Abstract
This is a revised and expanded edition of a book which was published in Germany in 2009 and in the United States in 2008 (Dreijmanis, 2008). For the German edition, Professor Dreijmanis’s introduction was translated by Dirk Siepmann, though for the purposes of this review he kindly provided me with a copy of his English original.
We all read Weber’s classic essays on scholarship and politics as vocations, which are included in this volume, but even specialists are unlikely to be familiar with most of the other texts here. They are concerned essentially with professional matters, including in particular the foundation of the German Sociological Association in 1910, but political issues loom as well, in what we have since learned to call the Berufsverbot for leftists and the states’ role in professorial appointments.
Perhaps the most striking piece is Weber’s blistering critique in the Frankfurter Zeitung (1908) of the reality behind the slogan of Lehrfreiheit (freedom to teach) at German universities. This amounts at best, he says, to the freedom of established professors, while access to the professoriate is restricted by political and religious prejudice. Weber cites the case of Robert Michels, then at Marburg, who, knowing that his membership of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) meant that he had no chance of obtaining a habilitation there or anywhere else in Prussia, made informal inquiries in Jena (Saxe-Weimar) and was advised to forget it there as well. Michels went instead to Turin.
As usual in such stories, however, the secondary elaboration is more significant, and Weber spares no detail of it. His brother Alfred had mentioned the Jena episode at a meeting attended by a Professor Fischer from Marburg, who assumed Alfred Weber was referring to his university and retorted that there were other reasons why Michels could not have expected a habilitation in Marburg and had ‘shaken off the dust of the fatherland’. Michels heard about this and asked Fischer for clarification, receiving a letter which cited the ‘ostentatious’ character of his socialism and his failure to baptize his children. Weber concludes that it would be better not to speak of academic freedom in Germany as long as it continues to be limited by considerations of political and religious respectability – something which, he suggests, may be ‘inseparable from the dynastic character of our state’ (p. 77).
The states’ role in professorial appointments, selecting from a list of candidates proposed by the university and sometimes imposing its own choice, is the topic of a number of other articles and letters in this collection. It continues, of course, to be a feature of the academic scene in the Federal Republic: a friend once told me he had been warned (wrongly, as it turned out) that as a liberal he would have no luck at a university in a state governed by the SPD. Weber refers repeatedly to the Prussian case and the role of Friedrich Althoff (1839–1908) in the Ministry. Despite Althoff’s substantial support for the universities, and at one point for Weber himself, as he acknowledges (pp. 130, 136–139), he rejects the corrupting influence of the ‘Althoff system’, the fact that the intrusion of non-academic considerations in appointments, which elsewhere might be seen as an occasional abuse, is ‘official doctrine in Prussia’ (p. 120)
What about America? As has been noted by, among others, Lawrence Scaff (whose book Weber in America [Scaff, 2011] was reviewed recently in this journal [Shean, 2012]), Weber’s 1904 trip to the United States made a great impression on him, and he gave a substantial speech to the University Teachers’ Association in 1911 comparing the German and US academic systems. ‘America has its Althoff at every university’ (p. 128) in the form of the president. The difference is that there are lots of them, each behaving differently, and also with an incentive to retain and promote their faculty, who are less mobile than German academics are required to be. ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1917) begins, of course, with a German/US comparison.
Whatever other reasons Weber had for banging on about value freedom, the fact that the political cards were so unevenly stacked in Germany is a major motivation. He states his position in the article on Lehrfreiheit in relation to the second congress of the University Teachers’ Association and returns to it in a contribution to the third (pp. 84–86): ‘Value judgements do not belong on the rostrum’ (p. 85). It is not, as the nationalist press had been suggesting, that he wants to fill academic posts with social democrats; that would be a disaster. But they should have the right to be considered. The theme recurs in Weber’s speech to the first conference of the German Sociological Association in 1910. The association is unpartisan (‘parteienlos’) and rejects any ‘propaganda’ for ‘practical’ or, as we would say, normative ideas (p.90).
Professor Dreijmanis has provided a valuable service in making these texts available in a single volume. His introduction, which begins with a Jungian interpretation of Weber’s personality, covers general aspects of his academic, political and academic-political work. As he notes, had Weber ‘lived long enough to experience the hyperinflation of 1923, the mass unemployment of the early 1930s, and national socialist rule, there is little doubt that he would have become again politically active’. The point is well taken: we should remember that Weber’s brother Alfred, only four years younger than Max, lived until 1958. It is perhaps a pity that Dreijmanis, who has published substantially on the academic scene, did not devote more of his introduction to this, though he provides useful references to other writers who have dealt with the ‘Althoff system’ and related matters. The footnotes are useful, but more would have been welcome.