Soc (2010) 47:63–68 DOI 10.1007/s12115-009-9269-7

REVIEW

Joachim Radkau, Max Weber. A Biography Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2009. 700 pp. $35.00. ISBN-10: 0745641474; ISBN-13: 978-0745641478 Bryan S. Turner

Published online: 24 November 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009

Max Weber has already been the subject of a number of large and influential biographies. The first from his wife Marianne Weber as Max Weber: ein Lebensbild came six years after Weber’s death in June 1920. In addition to the wealth of articles on Weber’s life and work, there are various substantial publications, most of which are intellectual histories rather than biographies as such. These include Eduard Baumgarten (1964) Max Weber: Werk und Person, Rheinard Bendix (1977) Max Weber: an intellectual portrait, Arthur Mitzman (1985) The Iron Cage, and Dirk Käsler (1989) Max Weber. An introduction to his Life and Work. We also know a lot about the context of Weber’s social science from Wilhelm Mommsen’s (1984) Max Weber and German Politics 1890–1920 and Fritz Ringer’s (1969) The Decline of the German Mandarins. Radkau makes little use of and even less reference to this existing literature on Weber. Radkau’s work is based on new evidence (such as the correspondence between Weber and his wife) that was often not available to previous biographers. It is not an intellectual biography, but it throws or attempts to throw considerable light on the development of Weber’s sociology. Its major theme is the tension in Weber’s life between ‘nature’ and ‘spiritual development’. The biography first appeared in Germany in 2005 with the title Max Weber. Die Leidenschaft des Denkens or the ‘passion of thinking’. Apparently the late Lord Dahrendorf advised against the sub-title suggesting that it would sound odd in an English context. As it turns out, the sub-title is important in pointing to the issues of passion, nature, professionalism and career in Weber’s life. Hence the B. S. Turner (*) Department of Sociology, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, USA e-mail: [email protected]

biography is organized around three major themes: the violation of nature, nature’s revenge, and finally ‘salvation and illumination’. In this sense, Weber’s life could be compared, not with other professional social scientists, but to the life of Goethe. Some further preliminary comments are in order. Perhaps most importantly, the chapter on Karl Marx and sociology from the German version is missing from the English translation. One consequence is that there are relatively few references to Marx or Marxism. There is little explanation for this absence but even without this chapter the book runs to some 683 pages. Polity Press are to be congratulated on such a publishing undertaking and the result is obviously satisfying and important. Radkau’s biography has already been received with considerable critical applause and it would indeed be carping to take a substantially different view. The new biography has a wealth of detail about Weber’s personal life, numerous commentaries on his intellectual associates and valuable insights into the social and political context in which his ideas evolved. In his Preface to the English edition, Radkau declares that he never entertained the ludicrous ambition ‘to write the “ultimate Weber biography”’ (p. xvii) and yet for the time being it is difficult to imagine a biography emerging with more detail and insight into Weber’s life. Just as Steven Luke’s biography of Emile Durkheim was for a long time after its publication in 1972 the ultimate source of information on the great French sociologist, so one can imagine social science students pouring over Radkau’s definitive biography of the great German sociologist for a long time to come. The main gist of my criticism however is that the biography sits uncomfortably between a descriptive life history and an intellectual biography. It is when Radkau starts interpreting Weber’s social and political theory that one feels less comfortable about the results.

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Radkau is an historian of psychiatry and mental disorders. He published Das Zeitalter der Nervosität: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (1998) and as one might expect one of the main themes of this biography is Weber’s nervosität or anxiety—a condition that was sufficiently crippling to prevent Weber from functioning fully as a professor from around 1899 to 1909. Weber’s partial recovery in 1909 was signalled by his willingness to take on the editorship of the Grundriss der Sozialokonomik and in the following year the Webers moved into the Fallenstein house on the banks of the Neckar, where Weber gave up his constant wanderings which had been his practical solution to his anxieties for a decade. The basic facts of Weber’s nervous illness are relatively well known: the fierce confrontation with his father in 1897 followed by the father’s death; the termination of his teaching duties through ‘nerves’ in 1899; the years spent travelling in Italy and elsewhere in search of a cure; the famous journey to America in 1904 and the origins of the two essays that became The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; the inheritance from the Oerlinghausen firm that finally removed his anxieties about money; the sexual liaisons that eventually released him from his ‘demons; the late lectures on science and politics as vocations; and his death from a lung infection in Munich in 1920. These major events are normally interpreted as a struggle between unfulfilled sexual drives and his personal commitment to an academic vocation. His life has been interpreted through the lense of Weber’s personal asceticism, the failure sexually to consummate his marriage with Marianne, the bitter conflict with his father and the complicated relationship with women. Weber’s erotic relationships with women have become more widely known in recent times and Radkau deals with these liaisons in some detail. In 1909 Weber fell in love with Else Jaffé but by January 1910 she had begun a relationship with his brother Alfred Weber, and for the next seven years their relationship was one of hostility. In 1912 he started a relationship with Mina Tobler whom he had known since 1909. In the spring of 1913 and 1914 Weber came under the influence of reformers who were experimenting with lifestyles ‘close to nature’ and in Italy he came into contact with Frieda Gross. Weber had been completely hostile to Otto Gross—the prophet of free love—but it turned out that Gross also suffered from nerves. So much so that he had a horror of sexual intercourse and went to bed with his clothes on! The quest for nature and primal origins was not of course peculiar to either Gross or Weber, but a sentiment widely shared in German intellectual circles at the time (Wiedman 1995). The view that Weber also had a horror of sexual intercourse and that his life was a constant battle between his asceticism and his desire for a life close to nature in which the asceticism was always triumphant—hence the

