Weber as an engaged intellectual and a social scientist in the war

Abstract

In Max Weber research in recent decades, the World War has played only a marginal role and is usually reduced to the topic of ‘Weber’s nationalism’. This article shows how Weber as a social scientist differs from the vast majority of German intellectuals and scientists in his attitude to the war, his practical behaviour and his political-programmatic plans. Weber not only spent 15 months in military service as a hospital officer, he also sought further employment as an expert on social policy in the German occupation administration in Belgium and Poland. The question of the social scientist Max Weber during the war years concerns firstly the interruption or continuation of his pre-war projects, that is, on the one hand his major work on the contemporary capitalist economy and contemporary economic science, and on the other hand his universal historical comparative research on the connection between religious systems and economic orders, and also the question of whether and to what extent the war influenced the content of this research. Secondly, it is about assessing the social-scientific dimension of his so-called ‘political writings’ and Weber’s plans for the organisation of a democratic post-war Germany based on them.