Comparative Knowledge
To continue the problem of comparative knowledge, Max Weber of course was not the first to set this example. The founder of sociology, Auguste Comte, also insisted on having this broad range of knowledge, and this range has remained ineluctable for the great social scientists ever since. The matter has been obscured by recent restrictive definitions of sociology, so that thinkers like Comte are today classified as philosophers of history or historical sociologists. Such classifications, however, do not abolish the structure of reality. The necessary empirical range of knowledge is still the basis of all serious science in these matters.
As a matter of fact, it was already clear in the early twenties, when I started into the field as a student, that comparative historical knowledge was a requirement. The model of Max Weber in this respect was fortified by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, a work that should not be considered only under the aspect of its dubious classification of civilizations and of the dubious organic analogies, but above all as the work of a man who acquired the historical knowledge that made possible the comparative study of civilizations. The background for Spengler’s work was of course the great History of Antiquity by Eduard Meyer, whose work in the following decades was also the basis for the work of Arnold J. Toynbee. If one looks at Toynbee’s text, especially that concerning ancient civilizations, one will find Meyer is the most frequently quoted authority.
It was my good luck when I was a student for a semester in Berlin in 1922–23 to be able to take a course with Eduard Meyer in Greek history. He was a very impressive personality. He would walk in, a tall figure slightly stooped by age with a great shock of hair, step up to the lectern, fold his arms on it, close his eyes, and then talk for the full hour without interruption, in impeccable language, never making a grammatical or stylistic mistake and never getting tangled up in a sentence. When the bell sounded, he would conclude the lecture, open his eyes, and walk out. What was particularly impressive about Eduard Meyer was his treatment of historical situations from the point of view of the person engaged in the action. I still remember his masterful characterization of Themistocles on the eve of the Battle of Salamis, weighing the possibilities that could lead to victory. I like to believe that Meyer’s technique of understanding a historical situation through the self-understanding of the persons involved has entered my own work as a permanent factor.
This range of knowledge represented by Eduard Meyer should be supplemented by the memory of a man of less weight in the critical detail but of a similar range and comparative vision—Alfred Weber. I had the good fortune to spend a semester in Heidelberg in the year 1929, when he delivered his course in the sociology of culture for the first time. Again, it was brought home to me that a scholar, if he wants to talk about social structures in their historical context, must have comparative knowledge and be as much at home in the genesis of Babylonian civilization as in the genesis of Western civilization in the time of the Merovingians and Carolingians.