Abstract
At Christmas 1875 the eleven-year-old Max Weber, growing up in Berlin, received Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography with a dedication.
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Notes
- 1.
Benjamin Franklin, Sein Leben von ihm selbst geschrieben. Mit einem Vorwort von Berthold Auerbach und einer historisch-politischen Einleitung von Friedrich Kapp (Stuttgart: Auerbach, 1876). Weber’s copy is in the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Munich.
- 2.
Quoted from the reprint of the introduction in Kapp, Aus und ueber Amerika (Berlin: Springer, 1876), 89.
- 3.
Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958), 50.
- 4.
See my essay “Zur Entstehungs-und Wirkungsgeschichte von Max Webers ‘Protestantischer Ethik’” in Bertram Schefold et al., Max Weber und seine ‘Protestantische Ethik’ (Düsseldorf: Verlag Wirtschaft und Finanzen, 1992), 43–68. In diesem Band Kap. 4.
- 5.
See my essay, “Global Capitalism and Multiethnicity. Max Weber Then and Now,” in Stephen Turner, ed., untitled. New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 1998. For a German version, see “Globaler Kapitalismus und Multiethnizitaät,” in Anton Sterbling and Heinz Zipprian, eds., Max Weber und Osteuropa. Beiträge zur Osteuropaforschung I (Hamburg: Kraemer, 1997). In this volume.
- 6.
Marianne Weber, Max Weber, abb. MW, tr. Harry Zohn (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1988), with a biographical introduction on “Marianne Weber and Her Circle” by myself. See also my essay, “Marianne Weber als liberale Nationalistin,” in Juergen Hess et al., eds., Heidelberg 1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1996), 310–326.
- 7.
See William H. McNeill, “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,” American Historical Review, 91:1 (February 1986): 1–10, also in Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1986).
- 8.
Scott began his literary career with translations from Goethe and Buerger. Robertson translated Lessing’s Education of the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechtes); George Eliot translated David Friedrich Strauss, Carlyle adapted Goethe, and as a student Kingsley also tried his hand at translations.
- 9.
On Christmas 1878 Weber received from his paternal grandparents translations of Scott’s The Talisman (1825) and Ouentin Durvard (1823), which he read with his mother. In the fall of 1878, the fourteen-year-old Max began to learn English privately, since in classical school he was taught only Latin, Greek and French. Somewhat overconfidently, he hoped soon be able to read Shakespeare in the original. Shakespeares’s works in English were another Christmas present. See Weber, Jugendbriefe, abb. JB (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1936), 17, 19. A close family friend was the well-known literary historian and theorist Julian Schmidt (1818–1886), who was also an expert on English literature from Walter Scott to Charles Kingsley. See Lawrence Marsden Price, The Attitude of Gustav Freytag and Julian Schmidt Toward English Literature (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, and Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1915).
- 10.
See my essay, “Weber the Would-Be Englishman: Anglophilia and Family History,” in Hartmut Lehmann and myself, eds., Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic’: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 83–121. For the commercial setting, see Stanley Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain. From the Industrial Revolution to World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
- 11.
See Hertha Marquardt, Henry Crabb Robinson und seine deutschen Freunde (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1964 and 1967), 2 vols.
- 12.
See my essay, “Heidelberg-London-Manchester,” in Hubert Treiber and Karol Sauerland, eds., Heidelberg im Schnittpunkt intellektueller Kreise (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994), 184–209.
- 13.
The theme of “Death in the Victorian Family” has now been extensively treated in the book of the same title by Pat Jalland (New York: Oxford UP, 1996).
- 14.
Letter of Jan. 17, 1877, Deponat Max Weber-Schaefer, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München (BSB), Ana 446.
- 15.
Theodore Parker, Sermons of Theism, Atheism, and The Popular Theology (London: Truebner, 1865), 194–222.
- 16.
Memoir of William Ellery Channing (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee & Co, 1860, 8th ed.), vol. II, 234.
- 17.
William Ellery Channing, “A Discourse Occasioned by the Death of the Rev. Dr. Follen,” Works (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1875), 607–618. Charles Follen (1796–1840), who drowned in Long Island Sound when the “Lexington” blew up, was known in Germany as the radical student leader Karl Follen, who had to flee because of his complicity in Ludwig Sand’s assassination of August von Kotzebue in 1819. He became one of the mediators between German literature and philosophy and New England Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. Channing first became aware of German philosophy and literature through Madame de Stael and Coleridge. He was particularly interested in Kant, Schelling and “the heroic stoicism of Fichte” (see Memoir, vol. II, 95). That the Baumgartens knew Channing’s eulogy of Follen is supported by the fact that Hermann Baumgarten defended Follen’s memory against Heinrich von Treitschke by citing it. See Hermann Baumgarten, Treitschke’s Deutsche Geschichte (Strassburg: Trübner, 1883), 19 f.
- 18.
Letter of July 8, 1884, JB (cited in 9), 120 f., cf. MW (cited in 6), 86.
- 19.
Wilhelm Hennis, “Freiheit durch Assoziation,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jan. 4, 1995.
- 20.
