Weber and Toennies: Comparative Sociology in Historical Perspective [1 ed.] 1560001348, 9781560001348

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Perspectives on Max Weber
1 Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences
2 Ideal-Type Theory: Max Weber’s Concept and Some of Its Derivations
3 Notes on The Sociology of Religion by Max Weber
4 A Review: Mitzman’s Iron Cage
Part II: Comparative Approach to Toennies
5 Toennies and Marx: Evaluation
6 Toennies and Spencer: Evaluation
7 Toennies and Weber: Comparison
8 Toennies and Durkheim
9 Toennies and Social Change
10 Toennies, Durkheim, and Weber
11 Toennies in America
12 A Research Note on Phenomenology and Symbolic Interactionism
Part III: Essays in Historical Sociology Pure, Applied, and Empirical
13 Historical Sociology: What It Is and What It Is Not
14 Vico and Historical Sociology
15 Starting Points in Sociology: Hobbes, Toennies, Vico
16 The Historical Sociology of Cities: A Critical Review
17 How Cities Grew . . .
18 The Rise of Civilization as a Paradigm of Social Change
Part IV: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity
19 Religion and Nationality
20 Adolph Fischhof and the Problem of the Reconciliation of Nationalities
21 Nature and Varieties of Ethnicity
22 The Mediterranean and Caribbean Regions: A Comparison in Race and Culture Contacts
Appendix: Rudolf Hess; or, An Introduction to the Emergence of German Geopolitics: An Autobiographical Account
Index

Citation preview

Weber and Toennies

Weber and Toennies Comparative Sociology

in Historical Perspective Werner J. Cahnman Edited with an introduction by

Joseph B. Maier, Judith Marcus, and Zoltán Tarr

Transaction Publishers New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)

First paperback printing 2016 Copyright © 1995 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, 10 Corporate Place South, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854. www. transactionpub.com This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 93-26953 ISBN: 978-1-56000-134-8 (cloth); 978-1-4128-5708-6 (paper) eBook: 978-1-4128-4125-2 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cahnman, Werner Jacob, 1902–1980 Weber and Toennies : comparative sociology in historical perspective / Werner J. Cahnman; edited and with an introduction by Joseph B. Maier, Judith Marcus, Zoltán Tarr. p. cm. Reprints of articles originally published 1943–1980. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1-56000-134-8 (cloth) 1. Historical sociology. 2. Weber, Max, 1864–1920. 3. Tönnies, Ferdinand, 1855–1936. 4. Sociology—Comparative method. I. Maier, Joseph, 1911–. II. Marcus, Judith, 1929–. III. Tarr, Zoltán. IV. Title. V. Title: Weber and Tönnies. HM104.C35 1994 301’.0722—dc20 93-26953 CIP

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

xi

Part I Perspectives on Max Weber 1

2

Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences

3

Ideal-Type Theory: Max Weber’s Concept and Some of Its Derivations

29

3

Notes on The Sociology of Religion by Max Weber

41

4

A Review: Mitzman’s Iron Cage

47

Part II Comparative Approach to Toennies 5

Toennies and Marx: Evaluation

53

6

Toennies and Spencer: Evaluation

57

7

Toennies and Weber: Comparison

61

8

Toennies and Durkheim

67

9

Toennies and Social Change

69

10

Toennies, Durkheim, and Weber

89

11

Toennies in America

105

12

A Research Note on Phenomenology and Symbolic Interactionism

127

Part III

Essays in Historical Sociology Pure, Applied, and Empirical

13

Historical Sociology: What It Is and What It Is Not

137

14

Vico and Historical Sociology

151

15

Starting Points in Sociology: Hobbes, Toennies, Vico

159

16

The Historical Sociology of Cities: A Critical Review

181

17

How Cities Grew . . .

191

18

The Rise of Civilization as a Paradigm of Social Change

221

Part IV

Religion, Race, and Ethnicity

19

Religion and Nationality

245

20

Adolph Fischhof and the Problem of the Reconciliation of Nationalities

255

21

Nature and Varieties of Ethnicity

269

22

The Mediterranean and Caribbean Regions: A Comparison in Race and Culture Contacts

289

Appendix: Rudolf Hess; or, An Introduction to the Emergence of German Geopolitics: An Autobiographical Account

299

Index

317

Acknowledgments The editors gratefully acknowledge the following publishers and publications for permission to use previously published materials. “Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences,” in Werner J. Cahnman and Alvin Boskoff, eds., Sociology and History. Theory and Research (New York: The Free Press, 1964), pp. 103–127. “Ideal Type Theory: Max Weber’s Concept and Some of Its Derivations,” in Sociological Quarterly, 6 (Summer 1965): 268–280. This is a revision of a paper read at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, September 1964. “Notes on The Sociology of Religion, by Max Weber,” in The Reconstructionist, 30 (June, 1964): 26–30. “A Review: Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: A Historical Interpretation of Max Weber,” in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 14, no. 2 (April 1978): 373–375. “Toennies and Marx. Evaluation and Excerpts,” in Werner J. Cahnman ed., Ferdinand Toennies: A New Evaluation (Leiden: E.J. Brill. 1973), pp. 219–223. “Toennies and Spencer. Evaluation and Excerpts,” Ibid., pp. 207–211. “Toennies and Weber. Comparison and Excerpts,” Ibid., pp. 257–262. “Toennies and Durkheim. An Exchange of Reviews,” Ibid., pp. 239–240. “Toennies, Durkheim and Weber,” in Social Science Information, 15, no. 6 (1976): 839–853. “Toennies and Social Change,” in Cahnman, Ferdinand Toennies, pp. 103–124.

