Sombart’s war against the cultural decay of a capitalist world

Abstract

By 1914, Friedrich Sombart was well known world-wide as a historian of modern capitalism and a knowledgeable sympathizer of the socialist labor movement. He had, however, already begun to rewrite his analysis of capitalism as a cultural critique of the modern world. The article analyses how this cultural critique lent itself to the translation into chauvinist hate speech when the First World War broke out. The resulting pamphlet on “Merchants and Heroes” was gross even by the standards of the time which helps explaining why Sombart was increasingly isolated from his colleagues most of whom were like Weber fierce nationalists themselves. The article investigates the various dimensions of this isolation and asks to what degree Sombart regained a more scholarly stance after 1918. While the final volume of his “Modern Capitalism” when it appeared in 1927 was well received even by a socialist reviewer like Rudolf Hilferding it has to be said that antisemitic and misogynist resentments characterized his postwar work throughout—a sad culmination being Sombart’s reduction of Rosa Luxemburg’s politics to the fourfold stigmatization of being Polish, Jewish, female and physically handicapped. In his case the First World War radicalized positions already present before and this radicalization impregnated the postwar work for good.

While not considered one of the principal founding figures of sociology by most historians of sociology, and while certainly lacking a long-term impact comparable to that of Max Weber, Émile Durkheim or Georg Simmel, in his own lifetime Sombart may well have been the most widely read sociologist worldwide—as suggested by the countless editions and translations of his work. This success had to do with the fact that his two main themes—the historical analysis of the rise of capitalism and the anatomy of socialism and the labor movement in Europe and beyond—were among the most urgent concerns of his contemporaries. In stark contrast to Weber and other canonical sociologists, his style made his writings accessible to a broader public. He therefore was more of a public intellectual than most of his colleagues. This put him in a favourable position to raise his voice when the First World War (WWI) broke out in the summer of 1914 (cf. Lenger, 1996; Wright, 1996). He was by no means alone among German academics in pamphleteering for the German cause nor was a corresponding proclivity to be found only among German intellectuals (cf. e.g. Agard and Beßlich, 2018). With his book Händler und Helden (Merchants and Heroes), Sombart went to extremes, however, that were offensive to many readers even by the standards of the war years. One of the tasks of this article is to demonstrate in which ways and to explain why. ¹ This requires the analysis of the most important turning points in his biography and his writings. The latter contained—to widely varying degrees—elements of cultural criticism as well as more sober scholarly analysis. Focusing on his war time production runs the risk of relegating the latter unduly to the background. It remains to be said, however, that while Sombart’s scholarly contributions are not simply invalidated by his chauvinist interventions and his cultural criticism, more generally, they cannot be clearly separated from them either. As will be demonstrated in the narrative to follow Händler und Helden was not a war time digression but the culmination of tendencies visible since 1903 and foreordaining his later sympathies for authoritarian regimes like those of Kemal Pascha and Mussolini (cf. Sombart, 1987: 418).

Part one of this article summarizes Sombart’s prewar development into a widely read author and an institutionally influential key figure of German sociology who together with Weber edited its most important journal and belonged to the board members of the German Society for Sociology. Against this background, the second part of the article investigates the impact of WWI on Sombart. The obvious starting point is his book Händler und Helden. Its reception helps explain why he was increasingly isolated from his colleagues, most of whom were, like Weber, fierce nationalists themselves rather than detached and sober analysts like Emil Lederer. Nevertheless, while this isolation was pronounced among fellow editors of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Archive for Social Science and Social Policy), the most important social scientific journal of the first third of the 20th century, and within the German Society for Sociology, where Simmel opposed Sombart’s plea to cut all international ties, it also had its limits. It was during the war that Sombart took up an influential position at Berlin University, a change that coincided with serious ruptures in his personal life and his financial situation. How long-lasting the changes brought about by WWI were can be seen most clearly in his work on socialism and the labor movement which continued to be governed by wartime resentments. The balance concerning his postwar work on capitalism is not quite as grim. While wartime notions of a specifically German or English political economy crept into the second edition of his voluminous Der moderne Kapitalismus (Modern Capitalism), the work proved valuable to later scholars like Fernand Braudel (cf. Braudel, 1986: esp. 13). And when its third volume appeared in 1927 even a socialist like Rudolf Hilferding (1978: 370) applauded. Despite Sombart’s fascinating account of late capitalism as being increasingly dominated by depersonalized and bureaucratic structures, the book’s final message—that only autarchy and a return to the simplicity of the life of peasants and craftsmen could save the world—was a bridge to his later engagement with fascism rather than a return to the serious analysis of modern capitalism.

