The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  The climax of On Social Differentiation was Simmel’s differentiation between objective and subjective culture. By the former he meant books that had been published, paintings painted, operas performed—achievements “out there” to which individuals can relate and define themselves, responses they can share, benchmarks and canons that can be agreed upon (or argued about) and which mark where someone belongs and differs from his or her fellows. By subjective culture, Simmel meant mainly business culture, where he saw bankers, industrialists, entrepreneurs, and shopkeepers sharing much less, having far fewer benchmarks with which to compare themselves, leading more private (but not necessarily more intimate) lives. He thought such life impoverished but saw at the same time that small town life was “unbearable” for people who had lived in metropolises.

  In May 1889 Simmel gave a paper on “The Psychology of Money.”21 Somewhat expanded, this was to become Die Philosophie des Geldes (The Philosophy of Money) which, when it appeared in 1900, was welcomed with great acclaim. Karl Joël declared it to be “a philosophy of the times,” Max Weber thought its analysis of the spirit of capitalism was nothing less than “brilliant,” and Rudolf Goldscheid suggested it formed “a very interesting correlate to Marx’s Capital.”

  Simmel’s argument owed something to Dilthey because he argued that “Money, like other phenomena, can never be grasped from a single science.” Nevertheless, for Simmel money was important because it symbolized “the fundamental relatedness of social reality.” The meaning of money, he said, is grounded not in production, as Marx would have it, but in exchange. Exchange, he insisted, is the source of value, embodying the process of sacrifice and gain. “Every interaction [in society] has to be regarded as an exchange: every conversation, every affection (even if it is rejected), every game, every glance at another person.” Such interactions always involve the exchange of personal energy, and this, for Simmel, is what metropolitan life is about and why it is new.22

  A money economy creates new dependencies, “especially upon third persons, not as persons but as representatives of functions.” One consequence is that the personalities of those we now become dependent upon are irrelevant and far less tense emotionally. Money enables us to participate in a much wider range of relationships and associations but without any real emotional involvement, still less commitment. Money is both “disintegrating and isolating” but also “unifying,” in that it brings together elements of a society that otherwise “would have no connection whatsoever.” Simmel even compared the money economy to prostitution: “The indifference as to its use, the lack of attachment to any individual because it is unrelated to any of them, the objectivity inherent in money…which excludes any emotional relationship…produces an ominous analogy between money and prostitution.”23

  In the final chapter of The Philosophy of Money—which ranks as one of the first sociological analyses of modernity—Simmel tried to work out an updated theory of alienation. Money, he said, helps modern culture toward a “calculating exactness,” and the ease of understanding of these monetary relationships eclipses all others, so that the individual’s chances to be creative and develop in particular directions becomes restricted. Furthermore, it is in the nature of the production process that more impersonal objects are preferred “because they are suitable for more people and can be produced cheaply to satisfy the widest possible demand.” In this way individual experience becomes flattened, intimacy is lost—this is the modern alienation and, for Simmel, the “tragedy of culture,” compounded further by the loss of philosophical coherence brought about by scientific specialization.

  In 1903 Simmel published his no less famous work, Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben (The Metropolis and Mental Life), later expanded into Soziologie (Sociology; 1908). Here he argued that great cities are not only characterized by far more social differentiation than before but also that there is a totally new phenomenon, the “indefinite collectivity” we refer to as crowds, which are characterized by “total indifference to one’s fellow human beings.”24 This experience—unknown in traditional, rural communities or market towns—provokes “extreme subjectivism,” he said. The individual’s struggle for self-assertion, against “the pervasive indifference” of much metropolitan social interaction, leads to excessive behavior, “the most tendentious eccentricities, the specifically metropolitan excesses of aloofness, caprice and fastidiousness, whose significance no longer lies in the content of such behaviour, but rather in its form of being different, of making oneself stand out and thus attracting attention.” Metropolitan life atrophies genuine individuality and replaces it with an artificial, contrived, calculated individuation. This too is a form of alienation.25

  Both Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin found The Philosophy of Money second only to Marx in importance. It also helped imbue writers like Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Oswald Spengler with “a passionate hatred” of the modern city, one of those themes taken up in 1920s Weimar Germany, paving the way for National Socialism.

  Simmel was also an important influence on the Chicago school.

  TWO TYPES OF INDIVIDUALISM

  Ferdinand Tönnies conceived sociology as part of an already-existing “cognitive continuum” extending from geometry at one end to narrative history at the other. Much influenced by Hobbes and Hume, he thought sociology was in principle no different from linguistics, mathematical physics, or the theory of law—it was a new form of logic or epistemology, brought about by modern life.26

  With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that Tönnies’s background was a heavy influence on some of his concepts. Born in 1855, in the marsh-lands of east Schleswig, where his grandparents had included Lutheran pastors, Tönnies was ten when the family left their country home for the nearby town of Husum, where his father—formerly a farmer—became involved in banking. All his life, right through to Nazi times, Tönnies seems to have found adjustment to metropolitan mass culture difficult.

