This is my second book about Max Weber, and until recent years I harbored doubts about writing it. Surely one contribution is enough in the vast sea of literature on Weber the man, thinker, scientist, and political intellectual. But the problems posed by Weber’s life and work are a source of endless fascination. There are a number of reasons to be fascinated: the emotional range and psychological drama of the life; the breadth and depth of the work; the sense that our times share something important with his world; the apparent centrality of Weber’s ideas to so many contemporary issues in science and politics; and, of course, the enduring questions about his most famous concepts, arguments, interpretations, and theses.
There are other reasons as well, however, for there is still a great deal we do not know about Weber and his life and writings and times. Despite the monumental efforts of the Max Weber Gessamtausgabe editors, we still do not have a complete published record of the correspondence and will not have that documentation for many years, if ever. Gaps persist in the critical edition of the published texts. Only in recent years, after nearly a century, have we recovered two texts Weber published in English translation in The Encyclopedia Americana in 1907–8. As for the historical period of Weber’s life and work, we may well have a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the quattrocento in Italy or seventeenth-century New England than we do of the Wilhelmine Era in Germany, the Progressive Era in the United States, and the important transatlantic ties forged in the West before the disaster of the Great War—essential especially for social policy, the arts and sciences, and intellectual life generally. Above all, the crucial American connection to Weber and the story of his 1904 journey to the United States, despite repeated prior attempts, have never been fully documented and understood.
In this investigation I propose to take up these textual and historical challenges, though in an unusual way by focusing on the American dimension to Weber’s work and experience. My first systematic treatment of Weber, Fleeing the Iron Cage, aimed for a comprehensive interpretation of his thought as a whole, juxtaposed to some of his most important contemporaries. This study is very different, for I use a particular focus in Max Weber in America to illuminate the thought, the life, and the historical era—especially in the United States, but with an eye on Germany and Europe. Readers will notice the two senses of Weber in America, the literal and the metaphorical: his 1904 travels with Marianne Weber in the United States in part 1, and the intellectual history of his work, texts and ideas in part 2. What unites these two inquiries is the biographical pursuit not of the man but of the work itself, for what we still need most of all is a biography of the work—or, if one prefers, a genealogy of the thinking that continues to challenge and provoke us.
My approach to the subject deserves an explanation. I have spent countless hours, days, and weeks in many archives in the United States and Germany, from the Knox County Public Library in Tennessee to the Prussian State Archives. It is a wonderful life, as Guy Oakes once said to me; if only the hours were better! For my interests (and considering the state of our knowledge) there is simply no substitute for reading the primary documentation—letters, reports, newspapers, records of all kinds, some neatly transcribed or printed, others hurriedly scribbled and barely decipherable. These materials were often frustrating, but always stimulating, raising questions I had not considered previously. I was impressed by the amount of documentation there is, particularly in American state and county historical societies’ collections. Using such sources critically is essential, of course, and I hope that in doing so I have paid sufficient attention to the usual canons of scholarship and the interpretative literature, which for Weber alone would fill bookcases. I have dealt with the issue of sources and documentation by writing a readable narrative, uncluttered as much as possible by footnotes, endnotes, or other textual interruptions. Instead, I have included bibliographical essays for each chapter in which the relevant sources are identified.
There are conditions and contributions enabling this kind of work that I would like to acknowledge. It is a pleasure to express my appreciation to Guenther Roth, who has followed my work over the years, provided thoughtful comments and suggestions, defended the highest standards of scholarship, and supported this investigation with generous encouragement. He read the entire manuscript, assisting with a number of details. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to Wilhelm Hennis for his passionate engagement with Weber and his times. I benefited from conversations and correspondence with Edith Hanke and Keith Tribe, whose work assisted my own efforts. As general director of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, Edith Hanke assisted especially with the holdings of the Mohr-Siebeck Archive. I have enjoyed the counsel of numerous colleagues, among whom I would like to mention Kevin Anderson, Robert Antonio, Karl-Ludwig Ay, David Chalcraft, Uta Gerhardt, Peter Ghosh, David Kettler, Harold Orbach, Joachim Radkau, Alan Sica, Sandra van Burkleo, and Sam Whimster. Donald N. Levine arranged an affiliation at the University of Chicago that assisted my work in the Regenstein Library. Stephen Kalberg, Dirk Käsler, Laurence McFalls, Guy Oakes, and David Smith also expressed their interest in this project. Pat Riker and Marilee Scaff graciously donated their time as general readers of individual chapters. I am grateful to Pat Riker for her interest and support, and for the peaceful setting in Santa Monica, California, where much of the final text was written—shadowed, so to speak, by an earlier generation of European immigrants to American shores.
The study that I have written could not have been accomplished without the Webers’ correspondence, both the nearly two hundred pages mailed home during the months in the United States, and the voluminous correspondence before and after the trip. The use of that handwritten correspondence is itself a challenge—Marianne’s large, uniform, flowing, schooled, almost purely Sütterlin script, and by contrast Max’s cramped, excitable, and highly individualized handwriting using a mixture of German and Roman scripts. If personality is revealed in the movements of the hand over the page, then here lies fertile ground for the analyst. As family members and other correspondents complained, reading Max Weber’s letters was not a matter of reading but of deciphering. Thanks to early tutorials from Manfred Schön of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (MWG), the world’s expert in such matters, my procedure has been to read the handwritten originals, compare my decoding with transcriptions or printed versions, as in Marianne Weber’s Max Weber: A Biography, then return to the originals for a final comparison and correction. My translations are based on this final corrected version, and I have noted when printed versions are incomplete or incorrect, and when the originals are unclear or ambiguous. Much of this work would be unnecessary, of course, were these materials published through the careful editorial procedures of the MWG. However, no period presents more difficulties than the years from 1898 to 1906, and publication of letters from this period lies many years in the future. These difficulties will never entirely disappear, nevertheless, as the MWG publishes only Max Weber’s complete letters, not those of other family members or the replies of his correspondents.
Working with primary sources can be an invitation to pay especially close attention to language, text, and context. And so it has been with my approach to Max Weber. In part 1, delineating the American journey of 1904 and its import, I have found it important to read what he actually wrote, to renew the engagement with his work by considering carefully his words, rather than following the projects proposed by subsequent commentators. Much of that commentary, as valuable as it may be in its own right, can still become a distraction. A great deal can be gained from learning to read Weber from the beginning, unencumbered by the various “creative misinterpretations” (in Guenther Roth’s felicitous phase) that have been offered before. However, part 2 does indeed belong to those interpretations and misinterpretations, creative and otherwise. The chapters of part 2 explore the networks of scholars in America drawn to Weber and his work, to the politics and sociology of “reading” and translation, to the creation of the sacred Weberian texts—long after Weber the author could continue to explain and defend his own words. The intriguing question of how the two dimensions of such an inquiry might be related—the historical-textual and the theoretical-interpretive, so to speak—is one I have kept in mind throughout.
A few sections of this volume have been published previously. Parts of chapter 5, “Remnants of Romanticism,” appeared in a modified form in the Journal of Classical Sociology and The Protestant Ethic Turns 100: Essays on the Centenary of the Weber Thesis. Some of the material in part 2, chapters 11 through 13, appeared in The European Journal of Political Theory, Max Weber Studies, and Das Faszinosum Max Weber: Die Geschichte seiner Geltung. I have completely rewritten and revised these articles and chapters for the current study.