International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1997

Ill. An Approach to the Sociology of Max Weber's Knowledge

The Young Max Weber: Anglo-American Religious Influences and Protestant Social Reform in Germany Guenther Roth At Christmas 1875 the eleven-year-old Max Weber, growing up in Berlin, received Benjamin Franklin's autobiography with a dedication: "To my dear young friend Max Weber from your old friend Friedrich Kapp. 1 Kapp (18241884), German revolutionary in 1848/49, prominent Republican politician in New York City in the 1850s and 1860s, was by then a leader of the National Liberal Party in the Reichstag of the new German Empire. He was a close political ally and family friend of Max Weber senior. In the introduction to the German Franklin edition Kapp expressed the wish that "every German father would put Franklin's autobiography into his son's hands as a textbook . . . [for w]e lag behind the materially developed peoples, especially the Americans, in appreciating the proper role of money-making and material means in achieving spiritual and moral purposes. ''2 It would be too hasty, however, to perceive a straight line from this Christmas present of 1875 to "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" thirty years later, when Weber opened his argument with a defense of Benjamin Franklin against Ferdinand Kuernberger's popular anti-American novel, The Man Tired ofAmerica. 3 There is no direct link to Weber's later interest in the possible historical connection between (inner)worldly Protestant asceticism and the spirit of capitalism, a secular ethos of money-making for its own sake, not for the sake of material enrichment or hedonist enjoyment. I will not treat here the academic origins of "The Protestant Ethic"; rather I would like to call attention to neglected aspects of the wider family background that brought the Anglo-Saxon world close to him.4 As a teenager Weber became acquainted through his mother and her family with an Anglo-Saxon religious literature that was progressive, universalist, anti-Calvini.~t and anti-Catholic. He also learned much about the political and economic realities of the United States from Friedrich Kapp and his own father, espe659 © 1997 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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cially about speculative railroad capitalism. Both men had connections with the American railroad tycoon Henry Villard. 5 The young Weber owed much of his cosmopolitan understanding of the world to the fact that he grew up within a remarkable Anglo-Saxon ambiance. As a scion of the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie he early developed a good grasp of the challenges the capitalist world economy posed for Germany. For decades it has gone almost unnoticed that Weber descended on the maternal side from one of the wealthiest Anglo-German merchant families in the 19th century, the Huguenot Souchays and their relations. In the wake of the lost war and the Versailles Treaty, his wife Marianne, a liberal nationalist (as I have called her in a recent essay), played down the Anglo-German connection in her hagiographic biography of 1926. 6 In taking sides for her mother-in-law, Helene Weber, against Max Weber senior, she let on, however, that the pious Helene's wealth--the English origins of which the reader barely notices--permitted a grand-bourgeois lifestyle, but also led to tensions with her more secular husband, who was a top official in the Berlin city government and a budget expert in both the Prussian and the Imperial Diet. Given this family background, it was only consistent that the young Weber at first wanted to follow in his father's footsteps and become an elected official, that he tried (if unsuccessfully) to gain experience in international trade, and began his academic career as a professor of commercial law and a specialist on the stock exchange and commodity futures. But the same background helps explain why Weber, whose family was also prominently involved in the Kulturkampfwith the Catholic Church, became the most knowledgeable of economists in matters of religion. The Anglo-German story is sufficiently unfamiliar to warrant some exploration. I shall first deal with the import of Anglo-American religious literature for the wider family and also with some gender differences that were involved. Secondly, I shall explain the impact of this literature on the young Max Weber and his understanding of the relation between religion and the secular order of the world. In this connection I would like to make some cautionary remarks about passages in Marianne Weber's biography that overemphasize the women's ethical rigorism at the expense of their salvation concerns. I will also caution against a recent suggestion by the well-known Weberian polemicist Wilhelm Hermis that Weber's later interest in the character-forming power of the sects originated in the early literary exposures. I will conclude with a brief look at the political constellation around 1900 when the Anglo-German image darkened and found an ambiguous reflection in "The Protestant Ethic." From the Napoleonic period to the establishment of the German empire in the early 1870s, but gradually diminishing thereafter, German An-

