The Power of the State and Dignity of the Academic Calling in Imperial Germany

THE WRITINGS OF MAX WEBER ON UNIVERSITY PROBLEMS
by Edward Shils (1974)

MAX WEBER was born in 1864 and died in 1920. At the beginning of his career he worked in ancient and medieval economic and legal history. He began his academic career as Privatdozent at the University of Berlin where he taught law, In 1893 he became professor of economics at the University of Freiburg and in 1896 was called to Heidelberg again as professor of economics in succession to Karl Knies. He had to renounce teaching on grounds of ill-health in 1903 and did not resume again until 1918. In spite of his illness, he was able to accomplish a prodigious amount of research in the history of Western and Asian religions, and in social, economic and legal history, as well as a large investigation into the industrial working class. He also edited the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, which from his assumption of editorship in 1904 until its closure in 1933 was one of the leading social science periodicals in the world. In addition to this he wrote a great deal about contemporary politics and during the First World War he began to take a more active part in politics. He was, although a nationalist, a severe critic of the emperor and of programs of territorial annexation.

During the period of his retirement from teaching he continued to live in Heidelberg and played a central part in the extraordinarily rich intellectual life there. It was also during the period of his retirement from teaching that he wrote most of the works which were posthumously published as Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, 2nd edn., 3 vols., (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1922-^.23); Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschafts-lehre (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1922); Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 2 vols., (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1922); Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik- (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1924) and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1924). On these rest his reputation as one of the very greatest figures in the history of the social sciences. His range of erudition was universal, his analytical penetration and scope were equal to his erudition. Although his research dealt with ancient Israel, China, India, Rome and the Reformation, his pervasive concern was with the character, origin and fate of modern Western society.

 

He was a liberal who regarded Bismarck - whom he also admired for his great political talent and achievements - as the source of Germany's political incapacity. He thought that the long and artful ascendancy of Bismarck had had disastrous consequences for Germany because he had crushed the incipient civility which had existed and never permitted any new civility to grow up again. Lacking a sense of civil self-esteem and a sense of responsibility for their own actions, the German people showed no inclination or capacity to maintain their independence in the face of political leaders of charismatic genius and a powerful bureaucracy.

 

When he contemplated the German universities of his own time, Max Weber saw a similar phenomenon. He thought that the members of the academic profession in Germany were losing the sense of the dignity of their academic role. As in the political sphere, they were being manipulated by a powerful figure, Friedrich Althoff, who held all the strings in his hand, who dazzled, outwitted, seduced and corrupted the academic profession. Weber thought that German university professors deceived themselves about the narrow constraints within which their academic freedom existed, and that they had no insight into the enfeebling influence which their readiness to bow before the prestige and power of the imperial monarchy and its political and administrative agents was having on their traditions.

 

Max Weber made no predictions about the conduct of German professors in the period of adversity which followed his death. Preoccupied as he was in the last years of his life with the completion of his great works - which were left incomplete - with the public disorder of German life after the defeat, and with his own re-commenced teaching activities (1918 in Vienna and 1919 in Munich), he wrote nothing more on the themes of his earlier journalistic publications on the universities and the state. Nevertheless the capitulation of so many German academic figures to the Nazi regime may be plausibly interpreted as evidence of the correctness of Max Weber's diagnosis regarding the complaisance of the German academic profession in its eager subservience to the authority of the state and the erosion of its moral rectitude.

 

Most of Weber's writings on the problems of the German university in the face of political and bureaucratic authority were published in the Frankfurter Zeitung. These and his four other short occasional articles have never been reprinted or collected and none of them has ever been translated. They have been assembled and translated for publication [here], not just because they are rare minor works of one of the great intellects of modern times but rather because they state, albeit in a particular context and in controversial form, certain fundamental principles of the liberal conception of university autonomy and academic freedom. Max Weber's principles embodied, around two thirds of a century ago, in these brief polemic articles, merit the attention and reflection of [today’s] readers.

 

In addition to these more occasional polemics, Max Weber dealt with university problems in several of his other writings. In 1917 he published a long paper on the relationship between evaluations or judgments of value and empirical or factual knowledge. It was the outcome of his effort over many years to make economists aware that their recommendations for particular policies did not arise solely from their economic-scientific studies but were based on certain ethical and political postulates which he wished them to acknowledge. In the introductory part or this paper, he examined the question of whether university teachers of the social sciences should present their own ethical and political evaluations in the course of their teaching, and the conditions and forms in which it would be legitimate for them to do so. I have reproduced the pertinent section of this paper because it expresses Max Weber's view that the university teacher must, if he wishes to express his views about authority and the policies it should follow, take the responsibility for doing so on himself and not allow it to appear that it is unquestionably "given " by the "facts" and hence lies outside his own moral responsibility.

 

In 1919 he delivered a lecture to an association of students of the University of Munich on "Science as a Vocation". This is one of the deepest and most moving confessions of faith in the value of science and scholarship coupled with a tragic awareness of their limits. The first part of this talk deals with the risks of the academic career and it leads into the discussion of the grounds of the pursuit of knowledge. I have reproduced these pages of Wissenschaft als Beruf in this section […] because it complements the argument, put forward in his journalistic writings, that an individual sense of responsibility and corporate self-respect are the pre-conditions of fruitful intellectual accomplishment and the university's discovery and performance of its proper function in society.

E. S.

Reference

Edward Shils, “Introductory Note,” in idem., The Power of the State and the Dignity of the Academic Calling in Imperial Germany: The Writings of Max Weber on University Problems (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1974), pages 1-3. Reprinted from Minerva vol. 11, no. 4 (October 1973).

 

FHEAP Comments:
Here is a thought worth singling out:

“Weber thought that German university professors deceived themselves about the narrow constraints within which their academic freedom existed, and that they had no insight into the enfeebling influence which their readiness to bow before the prestige and power of the imperial monarchy and its political and administrative agents was having on their traditions.”

 

Self-deception of this kind, of course, is not limited to the university professors of German universities, but can be found across the universities of the world. Nor is it limited to academic institutions, but can be found to one degree or another in all bureaucratic organizations. One has just to think of the collapse of Enron and World Comm, even the more recent invasion of Iraq, as examples of the kind of cognitive distortions that are possible. Easily recognizable to social scientists, these kinds of self-delusion go by different names, for example, Groupthink, as studied by Irving Janis, Barry Staw and other social psychologists interested in the cognitive effects of commitment and escalation of commitment phenomena. More recently, sociologists studying the cognitive aspect of organizational culture and institutional cultures have been resorting to social network theory to better understand these conditions. Especially fruitful in this context is Stephan Fuchs’ extension of Mary Douglas’ high grid/high group paradigm to include the "person-less" sociology of Niklas Luhmann. (See Randall Collins book review of Stephan Fuchs, Against Essentialism [Harvard Press, 2001].)

 

As Shils points out, “the capitulation of so many German academic figures to the Nazi regime may be plausibly interpreted as evidence of the correctness of Max Weber's diagnosis regarding the complaisance of the German academic profession in its eager subservience to the authority of the state and the erosion of its moral rectitude,” – transgressions that are hardly limited to Germany or to academic institutions!