Historically oriented economist and cofounder of German sociology: Sombart before 1914

At the outbreak of WWI, Sombart was 51 years old and could already look back on an academic career that had lasted a quarter of a century. As early as January 1890, he had been offered an extraordinary professorship at Breslau University. He had completed his studies in the “Sciences of the State” (Staatswissenschaften) in Berlin, with a focus on economics. Sombart’s supervisor Gustav von Schmoller was a prominent social reformer and historically oriented economist in Imperial Germany, who, in contrast to the approach of British political economists, saw no need to avoid political prescriptions. Sombart’s dissertation (published in 1888) bears witness to these formative influences in analysing the agricultural situation of the Roman Campagna from the perspective of the peasantry, considered to be socially valuable but in danger of being driven from the land by greedy landowning nobles.

Sombart’s political views were heavily influenced by his teachers, among whom Adolph Wagner certainly was the most prominent state socialist. ² Heinrich Braun had a similar academic background but having joined the social democratic party stood no chance of a university career. As a member of the revisionist wing of the party, which had given up the belief in sudden revolutionary change he served as editor of a leading journal—the Archiv für sociale Gesetzgebung und Statistik (Archive of Social Legislation and Statistics)—and had invited Sombart to write for it, patiently trying to win him over to social democratic positions without ever quite succeeding. ³ Sombart did, however, take up an early interest in Karl Marx and his writings which promised to reconcile the historical approach Sombart had taken over from Schmoller and others with a more theoretically informed conception of “historical materialism.” There were other influences—Charles Darwin among them—shaping his project of a developmental history but the “theoretical historism” he attributed to Marx and Friedrich Engels remained the central guidepost of his work for decades to come. This is not to say that he became a Marxist in the early 1890s, although he was considered to be one by many. His review of the third volume of Capital received considerable attention and favourable comments by Engels (1949). By the middle of the 1890s, Sombart therefore seemed the natural choice for a popular journal like Die Zukunft (The Future) to write a three-part appreciation of the recently deceased Engels (reprinted instantaneously as Sombart, 1895). Also, the positive reactions of the social democratic press to this appreciation played no small part in his perception as a “recognized representative of [. . .] Marxism” on the part of the Swiss society for ethical culture which organized a series of hugely successful lectures. ⁴ The publication of Sombart’s lectures as Socialism and Social Movement in the Nineteenth Century made a generation of middle-class Europeans familiar with Marxist thought and the labour movement. Within a dozen years, this short book sold more than 40,000 German copies and was translated into 16 languages. ⁵

While later editions would serve as a benchmark of Sombart’s changing views on Marx and the various strands of the labour movement, the first version documents what he took over from and what he rejected in Marx in the mid-1890s. While praising him as a figure comparable only to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Darwin, Sombart outright rejected Hegelian dialectics. The implications were twofold: in his view, methodically psychological explanations should replace dialectical ones, a move used by Sombart himself to introduce nationalism as a force of equal importance to class struggle. With regard to social development, the farewell to dialectics implied the farewell to revolutionary turning points and to any conception of social processes as necessary and inevitable. This understanding fitted Sombart’s own view of an evolutionary transition to a (more) socialist future well and underpins his reading of the (German) labour movement as a basically legalistic endeavour—an understanding quite in line with revisionist social democrats like Eduard Bernstein or Heinrich Braun. Other major disagreements with Marx concerned his value theory which—if at all—could be saved in Sombart’s view only if reduced to the status of “an expedient of thinking” (Sombart, 1894: 573). Since these disagreements concerned elements dear to orthodox Marxists, the question remains what it was that fascinated Sombart about Marx, to the point that he called himself a “neo-Marxist” a few years later. An answer can be found in his commitment to theoretical historism on the one hand, and the appeal of the realism that he attested to Marx on the other. Sombart recognized the importance of non-material interests (as witnessed to him by nationalism) but insisted that conflicts over competing interests, including material ones, determine social processes. This argument ran against the overestimation of ethical factors that Sombart saw as typical for the older generation of economists and social reformers like Schmoller.

