Max Webers Fragestellung: Studien zur Biographie des Werks by Wilhelm HennisReview by: Guenther RothThe American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 4 (Oct., 1988), pp. 1069-1070Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1863615 .

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Modern Europe 1069

social democracy, which in Dusseldorf remained dominated by artisans until well into the 1880s.

As he tells us in his introduction, Lenger wants his book to respond to the demand that "the history of the labor movement be closely tied to the history of labor" (p. 13). This, he believes, can best be done by examining the process of class formation (Klas- senbildung), which he conceives in a modified yet still explicitly Marxian mode. But Lenger recognizes that class formation is neither inevitable nor uni- form. He presents it as a multidimensional process that involves economic, social, cultural, and political developments. Moreover, he agrees with Kocka that it "can and has occurred with different ideological results" (p. 14). At no point in his account does Lenger allow his concepts to obscure the complexity of his material, which often does not lend itself to class analysis. As a result, his research and conclu- sions clearly reveal both the strengths and the limi- tations of his conceptual apparatus and method- ological assumptions.

JAMES J. SHEEHAN

Stanford University

GUSTAV SEEBER, editor. Gestalten der Bismarckzeit. Vol- ume 2, Berlin, G.D.R.: Akademie. 1986. Pp. 469. 38 M.

This volume is the successor to an earlier publica- tion of the same kind and the latest in a distinctive East German genre of collectively written hand- books that straddle the line between scholarly re- search and general history for a broader public. For many years the best example was Die biirgerlichen Parteien in Deutschland (2 vols., 1968-70), currently being superseded by an updated and larger multivolume version, which became a staple of the German political historian's preparatory diet. Oth- er, more recent, additions include the Geschichte der Produktivkriifte in Deutschland von 1800 bis 1945 (3 vols., 1985-88) and the valuable biographical guide to the revolution of 1848, Manner der Revolution von 1848 (2 vols., 1987). The first of the two volumes on the personalities of the Bismarckian era appeared in 1978, and this second one, edited by Gustav Seeber, is a welcome elaboration of the coverage in the previous volume.

Like its predecessor, the second volume assembles an attractive mixture of detailed portraits, integrat- ing not only the major personalities of state (such as Albrecht von Roon, Herbert von Bismarck, Lothar Bucher, Joseph von Radowitz, Friedrich ILL) and leading politicians (Eugen Richter, Friedrich Albert Lange) but also leading men of the economy (Bethel Henry Strousberg, Werner von Siemens, Hanns Jencke, Wilhelm Kollmann), socialists such as Carl Hirsch and Julius Motteler, and significant intellec-

tuals such as Adolph Menzel, Friedrich Spielhagen, Curd Lasswitz, Fanny Lewald, and Heinrich von Treitschke. Correspondingly, the authors include specialists from a variety of disciplines, whose con- tributions are frequently condensed from larger biographical or associated studies. The individual contributions perhaps add little to our understand- ing of the Bismarckian period by way of major interpretation, but, by providing well-contextual- ized and detailed guides to the careers of individuals who are invariably without a full-scale biography, they add considerably to the available literature on this period. This is particularly useful for business- men such asJencke and Kollmann, who are familiar figures for German historians of the Kaiserreich, but who are notoriously difficult to track down via the published sources. Because the contributions are also generously footnoted with references to the archives and other primary documentation, the vol- ume is a valuable research aid for graduate students first entering the period. In this sense there is no real equivalent of the genre in the historiography of the Federal Republic, whose handbooks (an equally characteristic feature of historical pedagogy there, one should say) remain aimed far more at an un- dergraduate audience.

The volume lacks an index. But otherwise it is well written and well produced and belongs in any library catering to research needs in German histo- ry.

GEOFF ELEY

Universiy of Michigan

WILHELM HENNIS. Max Webers Fragestellung: Studien zur Biographie des Werks. Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr. 1987. Pp. iv, 242. DM 34.

In Allan Bloom's best-selling The Closing of the Amer- ican Mind (1987), Max Weber appears as a key link in the "German connection" that has brought the United States to the brink of moral and intellectual disaster. Resurrecting the old charge of the German refugee Leo Strauss that the United States won World War II militarily but lost it culturally to Germany, Bloom sees Weberian relativism as the great vice of the American academy and indeed of the American way of life: "Anything goes." Through Weber's presumed supremacy in Ameri- can social science, Nietzschean nihilism has come to haunt American culture.