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glophilia and English Germanophilia mirrored one another and created a mythistory (in William McNeill's sense) about the historical and racial affinity of the two Germanic siblings. 7 Although German Anglophilia predated the era of the Revolutionary Wars, the English positive reception of German classical and romantic literature and philosophy was followed by a German positive reception of Germanophile writers such as Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) and the widespread popularity in Germany of novelists such as Walter Scott (1771-1832) and Charles Dickens (1812-1870). 8 Besides reading such novelists as Walter Scott with his mother,9 Max became aware early of the particular significance of four religious authors for his maternal grandmother Emilie Souchay FaUenstein and her daughters, the Americans William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) and Theodore Parker (1810-1860) and the Englishmen Frederick William Robertson (1816-1853) and Charles Kingsley (1819-1875). For the Anglo-German clans of the Souchays, Beneckes, Schuncks, and Mendelssohn Bartholdys, to whom Weber was related through his mother, London and Manchester were central to their far-flung trading network.1° But the families were also part of an Anglo-German web of literary, scientific and artistic connections, which included Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), the famed diarist and Carlyle's predecessor in mediating English and German influences, was for more than six decades family friend, legal counsel and fellow investor, n (He knew Coleridge and Wordsworth no less than Goethe and the Brentanos.) Whether they lived in Frankfort or Heidelberg, Camberwell (near London) or Withington (near Manchester), family members read English and American literature, from novels to religious and philosophical tracts. 12 They generally adhered to an undogmatic Christian progressivism that fused Anglo-American and German elements. The Huguenot tradition remained important in its commercial cosmopolitanism but not in any Calvinist rigorism. A generational break occurred between Jean Daniel Souchay (1736-1811), the first Reformed pastor who was permitted to preach in Lutheran Frankfurt, and his only child, Carl Cornelius Souchay (1768-1838), citizen of the free state of Frankfurt and Free Mason in Manchester, who accumulated a great fortune as a textile trader and merchant banker. He adhered neither to the Protestant ethic nor the spirit of capitalism in Weber's sense. His children, including Emilie Fallenstein (Weber's grandmother) in Heidelberg, Henriette Benecke in Camberweli, and Charles and John Souchay in Manchester continued to live in a faith that minimized the tensions between religion and world. In Heidelberg Emilie Fallenstein's four daughters Ida Baumgarten, Henriette Hausrath, Helene Weber, and Emilie Beneeke grew up in the rationalist spirit of the famed

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theologian David Friedrich Strauss and the equally famous historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus, the family's friend and Helene's importunate mentor. In her account of the family dynamics Marianne Weber overemphasized in particular the ethical rigorism of Max Weber's mother Helene and of his aunt Ida Baumgarten. It is true that in later life Ida became more rigorous, if not rigid, than Helene, but Marianne Weber went too far when she asserted that the former "measured all activity by the inexorable standards of Christian ethics" or that "both preserved the undiminished moral and religious heritage of their mother" in a rigorist sense (MW, 82f.). It appears to me, instead, that their turn or return to a positive faith had much to do with their agony over infant and child mortality, and here the consolations of English and American theology became crucial. 13 The theodicy of suffering encountered in Channing and Parker became increasingly important to the two women. When Helene Weber lost her second child (four-year-old Helene), her sister Ida, who had already lost three, wrote to her in 1877: "I am quite certain that Parker exerted a transformative influence on my inner life only by giving me the conviction, which I gained from a sentence in his sermons, that the terrible suffering of my poor children [Elisabeth and Laura, who died very painfully] prepared them for a higher life of the soul. 14 Ida Baumgarten probably had in mind Parker's sermon "Of the Economy of Pain and Misery Under the Universal Providence of God. ''15 When she lost her fourth child in 1880, she described to a friend (Frau Prof. Baum in Strasbourg) how she had lost her childhood faith through D. E Strauss and regained "the world of faith after many years of doubt" (see letter of April 19, 1880). Ida and Helene were reassured by the kind of hope which Channing expressed upon losing a son in 1822: "I suffer, but I have never forgotten that my child belonged to another and better parent, and was made for a higher state than this. I am sure he was equally the care of God in death as in life. I cannot believe that the necessary means of educating an immortal spirit are confined to this world . . . . I [do not] believe that the relation of parent and child is dissolved by death . . . . Death is not that wide gulf between us and the departed which we are apt to imagine. ''16 Channing elaborated his theodicy in his eulogy of Charles Follen, 'the close and faithful friend of many years': 'Is not suffering the true school of a moral b e i n g ? . . . I do not, then, doubt God's beneficence on account of the sorrows and pains of life' (612). 17 Whereas Ida and Helene had long known Parker and Channing through their mother Emilie Souchay FaUenstein, the young Max Weber was twenty when he first read the latter seriously, comparing him with the familiar Parker. Weber was nearing the end of his first year of military service in Strassburg, which he had chosen because his uncles Hermann