The two volumes on Modern Capitalism, which Sombart published in 1902, were devoted to the genesis and the theory of capitalist development respectively. The latter followed Marx more closely by treating “capitalist interests” as “the moving forces of modern economic development” and consisted largely of the demonstration that capitalist industry was far superior to artisanal production (Sombart, 1902, vol. II: 24). This demonstration combined theoretical deduction with empirical evidence. While Sombart’s argument resembled Marx’s own supposed prediction that the middling strata between bourgeoisie and proletariat would disappear, it left him with an embarrassing problem. Although he argued that artisans working for larger employers should not be included in crafts statistics, he had to admit that artisans still existed in turn-of-the-century Germany. His answer to this embarrassing contradiction between theory and empirical evidence was that the cheap labour of apprentices was largely preserved by legal regulation to guild members and master craftsmen. This rather weak conclusion was made worse by the way in which the parts on theory and genesis/history were not more closely integrated.

This is not to say that the more interesting historical volume on the genesis of Modern Capitalism was devoid of theory. Here, Sombart broke away from Marx more freely, not least by conceptualizing the genesis of capitalism as a psychogenesis. The two central elements of this psychogenesis—the awakening of the acquisitive spirit and the formation of economic rationalism—he found in late medieval Italian cities rather than in the early modern English countryside. The rationalism needed to turn mere greed into a capitalist spirit was symbolized by double-entry book-keeping—a development with enormous implications for Sombart: “With capital having become a person the person slowly became a thing, a will-less wheel in the giant work of modern business. So it comes that even after the sense for the possession of money has died the entrepreneur locked within the mechanisms of business life still keeps on restlessly acquiring, until he finally regards acquiring as the real end of all activity and being.” (Sombart, 1902, vol. I: 397) This not only anticipated part of Weber’s image of the iron cage but above all exemplified the broader objective of his book, that is, “to form the categories of economics (. . .) according to the spirit prevalent in economic phenomena” (Sombart, 1902, vol. I: 202). Contrasting the capitalist economy with an older artisanal one, he noted that the latter too was defined by its spirit—aiming “at a livelihood in accordance with his status, no less but above all not more . . .” (Sombart, 1902, vol. I: 86). This point partly resolved the seeming contradiction of artisans within a capitalist economy because for Sombart “an artisan with commercial abilities is no longer an artisan,” and one without such abilities would stand no chance of surviving capitalist competition (Sombart, 1902, vol. II: 465).

The major critics here were historians who were unwilling to admit that Sombart’s theoretical constructions did not depend upon the precision of his historical account alone. Those who a few years later would get together in the German Society for Sociology were—like the ethnographer Alfred Vierkandt—more intrigued. Weber not only borrowed the term “spirit of capitalism” from Sombart but used his constructions as the most frequently cited examples of ideal types as early as 1904 (Weber, 2018). Sombart was disappointed, nevertheless. Facing a blocked career, the failure of his political attempts to build an alliance of left-liberals and social democrats in the arena of social reform and the refusal of his wife to agree to a divorce frustrated him deeply. The resulting reorientation found its first expression in 1903 in a book-length account of Germany’s economic development in the 19th century that was infused with the cultural criticism that was to become his trademark during the next decade. He was at the same time preparing a second edition of Modern Capitalism. Between 1911 and 1913, he published four books that indicated the direction his studies were moving in. Two pondered the historical importance of specific demand factors for the development of capitalism: one was devoted to the impact of military demand during war time and the other concerned the role of luxury production. And as the former analysed the standardization of armament, the uniform clothing and the centralised provisioning of modern armies as factors influencing the demand for capitalist mass production the book—despite its suggestive title Krieg und Kapitalismus (War and Capitalism)—is of little relevance for a discussion of Sombart and WWI (cf. Sombart, 1913a; Wright, 1996).