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nerves—is seriously revised in Radkau’s biography. This new biographical interpretation presents a picture of Weber as a very masculine character with somewhat earthy inclinations towards drink, food, male company and duelling. Weber at least in his youth enthusiastically embraced the world of all male society—the university brotherhoods, student drinking clubs, the army, and the society of male university colleagues. Radkau dwells on the early years of Weber’s marriage when he would spend leisure time drinking with colleagues outside the domestic setting and this penchant for masculine society and male clubs spilled over into his sociology. For Weber early warrior societies—men at arms in feudalism and the violent world of the Ancients—produced closely knit societies in which there was a strong relationship between the cultivation of the soil, the family and the affective communal world. The problem for Weber was that the modern rational world was slowly eroding the close relationship between men and nature, the military bonding between men and hence the disenchantment of the world became an overriding theme of his work. Towards the end of his life, his followers—such as Gustav Radbruch and Ludwig Curtius—were to recall that his voice was that of a lion that had to be controlled and that he was dictator in an intellectual realm (Radkau, p. 294). However this picture of Weber as a ‘man’s man’ makes it even more difficult to understand the long bout of nervous illness that kept him permanently on the move, experimenting with one cure after another and failing to get to grips with his academic work until he enters into relationships with Else Jaffé and Mina Tobler around 1909–10. Were ‘nerves’ enough to deal such a damaging blow to this man? The more specific explanation of Weber’s ‘demons’ is connected with uncontrolled biological functions. Radkau (p.170) claims that ‘because sexuality was at the core of his illness—in his own eyes as well as those of his doctors—he had an understandable reluctance to speak too copiously about them’. However, one thing he did speak about was his insomnia resulting from his fear of nocturnal emissions. In Marianne Weber’s view, it was the presence of the inhibitions that his mother had drilled into him that made his struggles against the temptations of the spirit both difficult and painful. His ‘nerves’ were intensified by German winters; hence the need to be on the move in search of warmth. Despite the Freudian character of his complaint, he is reported, again by Marianne Weber in her biography, to have claimed that the ‘hygienic value’ of Freudian therapy was lost on him. Radkau’s account of Weber’s nerves and his efforts to cure them is a dominant—perhaps the dominant—theme of the biography, but no satisfactory explanation of Weber’s condition emerges. What was the cause—his rigid upbringing, the quarrel with the father, the sexually unsatis-

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factory marriage, the failure of his political career, the weather, the seductions of Frieda Gross or all of the above? At the end of the biography, despite the alleged ‘Salvation and Illumination’ Weber remains an enigma—at least in his personal life. But what is the function of this lengthy, painstaking and detailed account of nerves in the biography? Do the frustration and the nerves explain the character and scope of his social scientific work? Radkau appears to deny that one can understand the intellectual content of a person’s life as merely a reflection of the nerves or the sexual drives. In the Preface, he rejects the view put forward by Stanislav Andreski that the sublimation of sexual desire can explain creativity. But then why the laborious emphasis on nerves? Radkau’s biography does suggest, even against his own denial, that the struggle around what he calls Venus and Mars explains a lot of Weber’s intellectual brilliance. For Radkau (p.xv), the drama between these two gods in Weber’s life was manifest in the idea of charisma which has an ‘erotic aura’. While Weber’s interaction with Stefan George was crucial in the development of the concept of charisma, there was both hostility and resemblance between Weber (and the Eranos Circle at Heidelberg) and Stefan George and his circle. George was of the view that in modern peacetime the essential spirit of manliness was lost and for Weber the George Circle became a crucial test as to whether the spirit of charisma could be reborn in modern times. The core intellectual problem in this biography remains the question: without the nerves would Weber have produced the work that for example resulted posthumously in Economy and Society (1978)? In my view, it is important to separate the life from the work or at least to keep some distance between them; otherwise we might hold reasonably to the view that if he had met Else Jaffé early in his career, perhaps Weber would have produced nothing of intellectual value. It is however difficult to believe that any serious scholar could entertain such an interpretation and therefore the relationship between the work and the man remains problematic. After the final encounter with Else, we discover what Radkau (p.522) calls a new picture of Weber, namely Weber as passionate lover. In the late love letters, ‘we find a new and long unknown Weber, indeed an almost unbelievable Weber: a rapturous romantic, exhibitionist in his feelings, drunk on the presentiments of spring, sensual in his submission, dismissive of his whole previous existence’. How deeply rooted then were the nerves that blocked his previous intellectual creativity? This question raises yet another obvious query. Why is Weber regarded as a great social scientist? Where did the fame come from? Again the biography does not give a clear answer. However, Radkau does raise some challenging issues around the problem. To start with, Radkau depends heavily on Wilhelm Hennis for whom Weber was essen-