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B a u m g a r t e n and Wilhelm Beneeke were professors there. The mindless drudgery of barrack life prevented him from serious study, but he did manage to read some philosophy and a "little volume of Channing," which Ida had loaned him. Knowing the high esteem in which Ida and Helene held Channing, Max went out of his way to praise him, but in the end also maintained his existential distance from matters religious. H e wrote his mother, not without a lecturing undertone (on July 8, 1884): Channing's writings were of particular interest to me because of the extraordinary and, in their way, unassailable loftiness of conviction (Gesinnung). His entirely original and often magnificent view of the nature of religion--which, incidentally, is hardly to be called Christian--combined with an unusually charming personality, makes this somewhat older contemporary and compatriot of Parker an even more likeable figure than the latter. He is, in any case, considerablymore universal. . . . The point of view expressed in the theoretical sections is a rather naive one and may be described as childlike. But some of the practical results he derived from it make so much sense, and the clear, calm idealism he draws from the observation of 'the infinite worth of the human soul' is so refreshing.., to everyone, even those who do not share his way of looking at things, that there can be no doubt that his views are universal and based on real needs of the spiritual life. This is the first time in several years, as I recall, that something religious has had a more than objective interest for me, and I believe that in becoming acquainted with this great religious figure I have not spent my time quite uselessly after all. . . . Aunt Ida seems to be very pleased that I am so impressed by her favorite author, who is apparently not appreciated by her acquaintances. His world view seems to correspond to hers most closely, although I believe that Channing's cult of the individual does not go as far as hers and that his understanding of duty and morality is freer and not so rigid as hers.18 Marianne Weber cites this passage as the only document from the time that betrays any personal religious response on the part of young Weber, but in comparing and contrasting Channing's and Max's world view she never makes clear the A n g l o - G e r m a n context that would explain the family's interest in theologians such as Parker and Channing. A p a r t f r o m speculating a b o u t Friedrich K a p p ' s influence, Wilhelm Hennis too took the interest in William Ellery Channing as a given, when he asserted in 1995 an " e n o r m o u s formative influence" by this theologian on the young Weber. H e claimed that Weber's later "passionate interest in, and sympathy for, the character-forming power of 'sects' and 'clubs,' in which the individual must prove his 'personality,' was doubtless codetermined by the early reading of Channing. ''19 But neither Channing nor Weber's letter to his m o t h e r of July 8, 1884, which is Hennls' main evidence, treats the issue of holding one's own in the circle of one's peers, not to mention inner-worldly asceticism (JB, 120f.). Hennis m a d e much of Channing's 1829 sermon " R e m a r k s on A s s o c i a t i o n s , " which s u p p o s e d l y "left e n d u r i n g traces in W e b e r ' s thought and political action." W h a t I notice, however, in reading the serm o n is its warning against sects and clubs as dangers for character formation. As a 'sociologist' (so to speak, somebody who observes empirically),