The other two books followed through on the search for a spirit of capitalism which had been taken up by Weber in the meantime. Both were translated into English two years after their publication in German, the first, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, as The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911/1913) and the other—Der Bourgeois. Zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen—as The Quintessence of Capitalism (1913/1915). While on the face of it following Weber’s example of methodically searching for elective affinities between religious doctrines and attitudes favouring capitalist development, on a deeper level, they displayed Sombart’s willingness to sacrifice scholarly standards. Thus, while seemingly admitting that it was difficult to relate collective traits to racial characteristics, he did not shy away from introducing crude antisemitic stereotypes in order to “prove” just such relationships (cf. Leo, 2013: 432–444). Arguments drawn from collective psychology, anthropology, Jewish theology, history, and statistics all served to make the equation of Judaism and capitalism plausible. By associating the specific qualities of collectives with traits furthering capitalist development, he burdened his analysis of capitalism with value judgements without making them explicit. When in 1902, he introduced the concept of economic rationalism as a central element of the capitalist spirit, the argument was formulated in a relatively neutral way. Nine years later, the rationalism he identified as typical of Jewish life and religion was characterized as a type of cold intellectualism opposed to the warm (German) mind, a move that by implication projected negative connotations onto both capitalism and Judaism. ⁶ The Quintessence of Capitalism made these value judgments explicit by calling the precapitalist human being the natural being, opening the way for discrediting capitalism with the replacement of the needs of living humans by abstract notions of acquisition and business. Capitalism, he now argued, was responsible for a completely mistaken value hierarchy that preferred quantitative measures of consumption and comfort over idealist impulses. Taking up the reworking of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment through his friend Max Scheler, he diagnosed: “The herd is grazing peacefully on the rich pasture.” (Sombart, 1913b: 424).

Sombart during WWI: A chauvinist between isolation and outward success

Against this background, it does not come as a surprise that for Sombart the outbreak of war and the outburst of national enthusiasm in seemingly all social strata invested with meaning what had been meaningless before. “Who would have foreseen that we would reemerge out of this slump once again,” he asked a friend in a letter from late August 1914 (Kroll et al., 2019: 413). This sentiment informed his infamous war pamphlet Händler und Helden (Merchants and Heroes) of 1915 as well, which had been preceded by public lectures on Our Enemies or Our Hate against England in Vienna, Munich and Berlin in late 1914 (cf. in addition Wright, 1996: 216pp). While in The Quintessence of Capitalism, he had denounced a time in which wireless telegraphy and aeronautics were of more interest than the problem of original sin or the moral dilemmas dramatized in The Sorrows of Young Werther, he now was suddenly consoled with technical progress and celebrated “the bomb throwing and exploring flying machines” (Sombart, 1915: 125). Something like a miracle had healed “the complete cultural pessimism” to which he confessed to have adhered before the war. Since the cultural decay that had made him despair was the result of capitalist development, the deeper meaning of war seemed obvious to him: Sombart’s Germany had to function as “the final barrier against the mud flood of commercialism” (Sombart, 1915: 117, 145). The main proponent of commercialism and therefore the most important enemy was England. This was quite in line with the position of other German war propagandists like his friend Scheler. There were more changes needed than simply relegating the English people from the heroic to the merchant camp, however. The scorn that the cultivated author had heaped in 1913 upon the masses caring solely for their material well-being was now directed at the relationship between nations. “Germans should feel themselves to be above all the peoples surrounding them and have caught sight of those who are beneath them in limitless depth,” he preached to “the chosen people of this century” (Sombart, 1915: 143, 142). Quoting Nietzsche repeatedly, he admonished his fellow members of the master race to be warriors since that would enable them to remain heroes: “Because without danger man becomes stunted and shallow and invents happiness.” (Sombart, 1915: 127)