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tially a political philosopher and not a sociologist at all. For Hennis, for example in his magisterial Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction (1988), Weber has nothing to do with the sociologist of value freedom and value neutrality which became popular in American sociology. In this respect, Radkau appears to join the army of modern writers who blame Talcott Parsons for the disasters of modern scientific sociology—but that is another story! Hennis sees Weber in line with Aristotle as a thinker concerned to evaluate the political circumstances that produce the excellent or virtuous citizen and not as a sociologist of social systems and their functions. Remember that because the ‘dispute among university faculties’ can obscure our picture of the ‘whole Weber’, Radkau has ‘removed a chapter about Weber and sociology’ from his biography of Weber. As Radkau points out, Weber was a sociologist in a somewhat limited sense in that his work was directed towards understanding the individual rather than society: “Weber did not think about the logic of social systems: the basic unit for him was not “society” but the individual; and from the beginning the socialization process led in different directions, which could come into a tense relationship with each other. Weber constantly experienced among his family and relatives a tension between the totally male world of politics and science and the female world of the home” (Radkau, 2009: 54). In addition, Radkau follows Friedrich Tenbruck (1975) in claiming that Economy and Society is not the master work, but a collection of notes put together under the direction of Marianne Weber and that the real core of Weber’s work is the collection of publications around the economic ethics of the world religions. It was Marianne who wanted to create ‘the great work’ that would consolidate Weber’s academic career and as a result Economy and Society misleads the reader into assuming that Weber is laying out the fundamental categories of sociology. The result is perhaps to make ‘religious studies’ more prominent than sociology. Nevertheless this partial eclipse of sociology in the biography is somewhat extreme since one can equally suggest that in his general concern for the unintended consequences of action—such as capitalist rationality as the unintended consequence of piety—Weber was very thoroughly sociological. In any case, the idea that value freedom means that we have to expunge passion from sociological theory has long been abandoned and modern perspectives on Weber’s epistemology have recognized that Weber was probably the very last person to follow the norms of value neutrality. Much of professional American sociology has now embraced an emphasis on ‘the public intellectual’, critical theory and engaged research. One further issue relates to the actual nature of Weber’s work. Radkau is very useful in giving an account of the