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Channing indeed points to the proliferation of societies and associations, but as a theologian he defends God-given natural associations (family and neighborhood congregation) against the many artificial ones such as Bible, sabbath and temperance associations. His refrain is: "Individual action is the highest good . . . . In truth, all great actions are solitary ones" (149). 20 Weber could sympathize with Channing's insistence on "the infinite value of the individual soul," God's goodness making possible man's dignity. But he made it soon clear to his mother that he vehemently disagreed with one dimension of Channing's religious individualism--his pacifism. From early on he insisted on the autonomous order (Eigengesetzlichkeit) of the world. After reading the 1838 "Lecture on War," he lectured her in turn: "I utterly fail to see what moral elevation is to result from placing professional military men on the same level with a gang of murderers . . . he wants to apply the very dubious words from the New Testament: 'We must obey God rather than men' [Acts 5:29] . . . . Well, if it were not obvious that Channing knows absolutely nothing about such things and has in mind the conditions of the American mercenary armies with which the predatory wars of the democratic American federal government against Mexico etc., were fought, then this reasoning.., would have to be called a highly frivolous one . . . . Putting forth such theories is not without dangers, because it may easily produce a rift in people's sentiments between the supposed demands of Christianity and the consequences and conditions that are ereated by the social order of the states and the world". 21 In addition to Channing, Weber also became acquainted with the English theologians Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) and Frederick William Robertson (1816-1853) at about the same time. Shortly before the young Max went to Heidelberg to begin his university studies in the spring of 1882, his mother and her sister Ida read Charles Kingley's Letters and Memoirs. This was a favorite reading of Henriette Souchay Benecke in CamberweU, who had presented a copy to Fritz and Otto Baumgarten, Ida's sons. Ida was chagrined when she and Fritz reacted in opposite ways to Kingsley. In Heidelberg at the latest Max became aware of the personal importance that Robertson had for his cousin Otto Baumgarten and his Anglo-German fiancre Emily Fallenstein. 22 Max spent an intense f~st semester with Otto, who was six years older and nearing the end of his theological training. In his second examination Otto testified to his identification with Robertson's notion of "the sympathy of Christ": It "has been the basic orientation of my theology throughout my c a r e e r . . , experiencing the savior in his full humanity, who brings us before the creator god as a benign paternal judge . . . . I have always relied on the style and nature of Robertson's sermons as a way of making intelligible Christ's word and example for the present-day community".23

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There was, however, an important political dimension to the reception of Kingsley and especially Thomas Carlyle. "Christian socialism" of the "Carlyle-Kingsley" persuasion came to enjoy a vogue among German welfare reform advocates. There was a flood of publications on the Social Question and especially on Carlyle's critique of the social effects of industrialization. The slogan was: "Mehr Herz fuers VolkI"--"Have more sympathy for the people, at least for the laboring poor!" Both Otto Baumgarten and Paul Hensel, a.relative from the Mendelssohn Bartholdy line, contributed elevated philosophical tracts on Carlyle, in which they exaggerated the German influence on him before offering his moral philosophy back to the German audience.24 It is in this context that the two cousins Otto Baumgarten and Max Weber came to cooperate closely in 1890, when the Evangelisch-soziale Kongress (Protestant Social Congress) was founded by the Court Preacher Adolf Stoecker, whose conservative wing was soon challenged by a liberal wing around the young pastor Friedrich Naumann. 25 •At its early stage, Otto Baumgarten, who maintained a lifelong dedication to the Congress, pursued a double strategy: he tried to advance his Anglophile agenda as a theologian, while Max Weber provided the economic expertise. At the time Baumgarten gave a course with the intention of introducing Kingley and Robertson to a German university audience. In 1893 he proclaimed: "There is no profession in which the German bent toward ideology is as strong as among clergymen. Long ago the reading of Shakespeare and Dickens, Kingsley and Robertson, and not least George Eliot wrenched me out of this mode and proved to me that a Christian realism which has the courage and conscience to face the people's real needs is superior to systematic idealist speculation. ''26 In their Anglophile stance both Baumgarten and Weber opposed, however, not only Germanic "philosophical speculation" and unrealistic pastoral efforts, but especially the orthodoxy of the Lutheran-dominated state church. If for Baumgarten the "most terrible of horrors was Royal Prussian Christianity," for Weber (using the same phrase) "Lutheranism in its historical manifestations was the most terrible of horrors, I don't deny it." So he wrote to Adolf Harnack in an exchange on "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. "27 At the beginning of their cooperation Otto Baumgarten revealed his strategy to his mother Ida in the following terms: The first Protestant Social Congress revealed such ignorance on the part of eager pastors about the actual possibilities of reform.., that the participation of Christian circles in the urgent social rescue work threatened to lead to renewed discredit, to the greatest delight (Schadenfreude) of the Papists (Roemlinge). . . . As editor I guarantee the practicality of the measures proposed. For the rest, men of the most diverse opinions will have the opportunity to express themselves. How can I proceed? I maintain friendly relations with representatives of the old and the new r e g i m e . . , and I have gained Max Weber as my policy advisor, who brings along