The implications of such an imagined superiority were manifold. Sombart idealized living “in the midst of a world of enemies” because that made sticking to a heroic worldview easier (Sombart, 1915: 128). And while he advocated taking over naval bases, if necessary, his perspective was not an expansionist one. “We do not intend to ‘expand’ ourselves at all. There are more important things we must do. We have to develop our own spiritual essence, to keep pure the German soul, to take care that the enemy, the commercial spirit, does not intrude in our character anywhere: not from the outside and not from within” (Sombart, 1915: 144f). Since what divided the German middle classes politically was the extent of annexations to aim for rather than the question whether Germany should expand or not, his stance was that of an outsider. Sombart advocated intellectual isolation as well. As early as August 1914, he proposed to cut the ties of the German Society for Sociology with the Brussels based Institut Solvay. He failed to understand that other leading members like Ferdinand Tönnies or Simmel opposed his move. While his colleagues were hardly unsupportive of the German war effort, they did not indulge in fantasies of boundless superiority as Sombart did. To him, no damage was to be expected if scholarly exchange was to be suspended for a couple of decades—“exchange” for him largely being an illusion anyway with Germans on the giving side most of the time.

The circle within which Sombart must have felt his increasing isolation most sharply was the editorial committee of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. ⁷ After Edgar Jaffé had bought the journal, it was edited under its new name jointly by Jaffé, Sombart, and Weber from 1904 onwards. From 1910 on, the editorial committee was assisted—in increasingly influential ways—by Lederer while Robert Michels’ recruitment to the editorial committee in 1913 proved to be short lived due to his dichiarazione dell’ italianità (declaration of Italianness) in 1915. In 1917–1918, the anglophile Austrian Joseph Schumpeter joined and Sombart was to complain later that this had happened against his will. He had good reason not to feel at home on the board earlier than that. His more and more erratic prewar publications had caused Weber to distance himself somewhat, writing after the publication of Händler und Helden: “I admit openly, your nationalist furore strikes me as strongly puzzling” (Weber, 2008: 79–81).

But then, the differences between Sombart and Weber were minuscule compared to those between Sombart and Lederer with his sober sociological analysis of the war. As early as January 1915, the latter argued in an article which appeared in the Archiv in May 1915: “Gesellschaft turns over into Gemeinschaft in a way that expresses no solidarity but that still affirms the most intense interdependence, where all existing social groups, previously felt as basic, dwindle before the infinite unity of the people, which rises up in grandiose sublimity in defence of the native soil. Moreover, it should not be thought that such total unanimity might look any different beyond German borders” (Lederer, 2006: 245). Lederer not only insisted on taking some scholarly distance from the war experience but also linked the difficulties of making peace to the specific conditions of developed capitalist societies going to war. His justification for doing so was based on the conviction that war was unavoidable to defend the nation at large. This led to an unprecedented mobilization of forces which knew only one end point: “when the entire human reservoir is exhausted” (Lederer, 2006: 247). Lederer’s admirable striving for objectivity was reflected in his editorial work. With the support of the publisher and that of the owner of the journal, Lederer began organizing special issues of the journal on war starting in August 1914 praised for their “moderation, sobriety, accuracy, reasonableness, and truth” by John Maynard Keynes (Cited by Huebner, 2008: 68). Despite Sombart’s general disinterest in the war issues of the Archiv (and the concrete challenge of organizing a war economy), the isolation of its long-time editor did not become immediately apparent. The main reason for this was that the issues on war alternated with “normal” issues and Sombart pre-published a couple of chapters from the second edition of his Modern Capitalism in the latter. Thus, the question remains whether his personae as a scholar and war agitator could coexist during WWI.

