From charisma to canonization: Max Weber in German thought and politics, 1920--1945

This dissertation seeks to understand the impact of the economist and sociologist Max Weber (1864--1920) on German intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century. It documents the explosion of interest in Weber's writing---his methodology of the social sciences, theories about the origins of capitalism, political thought and cultural criticism---and illuminates the variety of interpretations and appropriations to which his ideas were subjected. It also explains how Weber's contemporaries appropriated his concepts to articulate their own concerns about the value of scholarly knowledge, the fate of capitalism, the crisis of liberal democracy and the possibility of heroism in a rationalized world. Drawing on a wide variety of published sources as well as archival materials, it presents the first comprehensive history of Weber's reception in the generation following his death. Contrary to the conventional historical account that minimizes Weber's importance in interwar Germany, I argue that his work served as a decisive point of reference for scholarly and political debate. I demonstrate that German intellectuals regarded Weber as the diagnostician par excellence of an age in which traditional values and institutions had lost their inherent plausibility. His critique of German scholarship and politics cleared the ground for thinkers from across the ideological spectrum to advance radical projects during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. During the 1940s and '50s, American scholars canonized Weber as a founding father of empirical social science. His earlier German interpreters saw him in a different light: as a philosophical guru, an unorthodox follower of Karl Marx, a proto-existentialist and a Machiavellian analyst of modern politics.