Postcolonial Sociologies by Go Julian;

Author:Go, Julian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2016-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

EMBATTLED AUTONOMY, 1880–1945

Max Weber and Richard Thurnwald present two very different patterns of scientific autonomy and dependence. Weber (1964, 1920), was recognized as the leading German sociologist during his lifetime.23 The Max Weber “myth” in Heidelberg in the decade before World War I rivaled that of his acquaintance, the poet Stefan George (Honigsheim, 1926; Norton, 2002, pp. 475–480; Radkau, 2009, pp. 293–297). At the meetings of the German Sociological Association between 1910 and 1933, no name was mentioned more frequently than Max Weber’s (Kaesler, 1984, p. 41). He was called the most important “maker of sociology” by the other German sociologists interviewed by Earle Edward Eubank in 1934 (Kaesler, 1991). Sociologically, Weber exemplified the 19th century model of the German university professor, in which Besitz (economic capital) formed the precondition for Bildung or academic culture, and also allowed for considerable scientific autonomy. This was true for Weber at least after he married Marianne Schnitger (Roth, 2001, p. 549) and obtained his first professorship at Freiburg in 1894 (Weber, 1988, pp. 199–201). Before that time Weber was financially dependent on his father. Shortly after Weber received the status of Ordinarius (full professor) at Heidelberg in 1897 his father died in a series of events that triggered his nervous breakdown. His teaching and research came to a halt and he resigned his professorship in 1903, again becoming financially dependent, this time on his mother (Mitzman, 1985, pp. 148–153; Radkau, 2009, p. 282). In 1908, Marianne inherited a great deal of money (Radkau, 2009, pp. 280–283), easing the Webers’ financial condition. Weber had already started to reemerge with the publication of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1904–905, and he began to play a central role in the nascent German discipline of sociology and in academia and politics more generally, finally accepting a chair in economics at Vienna in 1919 and Lujo Brentano’s chair at Munich in 1920, where he moved just before he died.

Weber attached central importance to autonomy. Much of his writing during the 1890s can be interpreted at least in part in the context of his obsession with his own and his mother’s autonomy from his overbearing, patriarchal father, Max Weber, Sr., and his desire to escape from “abject dependence” (Mitzman, 1985, pp. 124, 133; Radkau, 2009, p. 110). An example is Weber’s argument that the Prussian rural laborers’ exodus from the eastern estates was rooted in a desire for liberation from patriarchal feudal authoritarianism, as opposed to a strictly economic calculus. Weber associated the Prussian Junkers with his father, whom he saw as a conformist, “comfortable” petty bureaucrat who “enabled himself ‘to keep pace with this living standard’ only by pirating his wife’s inheritance” (Mitzman, 1985, pp. 48, 123). Many of his research projects, including his research on the Prussian rural laborers in the 1890s and his study of the “psychophysics” of industrial labor (Weber, 1984a, 1984b), were financed by the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Radkau, 2009, pp. 79, 267), and Weber’s attack on the Verein’s old

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