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his economistfriends.It is fun workingwith Max since he holds by and large the same viewson basic ethical issues, althoughhe is less friendlyto the cause of the workers and less convincedof the curativepowersof religion.2s Baumgarten, then, considered it Weber's role to propagate an economic realism next to his own theological one. Time and again Max thundered against the naive and ignorant reformism of the pastors, who meant to solve the Social Question idealistically. He labored to inculcate into pastors as well as workers some understanding for the realities of the capitalist world economy. When Friedrich Naumann founded the National Social Association in Erfurt in 1896 against his advice, Weber antagonized many participants with his harsh criticism. He justified his aggressiveness with the "profound indignation" that gripped him when he saw "political children, as is true of ninety percent of the pastors present, try to put their hands on the wheels of the ship of state without being aware of their tremendous responsibility. "z9 To his uncle, the theologian Adolf Hausrath, who wrote successful novels under the English penname George "Ihylor, Weber observed at the time: "Rather than being 'Christian-Social' I am a pretty pure bourgeois. My relationship to Naumann, whose character I esteem, is limited to an effort to wean him gently away from his socialist inclinations. ''3° We should keep in mind, however, that the older "Carlyle-Kingsley" kind of "Christian socialism" had little to do with the socialism of the continental labor movement. Although Carlyle and Kingsley were vociferous critics of the social, dislocations of industrialization, they excused some of the worldwide dislocations in the wake of Britain's civilizing mission. It is notorious that Carlyle defended slavery, the American South and Prussian militarism. Kingsley, who is famous for articulating a "muscular Christianity," let his chivalrous concern for white women and children call for the merciless suppression and annihilation of Black rebels in Jamaica, Indian (Sepoy) insurgents and Malaysian headhunting savages. Whereas the women in Weber's family circle seem to have noticed only the personal spiritual dimension in the Anglo-Saxon writers, the men were more attuned to not only the social reform but also the imperialist vision. Weber's fellow economist and friend Gerhart von Schulze-Gaevernitz had started out in 1890 with a study of Carlyle and Christian socialism ("On Social Peace"), but in 1906 he put forth Germany's claim to supersede Britain's world mission in his massive book British Imperialism and English Free Trade.31 As Anglophilia changed into Anglophobia, German interest in English religious and social thought lost its political innocence. In an ironic twist of history, the increasing rivalry between Great Britain and Imperial Germany was paralleled by a reinterpretation of the historical significance of Puritanism. When Weber wrote in "The Protestant Ethic" that "Puritanism enabled its adherents to create free institutions

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and still become a world power," he reflected the mythistory that British liberal Imperialists constructed about the Puritan origins of English liberty and world power. 32 After Carlyle, the great foe of liberalism, had rehabilitated Cromwell in the name of the "heroic in history," the liberals made him their precursor in an effort to reconcile Establishment and Dissent for the sake of national mobilization. Thus, it came about that in 1895 Lord Rosebery, the Prime Minister, proposed the erection of a statue of Oliver Cromwell. At its dedication in 1899 this leader of the liberal Imperialists celebrated Cromwell as a great soldier, a great ruler and "a great raiser and maintainer of British influence and power abroad." He was the first ruler who really understood and practiced toleration, although "it is quite true that Cromwell's action not unfrequently jars with Christianity as we in this nineteenth century understand it." He ended by calling for "a few Cromwells now. The Cromwell of the nineteenth or the Cromwell of the twentieth century would not be the Cromwell of the seventeenth cent u r y . . . . But he [too] would not compromise with principles. His faith would be in God and in freedom, and in the influence of Great Britain as promoting, as asserting, both. 33 It was left to Rosebery's erstwhile anti-Imperialist cabinet colleague John Morley to reveal that behind the mythistory of Cromwell loomed the challenge of Bismarck's Realpolitik and German Weltpolitik: "The overthrow of the old tradition about Cromwell that the genius of Carlyle had inspired half a century before, gained a fresh spell of vigorous popularity . . . . So now Cromwell became a name on an Imperialist flag. It fell in with some of the notions of the day about representative government, the beneficent activities of a busy State, the virtue of the strong Man, and the Hero for Ruler. I t . . . diffused a subtle tendency to deify Violence, Will, Force, even War. It was the day of Bismarck. "34 It is not surprising, then, that John R. Seeley also found an attentive German audience, including Schulze-Gaevernitz, when he used Cromwell for his purposes--a call for consolidating the empire in an age of intensifying imperialism--in his highly influential The Expansion of England (1883). 35 To sum up. How much was the young Weber affected by his exposure to English and American religious literature? He was certainly impressed by the existential significance it had for his mother, his aunt and his cousin. It appears to me, however, that on balance these writers did not provide him with existential support (Lebenshilfe) but became mainly of 'objective interest'--a first step toward his later concern with the sociology of the world religions. Moreover, Weber could not accept the monistic tenets of English Christian socialism, the belief that, since the world was God's creation, there could not be a real contradiction between the secular order and Christianity. Long before developing his interest in Calvinist and Puritan