The answer must be a qualified yes. On the one hand, there were direct traces of the war to be found in the second edition of Modern Capitalism where Sombart, for example, elevated German mercantilism as a far superior doctrine in comparison to classical English economics—the latter seen as reflecting the commercial spirit. On the other hand, this second edition tried to give every factor involved in the protracted development of capitalism its proper weight. Countering the critique that the well-known Protestant pastor and liberal politician Friedrich Naumann had directed against The Jews and Economic Life, Sombart announced in a letter to Naumann that out of 1200 pages of a reworked Modern Capitalism only about twelve would be devoted to Jews. This was not far off the mark even though the second edition—when finally completed in 1927—filled more than 3000 pages. And its new subtitle—“historical and systematic account of economic life in Europe from the beginning to the present”—made the striving for adequate proportions clear. While the first edition of Modern Capitalism had dealt with history and theory in two separate volumes, the latter was now more strongly integrated into a historical narrative reaching from the Middle Ages to the present. And insofar as it was a developmental theory rather than the pure theory that had gained increasingly more adherents among economists since the publication of the first edition, this developmental theory now owed less to Marx, who had lost centre stage to Tönnies whose dichotomous distinction between community and society framed the book. The idea of community was praised by Sombart as “the central sun giving life to everything happening in the medieval town,” not least artisanal labour whose products brought “a piece of soul into the world” because they were “the creation (. . .) of a living human being however limited” (Sombart, 1916, vol. I:1: 181, 194). Accordingly, artisanal production was no longer featured as doomed to be outcompeted by superior capitalist industry but rather as something precious to be preserved against the soulless rationality of capitalism. Tönnies’ dichotomy thus provided Sombart with a tempered and more controlled version of the cultural criticism that he had toyed with in his prewar publications—One of the rewards following the appearance of the 2nd edition was Sombart’s appointment to a chair in the economic sciences of the state (Staatswissenschaften) at Berlin University in the summer of 1917. It took place against considerable opposition and healed a wound that this most prestigious German university had inflicted on him in 1906 when upon his move to Berlin’s commercial academy it had denied him the right to lecture at Berlin University as well.

Sombart after war and revolution: Towards an authoritarian German socialism

Outer success thus came to Sombart rather late and it did not give him tranquility. He continued to rail against the “Jewish-international-social-democratic tendency,” he had attributed to the Archiv as early as the summer 1915 and—which he expanded on with the verdict “pacifist”—even as late as 1920, when after Weber’s death, he resigned from the editorship for good. In the meantime, the war had been lost—a catastrophic event for Sombart, as witnessed by his oldest daughter who had watched the defeated troops march through Brandenburg Gate with him from her father’s new office. By then plans had become obsolete to donate Sombart’s villa in Mittelschreiberhau (Silesia) to Paul von Hindenburg who had not been the victorious general the Schreiberhau notables had expected him to be. Among the latter were leading industrialists like Felix Deutsch and Walther Rathenau as well as the poets Carl and Gerhart Hauptmann all of whom were in frequent conversation with Sombart.

Sombart who destroyed his fortune during the hyperinflation of the early 1920s by selling his villa without quickly reinvesting the proceeds in property was not likely to heed the advice of Carl Grünberg who at the annual meeting of the Association for Social Policy in 1922 invited his colleagues “to stop thinking of themselves as something special.” ⁸ Instead, Sombart openly confessed to living in the “age of the canaille [scoundrel]” (Sombart, 1922: 276). As his daughter reported this did not keep him from joining in lively debates with the insurgent population in November 1918. Thus his later characterization of the “central European, especially again the German Revolution of 1918 and 1919” as a “rather harmless episode” was based on first-hand experience (Sombart, 1924, vol. II: 425). He was far more impressed by the Russian Revolution. While its egalitarian orientation ran counter to his aristocratic self-understanding, Sombart not only was and remained an ardent admirer of Lenin but saw Bolshevism clearly on the side of heroism in the struggle between pacifism and heroism that to him was bound to put its stamp on the centuries to come. When he greeted the Soviet constitution “as a bulwark against the rising tide of mechanist democracy and parliamentarism,” which he associated with the American bourgeoisie, he used the same trope he had earlier employed to characterize the German war effort (Sombart, 1920: 191; cf. Wright, 1996: 211pp).