Well-known political theorist Wilhelm Hennis be- gan his studies under Weber's spell, but, influenced by Strauss, deserted him in the late 1950s. Now, toward the end of his prominent career, Hennis has returned to Weber with a vengeance, claiming him for the Aristotelian moral and political tradition- the basis from which Strauss and Bloom have con-

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1070 Reviews of Books

demned Weber's ethical antifoundationalism. A neoconservative critic of social science, Hennis takes the high grounds of philosophy and history. Never before, he observes disdainfully, has an orthodoxy triumphed with so little intellectual effort as has Americanized social science, and the vast literature on Weber is bereft of any spirit and is merely a routinized enterprise. Hennis resolutely takes Weber away from social science, although he con- cedes that without the ahistorical American interest in him after World War II, and especially without Talcott Parsons's naive adaptation, Weber would be a dead classic today. Hennis's perspective involves a rejection of the conventional view of Weber as a founding father of sociology-a position that can be argued seriously-and a disinterest in the theoreti- cal and empirical uses made of Weber's opus. Hence he and the sociologists are bound to talk past one another.

Hennis is a first-rate polemicist and skillful pam- phleteer. In contrast to Bloom, who never cites Weber, he combines forceful formulation with a close reading of passages from the whole work. The present volume contains five essays that were con- ceived as a series, beginning with "Max Weber's 'Central Question"' [1982] published in English in Economy and Society, vol. 12 [1983] pp. 135-80; a translation of the whole by Keith Tribe has ap- peared.) In Hennis's "radically historical" and "phil- osophically anthropological" reading, Weber's cen- tral question revolves not around the theory of social action or of modern society nor Western rationalization or the fate of the German empire but around the moral qualities of the individual now and in the future. Hence, Weber's dominant schol- arly theme (chap. 2) concerns the relation between ethical personality and the "life orders." Investigat- ing the existential conditions of virtue places Weber squarely in the tradition of the moral sciences from Machiavelli to Rousseau and Tocqueville. There- fore, chapter 3 interprets Weber as a true heir of the German Historical school in political economy, which was normatively rooted in Aristotelian moral philosophy. But Nietzsche's "ethical personalism" and "heroic pessimism" also loom large in Weber's oeuvre (chap. 4). That does not make Weber a Nietzschean, Hennis hastens to add. Weber did not take Nietzsche seriously as a scholar or a political man, but he let the philosopher's overriding con- cern with the condition of humanity inspire him. Nietzschean influence also helped turn him away from the older liberalism but in the direction of a liberal voluntarism that remained committed to po- litical freedom (chap. 5).

In bringing Weber's oeuvre home to its forgotten German roots, so to speak, Hennis tries hard, with a good deal of erudition and verve, to change our perception of work and person at the very time that

the first volumes of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe have appeared and the ground is prepared for a new biography of Weber that can move beyond Marianne Weber's masterpiece. Hennis has been the most vociferous critic of the edition, which he sees as being controlled too much by professional sociologists. In my judgment, however, his case for Weber the moral philosopher is weakened by the fact that the writings contain almost nothing con- crete about ethical conduct. If Weber had spelled out his notions of what he wanted Germans to be in the future-courageous citizens in a rising empire- he might well appear to us more time-bound. In- stead, he poured his energies into the conceptual and substantive elaboration of his Entwicklungsge- schichte and sociology and thus provided take-off points for major developments in contemporary social science-for better or worse.

GUENTHER ROTH

Columbia University

MARKKU HYRKKANEN. Sozialistische Kolonialpolitik: Eduard Bernsteins Stellung zur Kolonialpolitik und zum Imperialismus 1882-1914; Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Revisionismus. (Studia Historica, number 21.) Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura. 1986. Pp. 382.

Eduard Bernstein's attempt to persuade the Ger- man Social Democratic party (SPD) to adopt a procolonial line before 1914 has attracted consider- able attention from historians in recent years. In this thoughtful and important study, Markku Hyrkkanen, a Finnish scholar, interprets Bernstein's colonialism from a perspective somewhat different from those of others who have studied the subject. He argues that Bernstein's colonialism should be seen as an integral part of his revisionism and that both together are best understood as Bernstein's response to the problematical situation of the SPD between the 1880s and World War I. He rejects the tendency prevalent in the literature to analyze Bernstein's thought as a convergence of intellectual influences, claiming instead that the immediate con- text in which Bernstein worked largely determined the shape of his thinking. The focus of attention should be the questions arising from the conduct of politics that led Bernstein to construct answers by selecting among the array of contemporary ideas available to him.

Hyrkkanen argues, for example, that, although Bernstein's views on politics and colonialism resem- bled those of many of the Fabians and Radicals with whom Bernstein was in contact while in Britain, he should not be portrayed (as he often is) as a kind of German Fabian or Radical. Bernstein's ideological positions were specifically tailored to the circum-

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