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dualism, he seems to have been convinced of the dualism of salvation religion and the orders of the world. He became familiar with the religious reactions to capitalism, to the social dislocations of industrialization, long before becoming interested in the possible spiritual origins of a particular Anglo-Saxon spirit of capitalism. From early on, it was Weber's strategy in the family to recognize the historical and conventional significance of Christianity, but to evade the pressures exerted by his mother Helene and her sister Ida Baumgarten to make a declaration of personal faith. I see no evidence that at twenty or later Weber adhered to Christian eschatological concepts such as eternal life or reunion in the beyond. 36 But even if he remained skeptical of American Unitarianism and British Christian reformism, his early exposure prepared the way for the scholarly confidence--indeed overconfid e n c e - w i t h which he later approached earlier forms of Anglo-Saxon Protestant asceticism. In good measure Weber was willing to cooperate with Baumgarten in the Protestant Social Congress because he wanted to prevent the Social Question from being claimed solely by the Conservatives, the anti-Semites and the Catholics. He sympathized with the good intentions of Christian reformism, but kept insisting on the basic difference between religious ethics and economic rationality. When the reform course of the Imperial government in the early eighteen nineties was quickly reversed and succeeded by a new repressive period, Weber became increasingly frustrated politically. Eventually he looked far back into the past for the roots of the historical differences, rather than the similarities, between the Anglo-Saxon and the German realm: "The fact that our nation never went through the school of hard asceticism, in no form whatsoever, is the source of everything that I hate about it and about myself," he explained to Harnack in echoing British mythistory.37 Religion and economy, so it appeared to him, had been antagonistic forces throughout history. Only once had there been a positive link, a merger of religious and political voluntarism. This had turned the English into a master race (Herrenvotk). That became a political subtext of "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" in Weber's struggle against the authoritarian state and church in Germany. Having grown up in an extended family with close links to the Anglo-Saxon world, Weber and Baumgarten refused to abandon their basic Anglophile orientation in the face of the growing tensions between the two empires. In whatever mythologized manner, England remained an ideal in crucial religious and political respects. Thus, it came about that in spite of their unquestioned nationalist sentiments, the two cousins became increasingly odd-men-out as the world moved toward the catastrophe of the Great War.

