German national character as a duty towards future generations, even though the particular expression of it varies as the context changes (Beetham, 1989: 138–144; see also Palonen, 2001, and Norkus, 2004: 392–395).

The theme of the responsibility to future generations imbued through participation in or commitment to state or national power is in a generalized statement written in 1911 from which Weber appears to stand at some distance but which nevertheless reflects a personal attachment. He writes in a manner that also informs the distinction in Die Frau between a Machtstaat and ‘small nations’, that while ‘All political structures use force . . . they differ in the manner in which they use or threaten to use it against other political organizations . . . [and such] differences play a specific role in determining the form and destiny of political communities’ (Weber, 1978/1922: 910). This consideration is pertinent in understanding ‘the nation’ because the ‘sentiments of prestige’ which attach to ‘states rich in the historical attainment of power-positions . . . may fuse with a specific belief in responsibility towards succeeding generations’ and the ‘naked prestige of “power” is unavoidably transformed . . . into the idea of the “nation”’ (Weber, 1978/1922: 921, 922). The nation is not only in a symbiotic relation with the power-state, but both are connected with cultural values:

The significance of the ‘nation’ is usually anchored in the superiority, or at least the irreplaceability, of the culture values that are to be preserved and developed only through the cultivation of the peculiarity of the group (Weber, 1978/1922: 925).

A couple of sentences later the text abruptly ends but Weber’s marginal notes indicate that the themes he intended to develop, namely that ‘Cultural prestige and power prestige are closely related’ and that ‘Pure art and literature of a specifically German character did not develop in the political centre of Germany’ (Weber, 1978/1922: 926), are given expression in his contribution to Die Frau, noted above.

Indeed, the discussion in Die Frau regarding the German race extending beyond the state boundary, and the way in which the Silesian Poles were ‘loyal if passive “Prussians”, but . . . not “Germans” interested in the existence of the Reich’ (Weber, 1978/1922: 396), mentioned earlier, together make sense of Weber’s (1978/1922: 922) claim that ‘nation’ is ‘not identical with the “people of the state”’, both externally and internally. In this manner, then, ‘the nation’ has characteristics in common ‘with the sentiment of solidarity of ethnic communities’ but this does not ‘by itself make a “nation”’ (Weber, 1978/1922: 923). Weber here does not say why this ethnic ‘sentiment of solidarity’ while necessary is not sufficient for the nation, even though he answers this question throughout the text, namely that for a people to be a Herrenvolk an association is required with a power-state, expressive of the nation’s sense of a common past and future aspirations, as explicitly indicated elsewhere (Weber, 2000/1918: 269–270). The underlying concept here is race, not based on innate characteristics, but constituted through future political aspirations providing meaning to a shared past, defined by cultural values, and consolidated through and expressed in a national capacity, provided with instrumental form as an imperial power-state.

Conclusion

The idea that Weber failed ‘to give sufficient weight to racial, ethnic and national conflicts’ (Stone, 1995: 391) is a matter of judgement that may be revised in light of the evidence presented here. It has been argued that Weber’s core framework devolved on a notion of race that simply escapes attention when race is understood biologically. Weber’s view of the nature of race experienced by the German Herrenvolk is complex in the sense of comprising a number of distinct elements, including not only the factors often associated with racial as well as ethnic identity, of a common past and future destiny, but also a cultural formation as a nation based on values and the power-expressive form of a state, imperialistically expansive in its influence. In many ways Weber’s idea of race is tied to the historical experience of the Wilhelmine Reich (1888–1918), but distinguished from conceptualizations circulating at that time expressed by Ploetz and his associates, and from earlier exhortations as when Bismarck ‘called on Germans, spread at the time throughout more than thirty sovereign entities, to unite in a single state: “Germans, think with your blood!”’ (Connor, 1993: 377), and later, when Germans in 1942 were called upon to ‘enjoy the consciousness of belonging to a community, a consciousness which is far stronger than that created by political or economic interests . . . [that] is conditioned by the fact of a blood-relationship’ (Hitler quoted in Connor, 1993: 377).

While historically grounded, Weber’s understanding of a people united by common values and world-political aspirations that are realized by a power-state continues to have relevance. This is one reason why examination of Weber’s ethnonational conceptualization of race is important. Big power national imperialism is a feature of our times and an appreciation of Weber’s approach to the German nation and its power-state, based on values or cultural commonality and a shared sense of common future-orientated global political aspirations, can sensitize us to the nature of appeals to expansive dominance that endeavours to realize a national identity based on distinctive values. This will be overlooked if only formal structures and material interests are assumed to govern political ambitions and practices.