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scholars with whom Weber had significant intellectual contact—Troeltsch, Schumpeter, Michels, Simmel and so forth—but Radkau tells us little or nothing about the systematic intellectual influences on Weber. As we have seen, Marxism plays no role here. More importantly, the idea that Weber was influenced by Nietzsche is soundly rejected. This is questionable, if we follow Hennis’s interpretation of Weber and as a result place importance on the notion of ‘personality and life order’ in Weber’s social theory as a whole. In the Protestant Ethic, Weber (1976) explored the disciplined and ascetic life order of the Reformation that produced a new type of religious excellence (virtue) namely piety. Similarly, the life order of the ascetic tradition of South Asia produced Buddhist virtues. As we know, for Weber the paradox or tragedy of Protestant piety was that its form of rationality was highly compatible with the ‘spirit of capitalism’. Weber’s sense of alienation from the modern world was that the life order emerging out of capitalism did not produce excellence or an ethical view of the world, because its non-rational or even irrational demand for accumulation was destroying the natural world and at the same time converting men—I use the word advisedly—into bureaucrats who are hedonists without a heart and specialists without a soul. As a result, Weber came to despise a world dominated by such soulless professionals that is the domination of the world by the ‘modernen Genius im professionellen Menschen’ (Stauth and Turner 1986). Rational capitalism had, so to speak, moved beyond moral influence to become a self-sustaining system of production and accumulation. So what of the allegation that Nietzsche was not influential? Radkau quotes the famous exchange with students in February 1920 when, following a discussion about Oswald Spengler, Weber commented that the ‘honesty’ of a modern scholar could only be assessed by their attitude towards Marx and Nietzsche. Weber went on to observe that ‘The world in which we live intellectually is largely one that bears the stamp of Marx and Nietzsche’ (Baumgarten 1964: 554). The impact of Nietzsche on Weber has been much discussed in interpretations of Weberian sociology (Eden 1983; Hennis 1988). However Radkau fundamentally rejects these interpretations. Weber asserts Radkau was fond of making statements that appear to shatter illusions and that his student audience would have been impressed by such a sweeping statement. References to Nietzsche are few and far between in Weber’s own work even in the sociology of Judaism where Weber (1952) refers to ‘pariah groups’. When Weber did refer to Nietzsche it was to dismiss him in derogatory terms. Weber even referred to Nietzsche as a ‘German petty bourgeois’ and rejected Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity as ‘narrow-minded and indiscriminate in comparison with the magic of brotherhood and communism of love’ (Radkau,p. 167).

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While the evidence of any direct influence of Nietzsche on Weber’s sociology may be modest, there is nevertheless a striking parallel between Nietzsche and Weber in terms of life and philosophy. Both men retired from their professorial positions at an early age as a result of ongoing health problems that were both physical and mental. Nietzsche suffered from severe headaches and digestive problems long before his final breakdown in Turin in December 1888. Weber withdrew from lecturing in 1899 and did not take up serious research activity for a decade. Both men sought recovery from mental strain through convalescence in the Alps. Both men had unfulfilled ambitions significantly to influence public opinion—Nietzsche as a prophet and Weber as a politician. Weber, according to Radkau, clearly enjoyed his brief military service when he could play out the role of the masculine, military man and become close to nature, in fact to the earth. The famous picture of Nietzsche in military outfit suggests that he too had personal fantasies as a military man. Both men were famously frustrated in their sexual and personal lives. Both men fell under the spell of Wagner’s romantic musical genius. One can relatively easily find such parallels in their biographical circumstances and it is obvious that these experiences of mental torment had an impact on their work and outlook. Nevertheless I am only interested in their actual ideas, because, while the source of these ideas is probably of interest to the historian of ideas, there are of relatively little interest to the sociologist. As critics of German or more precisely Prussian society, there is an important convergence in their ideas. We have already seen that Weber was interested not in society but in the fate of the individual. While Nietzsche developed a battery of ideas around the will to power, nihilism, the overman, the soul, and fate to form a critical theory of an emerging industrial society, his principal concern was the disappearance of the heroic individual who had achieved selfmastery through struggle against conventional morality and modern society. The overman was precisely somebody who had achieved self-mastery through discipline and confrontation with hypocrisy and convention. At times Nietzsche argued in a manner wholly parallel to Weber that the heroic individual was cultivated in the ancient world, in warrior societies and in the military. This view was Nietzsche’s version of ‘personality and life orders’. Against the view that the ancient world was one of tranquillity, Nietzsche showed that Greek society was characterized by an endless struggle between eroticism and passion (Dionysus) and rationality and formalism (Apollo), and that a healthy life for the individual would require some reconciliation of these two dimensions of human nature. The problem with modern society was that the emergence of an industrial civilization and the growth of a mass society had eclipsed the