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1. Benjamin Franklin, Sein Leben yon ihm selbst geschrieben. Mit einem Vorwort von Berthold Auerbach und einer historisch-politisehen Einleitung von Friedrich Kapp (Stuttgart: Auerbach, 1876). Weber's copy is in the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Munich. 2. Quoted from the reprint of the introduction in Kapp, Aus und ueber Amerika (Berlin: Springer, 1876), 89. 3. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Taicott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958), 50. 4. See my essay "Zur Entstehungs-und Wirkungsgeschichte yon Max Webers 'Protestantischer Ethik'," in Bertram Schefold et al., Max Weber und seine 'Protestantische Ethik' (Duesseldorf: Vertag Wirtschaft und Finanzen, 1992), 43-68. 5. See my essay, "Global Capitalism and Multiethnicity. Max Weber Then and Now," in Stephen "lhrner, ed., untitled,, New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 1998. For a German version, see "Globaler Kapitalismus und Multiethnizitaet," in Anton Sterbling and Heinz Zipprian, eds., Max Weber und Osteuropa. Beitraege zur Osteuropaforschung I (Hamburg: Kraemer, 1997). 6. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, abb. MW, tr. Harry Zohn (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1988), with a biographical introduction on "Marianne Weber and Her Circle" by myself. See also my essay, "Marianne Weber als liberale Nationalistin," in Juergen Hess et al., eds., Heidelberg 1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1996), 310-326. 7. See William H. McNeill, "Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians," American Historical Review, 91:1 (February 1986): 1-10, also in Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1986). 8. Scott began his literary career with translations from Goethe and Buerger. Robertson translated Lessing's Education of the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechtes); George Eliot translated David Friedrich Strauss, Carlyle adapted Goethe, and as a student Kingsley also tried his hand at translations. 9. On Christmas 1878 Weber received from his paternal grandparents translations of Scott's The Talisman (1825) and Ouentin Durward (1823), which he read with his mother. In the fall of 1878, the fourteen-year-old Max began to learn English privately, since in classical school he was taught only Latin, Greek and French. Somewhat overconfidently, he hoped soon be able to read Shakespeare in the original. Shakespeares's works in English were another Christmas present. See Weber, Jugendbriefe, abb. JB (Taebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1936), 17, 19. A close family friend was the well-known literary historian and theorist Julian Schmidt (1818-1886), who was also an expert on English literature from Walter Scott to Charles Kingsley. See Lawrence Marsden Price, The Attitude of Gustav Freytagand Julian Schmidt Toward English Literature (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck, and Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1915). I0. See my essay, "Weber the Would-Be Englishman: Anglophilia and Family History," in Hartmut Lehmann and myself, eds., Weber's 'Protestant Ethic': Origins, Evidence, Contexts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 83-121. For the commercial setting, see Stanley Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britair~ From the Industrial Revolution to World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 11. See Hertha Marquardt, Henry Crabb Robinson und seine deutschen Freunde (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck, 1964 and 1967), 2 vols. 12. See my essay, "Heidelberg.London-Manchester," in Hubert Treiber and Karol Sauerland, eds., Heidelberg im Schnittpunkt intellelaueller Kreise (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994). 184-209. 13. The theme of "Death in the Victorian Family" has now been extensively treated in the book of the same title by Pat Jalland (New York: Oxford ~ 1996). 14. Letter of Jan. 17, 1877, Deponat Max Weber-Schaefer, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Muenchen (BSB), Ana 446.

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15. Theodore Parker, Sermons of Theism, Atheism, and The Popular Theology (London: "It-uebner, 1865), 194-222. 16. Memoir of William Ellery Channing (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee & Co, 1860, 8th ed.), vol. II, 234. 17. Wdliam Ellery Channing, ' ~ Discourse Occasioned by the Death of the Rev. Dr. Foilen," Works (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1875), 607-618. Charles Follen (17961840), who drowned in Long Island Sound when the "Lexington" blew up, was known in Germany as the radical student leader Karl Follen, who had to flee because of his complicity in Ludwig Sand's assassination of August von Kotzebue in 1819. He became one of the mediators between German literature and philosophy and New England Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. Channing first became aware of German philosophy and literature through Madame de Stael and Coleridge. He was particularly interested in Kant, Schelling and "the heroic stoicism of Fichte" (see Memoir, vol. II, 95). That the Baumgartens knew Channing's eulogy of Follen is supported by the fact that Hermann Baumgarten defended Folle~'s memory against Heinrich von Treitsehke by citing it. See Hermarm Baumgarten, Treitschke's Deutsche Geschichte (Strassburg: Truebner, 1883), 19f. 18, Letter of July 8, 1884, JB (cited in 9), 120f., of. MW (cited in 6), 86. 19. Wilhelm Hennis, "Freiheit durch Assoziation," FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung, Jan. 4, 1995. 20. Works (cited in 17), 149. Channing's homiletics uses the rhetorical tactic of qualifying every assertion in order to anticipate and deflect objections from listener and reader, but after each qualification he reaffirms his main thesis: Not only are natural associations more effective than artificial ones, but "all virtue lies in individual action.., in self-determination". As against the common opinion that only "bad company" is dangerous, Channing insists: "To our apprehension, there is a peril in the influence of both of good and bad. What many of us have chiefly to dread from society is, not that we shall acquire a positive character of vice, but that it will impose on us a negative character; that we shall live and die p.assive beings" (Works, 142). After enumerating arguments in favor of association, Channing formulates his own critical position: "In our judgment, the influences of society at present tend strongly to excess, and especially menace that individuality of character for which they can yield no adequate compensation" (140). 21. Letter of Dec. 6, 1885, JB (cited in 9), 191f., d. MW (cited in 6), 89. 22. Their common grandmother Emilie Fallenstein had probably met Robertson. In the summer of 1846 Robertson was for nine weeks acting as pastor of the English Church in Heidelberg. Henry Crabb Robinson was visiting, and Emilie Souchay Fallenstein had just settled among her Anglo-German relatives. In 1859 Robinson gave Emilie in London two volumes of Robertson's sermons to take back to Heidelberg for Lulse Benecke. A grandchild of Eduard Souchay, Emilie's brother, the Baroness Helene yon Dungem (1865-1953) edited a German volume Sozialpoh'tische Reden (1895) from Robertson's Literaty Remains (1876). On German theological literature to which Otto Baumgarten introduced Max Weber, see Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, "Max Weber und die protestantische Theologie seiner Zeit," Zeitschrift fuer Religions-und Geistesgeschichte, 39:2 (1987): 122-147, and "The German Theological Sources and Protestant Church Politics," in Lehmann and Roth, op. cit., 2749. 23, Otto Baumgarten, Meine Lebensgeschichte (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1929), 63. See "The Sympathy of Christ" (Nov. 4, 1849), Sermons (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1861), vol. I, 102-118. Adolf Harnack wrote an introduction to a late German translation, Religioese Reden (1890). 24, See Otto Baumgarten, Carlyle und Goethe (Taebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1906) and Paul Hensel, Thomas Carlyle (Stuttgart: Fromann, 1901). Charles Frederick Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought: 1819-1834 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934) criticized Baumgarten for exaggerating Goethe's impact on Carlyle and Hensel and for carrying "the parallel between Carlyle and Fichte to unwarrantable limits" (249 and 292). 25. See Rita Aldenhoff, "Max Weber and the Evangelical-Social Congress," in Wolfgang Mommsen and Juergen Osterhammel, eds., Max Weber and His Contemporaries (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 193-202; Harry Liebersohn, Religion and Industrial Society: The