After the war, Sombart took over a class at the adult college of Nieder-Schönweide in order to get in touch with workers who supported the independent socialists. His reasons for doing so are suggested in the introduction he wrote in September 1919 for an anthology which presented basic texts and criticisms of socialism. Here, he distinguished two kinds of socialist theories: on the hand “the organic, morphic, tectonic, concrete, visionary, corporative, state socialism” represented in the collection by Plato, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Karl Rodbertus and others; and on the other hand, the “mechanist, amorphic, plain, abstract, construed, egalitarian, international, societal socialism” whose most prominent proponents were Marx and Engels (Sombart, 1919, vol. I: VIII). Sombart’s clear preference for the first kind of socialism was more than a return to the state socialism that he had advocated as a student. The references to Plato and Fichte showed that his socialism could do without democracy as it had been established in the Weimar Republic, which he denounced as “rule of the rabble” in a letter to Tönnies (Kroll et al., 2019: 433, 434). His socialism was modelled on the war experience. As early as 1915, he had been in touch with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck—a leading representative of the conservative revolution and one of the proponents of a German or Prussian socialism—and he continued to argue along these lines for the next two decades. His book Deutscher Sozialismus (German Socialism) of 1934 offers the most extensive treatment, with Prussian militarism and economic autarchy especially prominent in light of his immediate postwar conclusions. If it was admissible to shoot a soldier deserting his post, he argued, it was also acceptable to penalize a worker whose strike endangered the common weal.

Sombart’s distinction between the two kinds of socialism questioned the socialist ideals of the Marxist tradition, and was based on his long-held conviction that “in the whole of Marxism (. . .) there is not a grain of ethics” (an argument which in the 1890s had been a useful weapon against the ethical sentiments of Schmoller and his ilk) (Sombart, 1892: 489, 490). In the early 1920s, to exclude Marxism from the socialist tradition was a counterintuitive move as Sombart knew well enough. Once again taking up ideas developed by Max Scheler in the two-volume book of 1924, he introduced “three basic forces” capable of constituting social formations: “Power, reason and love” (Sombart, 1924, vol. I: 9). All three he saw as present in capitalism although he deemed power dominant and relegated love to the family and welfare or “shooting up to stark flames in times of great national uprisings” (Sombart, 1924, vol. I: 11). Modern or Proletarian Socialism on the contrary was primarily a rational affair—an argument that allowed him to censure the lack of idealism while at the same time transferring all the negative and often antisemitic connotations he had associated with cold rationalism since the immediate prewar period to socialism. Thus, he could stick to his assertion that modern or proletarian socialism was not really socialism while devoting the rest of his 1000 pages to it. The first of his two volumes dealt with the socialist worldview and presented socialist thinkers as bourgeois declassés who compensated for their failures politically and were like Marx incapable of “ever believing in noble motives” (Sombart, 1924, vol. I: 70, 71). The imputation of ressentiment served as a primitive psychological catch-all explanation throughout. A sad climax of this kind of reasoning was the reduction of Rosa Luxemburg’s politics to the fourfold stigmatization of being Polish, Jewish, female and physically handicapped. Sombart presented the socialist worldview as the successor of a Jewish-English utilitarianism standing for comfort and utility rather than higher or heroic values. The Quintessence of Capitalism thus strongly resembled the quintessence of proletarian socialism. If the latter found ready adherents, the second volume explained, that was due to the low instincts of the masses, their inferior intellectual quality and so forth. Therefore, for socialist mass movements, there was “only one adequate type of leader: the demagogue,” typically a stranger to class, country and race (Sombart, 1924, vol. II: 279)

Two major tenets characterize Sombart’s postwar work, including, first, his conviction that capitalism and socialism were equally prone to the cold rationalism he despised. Accordingly even his most valuable postwar publication—the third volume of Modern Capitalism (1927)—in the end, advocated autarchy and a return to the simplicity of the life of peasants and craftsmen as the only escape route. A second tenet was his disdain for the masses which translated into the advocacy of authoritarian rule and was formative for the political program culminating in Deutscher Sozialismus (German Socialism) (Sombart, 1934). Even when he wrote immensely learned books and papers on the history and methodology of economics and sociology, he fell back on the combination of an idealist position with an uncontrolled recourse to Völkerpsychologie, a feature of his work since the immediate prewar years. This highly questionable approach impregnated everything he wrote after 1903. This is not to say that it invalidated everything he published after that. More than everything else much in his three volumes on Modern Capitalism has stood the test of time quite well (cf. Eicholz, 2022). But with regard of the central question of this volume, how WWI shaped the work of leading sociologists, it needs to be stressed that in Sombart’s case, the war played the role of a catalyst rather than that of a cause. For him, the decisive turning point was around 1903 and his war time production was little more than the extreme culmination of tendencies that can be traced back to this turn.