  In his university education he followed the cosmopolitan model, studying at Strasbourg, Jena, Berlin, Leipzig, Heidelberg, Kiel, and Tübingen.27 Between 1878 and the outbreak of World War I Tönnies visited England several times, and in 1905 went on to the United States. His attitudes to these countries was mixed. He found the contradiction of capitalism and poverty “hypocritical” but at the same time admired their constitutional liberties, a contradiction that was to remain at the heart of his theorizing.

  After his first doctorate, in philosophy, he formed a friendship with Friedrich Paulsen, the philosopher and educator, and under his influence Tönnies began to investigate the pre-Kantians. In the course of this he encountered the works of Thomas Hobbes, which led to those visits to England, where he gained access to original Hobbes material in the British Museum, St. John’s College, Oxford, and the country seat of the Duke of Devonshire, at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. He discovered Hobbes documents that had been overlooked by other scholars, enough material to publish four papers, helping to make his name both north and south of the Channel.

  Hobbes led to an appraisal of Adam Smith, then to other economists, and this was the intellectual background that brought about Tönnies’s first “sketch” of what would become Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Civil Society), in which he tried—seriously—to counterpose what he saw as two fundamentally contrasting models of human social organization. Tönnies formed the view that the traditional, small-scale village in which he had himself grown up was dying, and he felt the loss profoundly. At the same time, Bismarck’s high-handed repression of all opposition produced in Tönnies “a growing disenchantment with the much vaunted achievements of the new imperial German Reich.”28

  There was, however, little sign as yet that his sketch would ever be expanded and he returned to England to work on Hobbes. It was only a series of mishaps, during the course of which his British publishers canceled Tönnies’s projected volume on Hobbes, that caused him to return his attention to Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. It was 1887 and it was a
fateful decision. There were to be eight editions of the book during his lifetime, the last in 1935, shortly before his death, and though it was ignored to begin with, it caught on in the run-up to World War I.29

  The book was divided into three parts; the first compared small-scale “communities” and large-scale, market-based “civil societies.” The second examined the way these two types affect how people think and behave. The third looked at how all this affected politics, government, and law. Tönnies’s central point was that at one extreme, the will, or consciousness, was “natural,” spontaneous and unreflecting (what he called Wesenswille); at the other extreme, the will was artificial, deliberative, limited to “rational calculation” (Willkür to begin with, later changed to Kürwille). For him, these were two kinds of freedom. One entailed “unselfconscious fulfilment of a function or duty within a predetermined social context,” while the other, the “rational will,” was more self-conscious but brought with it “unlimited choice” and therefore absolute “self-sovereignty.” Tönnies thought both forms of will and freedom were latent in all human beings but tended to be expressed differently according to different social circumstances. Rational will was more characteristic of men than women, of adults than children, of city-dwellers than villagers, of traders than creative artists. He built on these differences to argue that there were in modern society two totally different types of human psyche. The “natural will” produced a “self” that was in harmony with its habitat and closely linked with others. In contrast, the “rational will” produced “subjects” (not selves) that invented their own identities and were in fact estranged from their natural selves, perceiving other people, moreover, as mere things or “objects.”30

  This dichotomy of the human psyche was closely linked with social and economic organization. The “organic” community (Gemeinschaft) was characterized by ties of kinship, custom, history, and the communal ownership of primary goods. The converse was “society” (Gesellschaft), in which “free-standing individuals interacted with each other through self-interest, commercial contracts, a ‘spatial’ rather than a ‘historical’ sense of mutual awareness, and the external constraints of formally enacted law.” The dichotomy ran through everything. For example, in community material production was primarily for “use” not “gain.” In society, in contrast, “all personal ties were subordinate to the claims of abstract individual freedom.” In community, work and life were integrated in a “vocation” or “calling,” while in society business produced profit that was then used to provide “happiness.” “The entire civilisation has been turned upside down by a modern way of life dominated by civil and market Society, and in this transformation civilisation itself is coming to an end.”31

  Tönnies’s arguments overlapped with at least some of the things the Social Darwinists and vulgar nationalists were saying. But his dichotomy didn’t catch on until the international temperature was on the rise before World War I. After the war, Tönnies was much better appreciated, and not just in Germany. Even in Europe and North America, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft became a canonical text of classical sociology.

  Tönnies always said that he emphatically wasn’t comparing individualism and collectivism. Rather, there were two distinct forms of individualism, “the unself-conscious kind, which was created by and naturally flowed from Gemeinschaft, and the self-conscious kind which fostered and was manufactured by the culture of Gesellschaft.” Most readers, however, interpreted his book as an attack on modernity.

  Simmel and Tönnies are important in the way that they identify aspects of “cultural lag” at the end of the nineteenth century that would have long-lasting consequences for the “belated nation” that was Germany in the twentieth century (see Chapter 41). As did Simmel, Tönnies identifies something that Riehl had categorized as “un-German” about modern society, and that was, through such writers as Julius Langbehn, Spengler, and Chamberlain, to drive conservative thinking into intellectual proximity with the Nazis, in the shape of the so-called Conservative Revolution (see Chapter 33). As Keith Bullivant, historian of the Conservative Revolution, has pointed out, the basic ideas behind Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft continued to play a central part in German thinking, even after the Second World War, as Chapter 9 of Ralf Dahrendorf’s 1968 Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland clearly shows: it is titled “Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft” (again, see Chapter 41).