Works (cited in 17), 149. Channing’s homiletics uses the rhetorical tactic of qualifying every assertion in order to anticipate and deflect objections from listener and reader, but after each qualification he reaffirms his main thesis: Not only are natural associations more effective than artificial ones, but “all virtue lies in individual action… in self-determination“. As against the common opinion that only “bad company” is dangerous, Channing insists: “To our apprehension, there is a peril in the influence of both of good and bad. What many of us have chiefly to dread from society is, not that we shall acquire a positive character of vice, but that it will impose on us a negative character; that we shall live and die passive beings” (Works, 142). After enumerating arguments in favor of association, Channing formulates his own critical position: “In our judgment, the influences of society at present tend strongly to excess, and especially menace that individuality of character for which they can yield no adequate compensation” (140).
- 21.
Letter of Dec. 6, 1885, JB (cited in 9), 191f., cf. MW (cited in 6), 89.
- 22.
Their common grandmother Emilie Fallenstein had probably met Robertson. In the summer of 1846 Robertson was for nine weeks acting as pastor of the English Church in Heidelberg. Henry Crabb Robinson was visiting, and Emilie Souchay Fallenstein had just settled among her Anglo-German relatives. In 1859 Robinson gave Emilie in London two volumes of Robertson’s sermons to take back to Heidelberg for Luise Benecke. A grandchild of Eduard Souchay, Emilie’s brother, the Baroness Helene von Dungern (1865–1953) edited a German volume Sozialpolitische Reden (1895) from Robertson’s Literary Remains (1876). On German theological literature to which Otto Baumgarten introduced Max Weber, see Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “Max Weber und die protestantische Theologie seiner Zeit,” Zeitschrift für Religions-und Geistesgeschichte, 39:2 (1987): 122–147, and “The German Theological Sources and Protestant Church Politics,” in Lehmann and Roth, op. cit., 27–49.
- 23.
Otto Baumgarten, Meine Lebensgeschichte (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1929), 63. See “The Sympathy of Christ” (Nov. 4, 1849), Sermons (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1861), vol. I, 102–118. Adolf Harnack wrote an introduction to a late German translation, Religiöse Reden (1890).
- 24.
See Otto Baumgarten, Carlyle und Goethe (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1906) and Paul Hensel, Thomas Carlyle (Stuttgart: Fromann, 1901). Charles Frederick Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought: 1819–1834 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934) criticized Baumgarten for exaggerating Goethe’s impact on Carlyle and Hensel and for carrying “the parallel between Carlyle and Fichte to unwarrantable limits” (249 and 292).
- 25.
See Rita Aldenhoff, “Max Weber and the Evangelical-Social Congress,” in Wolfgang Mommsen and Juergen Osterhammel, eds., Max Weber and His Contemporaries (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 193–202; Harry Liebersohn, Religion and Industrial Society: The Protestant Social Congress in Wilhelmine Germany (Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1986); Gangolf Hübinger, Kulturprotestantismus und Politik (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1994).
- 26.
Baumgarten, “Die Bedeutung des englischen Einflusses für die deutsche praktische Theologie,” Zeitschrift für praktische Theologie, 15 (1893): 242. See also Baumgarten’s encyclopedia entries on Carlyle, Eliot and Robertson in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, first and sec. edition.
- 27.
Baumgarten, Meine Lebensgeschichte (cited in 23), 132; Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, II/5, Briefe 1906–1908, eds. M. Rainer Lepsius and Wolfgang Mommsen with Birgit Rudhard and Manfred Schoen (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1990), 32 f., letter of Feb. 5, 1906.
- 28.
Letter of Aug. 23, 1890, BSB (see 14), Ana 446.
- 29.
Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, 1/4, Landarbeiterfrage, Nationalstaat und Volkswirtschaftspolitik, ed. Wolfgang Mommsen with Rita Aldenhoff (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1993), 616 f.
- 30.
Letter of Oct. 15, 1896, Max Weber Nachlass, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Berlin, Rep. 92, Nr. 30:3. Hausrath was worried that Weber’s association with the Christian-Social movement could weigh against his call to Heidelberg.
- 31.
Gerhart von Schulze-Gaevernitz, Britischer Imperialismus und englischer Freihandel (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1906).
- 32.
Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958), 261.
- 33.
Lord Rosebery, “Cromwell,” Miscellanies (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1921), 83, 86, 97 ff.
- 34.
John Morley, Recollections (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 49. See Timothy Lang, The Victorians and the Stuart Heritage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
- 35.
John R. Seeley, The Expansion of England, ed. with an introduction by John Gross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
- 36.
In 1936 Marianne Weber answered a query by Eric Voegelin by recalling that Weber’s “relationship to Christianity had been greatly attenuated in the second half of his life, although every religious phenomenon interested him” (“Max Webers Beziehungen zum Christentum waren in der zweiten Hälfte seines Lebens stark verblasst – allerdings bewegte ihn jede religiöse Erscheinung und Vorstellungswelt.”). At issue was Weber’s interest in Kierkegaard, whose philosophy of marriage and love Max and Marianne discussed in their troubled early married days. See a letter of Feb. 5, 1936, in Eric Voegelin, Die Größe Max Webers, Peter Opitz, ed. (Munich: Fink, 1995), 60.
- 37.
Letter of Feb. 5, 1906, see note 27.
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Roth, G. (2021). The Young Max Weber: Anglo-American Religious Influences and Protestant Social Reform in Germany. In: Sigmund, S. (eds) Kapitalismus, Herrschaft und Max Weber. Ausgewählte Aufsätze. Studien zum Weber-Paradigma. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-33939-5_14
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