Persuasions and Prejudices by Irving Horowitz

Author:Irving Horowitz [Horowitz, Irving]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351499989
Google: BCExDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05T04:33:36+00:00

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* Jacob Neusner, Israel In America: A Too Comfortable Exile? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), pp. 203.

Stuart E. Rosenberg, The New Jewish Identity in America. (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1985), pp. 290.

Stephen J. Whitfield, Jews in American Life and Thought: Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau. (Hamden, Connecticut: The Shoe String Press / Archon Books, 1984), pp. 322.

From American Jewish History, vol. 75, no. 4 (1986), pp. 457–62.

48

The Jews and Modern Communism*

Werner Sombart

The recent reissuance of Werner Sombart’s classic work, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, is a welcome event—both in itself and for making available once again this significant effort to understand the relationships between religion and the economy. But rather than simply recreate the past, one should evaluate the present. Specifically, we should reconsider, against the background of Sombart’s understanding, the global problem of Jews and their place in a variety of social systems, particularly in the light of the rise of modern communism as a major political and economic force of our age. But before getting directly to our topic, it is worthwhile to briefly summarizew just what the Sombart thesis actually states. For like the so-called Weber thesis concerning the relationship of Protestantism and the emergence of modern capitalism, the actual writings of Sombart are more often discussed than digested.

Sombart employs a benign transvaluation of Marx’s capitalism as that organization wherein regularly two distinct socio-economic groups cooperate. They are the owners of the means of production and the great body of workers who possess essentially only their labor power. The pursuit of gain is the mainspring of the system; the procedure is rationalism, planning, and efficiency in the means of production. Economic activity is regulated by a cash nexus requiring exact calculations. The structure of cooperation is induced by a common appeal to the marketplace. In this context, the apparent success of the Jews under capitalism is attributed by Sombart to four factors: their dispersion over a wide area, their treatment as perennial strangers, their semicitizenship, and their liquid wealth. But these objective circumstances are important only in the context of special Jewish characteristics. Religious values are taught to the humblest and the mightiest alike; their loss of a land and hope for return transformed them into a cultural brotherhood, and rationalism is the dominant ideology of Judaism as it is of capitalism.

These are, of course, only the bare bones of Sombart’s appraisal. Our concern however is to examine the hypothesis in conditions of communism, a system in which the state transcends class forces in the management and planning of the economy. The communist system fuses material and moral incentives to increase productivity and higher living standards through the elimination of presumably antagonistic social and economic forces and classes. One might argue, as do Mosca and Pareto (two of the more eminent contemporaries of Sombart) that antagonisms are not so much eliminated, as transformed from the economic plane of classes to the political plane of bureaucracies or interest groups. It might also be claimed that the enormous increase in centralized authority creates a ruling class out of the administrative elite.

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