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opportunities for heroic individualism. This was Nietzsche’s version of the theory of charisma. Nevertheless against modern nihilism, Nietzsche preached a ‘revaluation of values’ that is a critique of culture that would open up the possibility of recreating heroic men. Weber’s famous Freiberg inaugural lecture of 1895 had all of these Nietzschean themes albeit with a more explicitly Darwinian touch: social struggle, politics as a vocation, the collapse of manly virtues, and the importance of youthfulness for nations if they are to avoid cultural degeneracy. Perhaps one area of disagreement and difference was that the Freiberg address was overtly nationalistic emphasizing the need for imperial expansion and international markets for German goods, but also warning against the encroachment of Polish farm workers in eastern Prussia. Weber notoriously saw Poles as racially inferior and hence it was necessary to encourage German farmers to settle on Germany’s eastern borders and to develop social policies to bring about these social changes. By contrast, Nietzsche was deeply opposed to Prussian values and German identity, arguing that his name in fact demonstrated his Polish ancestry. Although Nietzsche’s claims about his Polish background may have been mere fantasy, we can imagine why Weber sought to distance himself from Nietzsche. In short both men were engaged in Die Leidenschaft des Denkens. Anybody who doubts this parallel should in conjunction with the Radkau biography read the beautiful account of Nietzsche in Lesley Chamberlain’s (1996) Nietzsche in Turin. To return to Hennis briefly, the central question in Weber’s social thought was directed towards the issue of personality and life orders. It was the historical development of Menschentum which was the central issue in Weber’s sociology, namely how certain cultural developments produced a particular type of personality and a particular rational conduct of life, particularly in the idea of a calling as part of the constitutive question of modernity. In this respect he followed Nietzsche closely in describing the Last Man—the herd have closed their eyes to the tragedy of human existence by encasing themselves in a happy social cocoon (Thiele 1995:221). In more precise terms, Weber’s sociology addressed the historical origins of life regulation as rational conduct in the development of professional vocations in the modern world. Weber’s analysis of the ascetic regulation of life is therefore simply one dimension of this analysis of Lebensführung or the study of personality types arising from particular kinds of (religious) practice. The rationalization theme to which Weber draws attention in the Protestant ethic thesis involved a transformation of discipline and methodology relevant to particular forms of economic life regulation. Weber’s analysis of rational capitalism was not so much concerned to explain its economic structure and functions but to understand the ways in which forms of capitalist

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economic activity had an ‘elective affinity’ with specific forms of personality and life order. By ‘personality’ Weber did not have in mind what we might now call ‘the personality system’ within an empirical social psychology, but rather what kind of being would be produced by different life orders, that is Weber asked an existential question from the perspective of cultural values. Why write a biography of Max Weber? After all, academic lives, including Weber’s, are rarely dramatic or exciting? The obvious answer is that Weber is widely regarded as the most influential social scientist of his generation. Radkau’s biography fails ultimately to establish why and how Weber became a famous sociologist—or political philosopher if one follows Hennis. Radkau provides a valuable account of how a circle of intellectual disciples gathered around Weber at the end of his life and how, once the nerves and the demons had abated, Weber was able to produce in the space of some ten years the staggering volume of work on the Russian Revolution, the sociology of world religions, and the foundations of what later became the posthumous Economy and Society. Radkau’s biography is a work that one wants to consult regularly and on the actual life it is probably the last word. But the stature of Weber rests only in part on the triumph of will over adversity and much more on the fact that he provides a comprehensive, compelling and integrated framework for understanding the modern world, and in my view a sociological account. The nerves, the sexual liaisons, the personal conflicts and the frustrations are in the end a digression. What remains is indeed the passion of thinking.

Further Reading Baumgarten, E. 1964. Max Weber: Werk und person. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Bendix, R. 1977. Max Weber: An intellectual portrait. New York: Doubleday. Chamberlain, L. 1996. Nietzsche in Turin. The end of the future. London: Quartet Books. Eden, R. 1983. Political leadership & Nihilism. A study of Weber & Nietzsche. Tampa: University of South Florida Press. Hennis, W. 1988. Max Weber. Essays in reconstruction. London: Allen & Unwin. Käsler, D. 1989. Max Weber. An introduction to his life and work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lukes, S. 1972. Emile Durkheim. His life and work. A historical and critical study. London: Penguin Press and Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985. Mitzman, A. 1985. The Iron Cage. An historical interpretation of Max Weber. New York: Universal Library. Mommsen, W. J. 1984. Max Weber and German politics 1890–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Radkau, J. 1998. Das Zeitalter der Nervositat. Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler. Munich: Carl Hanser.

68 Ringer, F. K. 1969. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German academic community of 1890–1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stauth, G., & Turner, B. S. 1986. Nietzsche in Weber oder die Geburt des modernen Genius im professionellen Menschen. Zeitschrift fur Soziologie, 15(2), 81–94. Tenbruck, F. 1975. Das Werk. Max Webers. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 27, 663–702. Thiele, L. P. 1995. Timely meditations. Martin Heidegger and postmodern politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weber, M. 1926. Max Weber: ein Lebensbild. Munich (English translation, 1998). New Brunswick: Transaction Books). Weber, M. 1952. Ancient Judaism. New York: Free Press.

Soc (2010) 47:63–68 Weber, M. 1976. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Allen & Unwin. Weber, M. 1978. Economy and society, an outline of interpretive sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wiedman, A. K. 1995. The German quest for primal origins in art, culture and politics 1900–1933. New York: The Edwin Mellor Press.

Bryan S. Turner, International Advisory Editor of Society, is the Alona Evans Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. He is author most recently of Can We Live Forever? (London: Anthem Press, 2009).