The Young Max Weber

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34, 35. 36.

37.

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Protestant Social Congress in Wilhelmine Germany (Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1986); Gangolf Huebinger, Kulturprotestantismus und Politik (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1994). Baumgarten, "Die Bedeutung des englischen Einflusses fuer die deutsche praktische Theologie," Zeitschrif~ fuer praktische Theologie, 15 (1893): 242, See also Baumgarten's encyclopedia entries on Carlyle, Eliot and Robertson in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, first and sec. edition. Baumgarten, Meine~Lebensgeschichte (cited in 23), 132; Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, 11/5, Briefe 1906-1908, eds. M. Rainer Lepsius and Wolfgang Mommsen with Birgit Rudhard and Manfred Schoen (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1990), 32f., letter of Feb. 5, 1906. Letter of Aug. 23, 1890, BSB (see 14), Ana 446. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, I/4, Landarbeiterfrage, Nationalstaat und Volkswirtschaftspoli. tik, ed. Wolfgang Mommsen with Rita Aldenhoff (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1993), 616f. Letter of Oct. 15, 1896, Max Weber Nachlass, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Berlin, Rep. 92, Nr. 30:3. Hausrath was worried that Weber's association with the Christian-Social movement could weigh against his call to Heidelberg. Gerhart yon Schulze-Gaevemitz, Britischer Imperialisrnus und englischer Freihandel (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1906). Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958), 261. Lord Rosebery, "Cromwell," Miscellanies (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1921), 83, 86, 97ff. John Morley, Recollections (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 49. See Timothy Lang, The l,qctorians and the Stuart Heritage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). John R. Seeley, The Expansion of England, ed. with an introduction by John Gross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). In 1936 Marianne Weber answered a query by Eric Voegelin by recalling that Weber's "relationship to Christianity had been greatly attenuated in the second half of his life, although every religious phenomenon interested him" ("Max Webers Beziehungen zum Christentum waren in der zweiten Haelfte seines Lebens stark verblasst--aUerdings bewegte ihn jede religioese Erscheinung und Vorstellungswelt."). At issue was Weber's interest in Kierkegaard, whose philosophy of marriage and love Max and Marianne discussed in their troubled early married days. See a letter of Feb. 5, 1936, in Eric Voegelin, Die Groesse Max Webers, Peter Opitz, ed. (Munich: Fink, 1995), 60. Letter of Feb. 5, 1906, see note 27.