  HEROES VERSUS TRADERS

  At the time, Werner Sombart was probably even better known than Tönnies, and not just in Germany.32 He has come to be regarded as the “reactionary modernist” par excellence, best known for Der moderne Kapitalismus (Modern Capitalism, in which he introduced the concept and the word “capitalism”), for Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (The Jews and Modern Capitalism), and Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? (Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?). Many of the first generation of sociologists—Tönnies and Weber in Germany and Everett C. Hughes and Robert Park in America—regarded him as brilliant and original, though they had certain reservations, summed up by Joseph Schumpeter, who said that Modern Capitalism “shocked professional historians by its often unsubstantial brilliance.”33

  Der moderne Kapitalismus, published in two volumes in 1902 and re-issued as a single work in 1916, was the book that made Sombart’s name.34 Many, though again not all, of his colleagues regarded this book as an immediate classic. In this work, he rejected Marx’s base-superstructure theorem where, it will be remembered, productive forces comprise the fundamental layer of society, with an ideological architecture built on top. Sombart thought that the essence of capitalism was its spirit, in some ways anticipating Max Weber’s ideas. More than any of the other sociologists at the time, Sombart’s work overlapped with the lesser figures addressed in the previous chapter. Such issues as race, Judaism, Germanness, technology, Marxism, and nationalism are returned to time and again.

  In their analysis of Sombart’s career, Reiner Grundmann and Nico Stehr argue that he performed a volte face on two crucial issues, and this perhaps explains the conviction with which he wrote: he had the passion of a convert. In the first place, he began as a Marxist and an ardent socialist.35 After the turbulent 1890s, however, Sombart became an equally ardent anti-Marxist, and one, moreover, with anti-Semitic overtones. His attitude to his own country changed too. Early on, he had had serious misgivings about where Germany was headed, but all that changed around 1910 and he developed a strident nationalism. In his book Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (The German Economy in the Nineteenth Century), published in 1903, he began to argue that the national character of the German people was responsible for the spirit of capitalism. This somewhat muddy argument became clearer as Sombart began to distinguish between two types of capitalists: entrepreneurs and traders. By 1909, and then in Der Bourgeois, in 1913, he was writing that the entrepreneur is “quick in comprehension, true in judgement, clear in thought, with a sure eye for the needful…Above all he must have a good memory.” Contrast that with his view of the trader, whose “intellectual and emotional world is directed to the money value of conditions and dealings, who therefore calculates everything in terms of money.” This type, in particular, he said, was epitomized “by the Jewish species.” He argued that there was indeed a “spirit of capitalism” that was based on a particular form of rationalism, best seen in the United States and England. Later he was more specific still. “The capitalist spirit in Europe was cultivated by a number of races, each with different characteristics of its own and that, of [these] races, the Trading peoples (Etruscans, Frisians and Jews) may be divided off from those we have termed Heroic…The Scotch, the Jews, the Frisians and Etruscans are trading peoples, the Celts and the Goths heroic people. Since the Jewish spirit is capitalistic, and the English are said to possess the capitalist spirit, they also possess the Jewish spirit.” By Nazi times, in Deutscher Sozialismus (1937), he was able to write: “What we have characterised as the spiri
t of this economic age…is in many respects a manifestation of the Jewish spirit…which dominates our entire era.”36 Since he had been saying this long before Hitler, he came to see himself as the Third Reich’s chief ideologue. The Nazis did not.

  THE “GERMAN LINE” IN SOCIOLOGY

  Jeffrey Herf (1984) characterizes Sombart, along with Ernst Jünger, Oswald Spengler, Hans Freyer, Carl Schmitt, Gottfried Benn, and Martin Heidegger, as one of the main architects of what he terms “reactionary modernism.” The essence of reactionary modernism in Germany was support for industrial development combined with a rejection of liberal democracy, a view that appealed to the Nazi regime. Men like Ernst Jünger and Gottfried Benn were in favor of technological progress and even approved of some modernist aesthetic developments, but they eschewed many of those institutions that would act as checks and balances in political and social affairs. “The rural conditions of a natural, living Gemeinschaft constitute much more desirable conditions of social existence than those of the artificial Gesellschaft.”37 Sombart, in his concept of heroes and traders, aligned himself with such thinking, not keeping much of a distance, as Tönnies tried hard to do.

  Stefan Breuer has identified what he calls a “German” line in sociology. Its main elements are (or were) a “romantic criticism of capitalist rationality, the utility principle, and the lament over the breaking up of community bonds.” He includes Tönnies, Sombart, and even Simmel in this group, though he thinks that Max Weber stands apart. “Weber did not welcome the First World War as a chance for redemption from fragmentation and alienation by means of German heroism and, what seems more important, he defended liberal democracy and its institutions.” More than anyone else, then, Sombart felt the loss of Gemeinschaft. And, more than anyone else, as Herf says, he tried “to identify the guilty party for ruining it.”38