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“Toennies in America,” in History and Theory, 16, no. 2 (1977): 147–167. A version of this essay was delivered at the Eighth World Congress of Sociology, Toronto, August 20, 1974. “A Research Note on Phenomenology and Symbolic Interactionism,” in Cahnman, Ferdinand Toennies, pp. 291–298. “Historical Sociology: What It Is and What It Is Not,” in Baydia N. Varma, ed., The New Social Sciences (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), pp. 107–122. “Vico and Historical Sociology,” in Social Research, 43, no. 4 (Winter 1976): 826–836. “Hobbes, Toennies, Vico: Starting Points in Sociology,” in Buford Rhea, ed., The Future of the Sociological Classics (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1981), pp. 16–38. “The Historical Sociology of Cities: A Critical Review,” in Social Forces, 45, no. 2 (December 1966): 155–161. “The Significance of Urban History” (chap. I), “The Historical Typology of Cities” (chap. II), “Social Stratification in Cities” (chap. III) and “The Location and Ecology of Cities” (chap. IV) in Cahnman and Jean Comhaire, How Cities Grew: The Historical Sociology of Cities (Madison, NH: Florham Park Press, 1959), pp. 1–39. “The Rise of Civilization as a Paradigm of Social Change,” in Cahnman and Boskoff, Sociology and History, pp. 537–559. This essay is an enlarged and revised version of a paper, “Culture, Civilization, and Social Change,” in The Sociological Quarterly, 3, no. 2 (April 1962): 93–106. “Religion and Nationality,” in Cahnman and Boskoff, Sociology and History, pp. 271–280. This was read in its original form at the Fourteenth Annual Festival of Music and Fine Arts, Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn, April 1943. It was reprinted with permission from the American Journal of Sociology, 49, no. 6 (May 1944). “Adolph Fischhof and the Problem of the Reconciliation of Nationalities,” in East European Quarterly, 12, no. 1 (1979): 43–56. “Nature and Varieties of Ethnicity,” in P. Saran and E. Eames, eds., The New Ethnics (New York: Praeger, 1980), pp. 5–28.

viii

Acknowledgments

“The Mediterranean and Caribbean Regions: A Comparison in Race and Culture Contact,” in Social Forces, 22, no. 2 (December 1943): 209–214. The original paper was read before the Twenty-second Meeting of the Society for Social Research, Chicago, August 1943. “Rudolf Hess or an Introduction to the Emergence of German Geopolitics,” in several unpublished manuscript forms. Edited version.

ix

Introduction In 1964, Werner J. Cahnman and Alvin Boskoff presented a collection of essays to their sociological peers under the title Sociology and History: Theory and Research. In the introductory essay, the two editors explained what they thought of the sociologist’s approach to history and made clear the principles upon which they selected the papers for this path-breaking volume.1 The book was the result of their recognition of the complex relationship between history and sociology and of the need to examine the actual or potential interdependence between them. In their opinion, both disciplines were ill-served by the mordant humor that asserted: “Sociology is history with the hard work left out; history is sociology with the brains left out.” Cahnman and Boskoff stated the obvious when they wrote that “the difference between historians and sociologists would not be in the methods employed but in the kinds of questions asked.” The sociologist’s objective was defined in a simple and hardly revolutionary way as the following: “If it is desirable and possible to attain some measure of understanding of specific events and related periods, it is also desirable and possible to discover the extent to which explanations applicable to one situation may be extended to comparable situations from other times and places.”2 Werner Cahnman himself never accepted the compartmentalized thinking of “history here, sociology there”; his special talent, sensitivity to the “historically relevant and sociologically significant,” marked his lifework.3 Born in Munich on 30 September 1902 into an upper-middle-class Jewish family, Werner Jacob Cahnman went on to study economics, history, political science, and sociology first in Berlin and then in Munich (1921–27); his doctoral dissertation at the University of Munich dealt with “Economic Pessimism and the Ricardian System of Economic Thought.”4 He wrote it under the sponsorship of Professor Otto von Zwiedineck-Suedenhorst, an Austrian aristocrat and pan-Germanist, a noted exponent of Sozialpolitik and successor of Max Weber at the university, whose thinking derived in equal parts from the historical and the marginal utility schools in economics. Only Professor Jacob Strieder, “the diligent historian of early capitalistic development,” had an equally lasting influence on Cahnman’s intellectual development.5 xi

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But there were other, even earlier exposures that put their indelible stamp on Cahnman’s views, scholarship and preoccupations. It was from his father, an inveterate storyteller, that he inherited “historical enthusiasm,” Jewishness as a matter of kinship and Gemeinschaft, the perspective of participant observer, and the decisive importance of the enduring forms of human existence, such as people and family. As recounted in his “Methodological Note” to a typological study of “Village and Small Town Jews in Germany,” Werner Cahnman collected many family-related data from early youth, partly by consulting archives and partly by interviewing older relatives.6 And as his parents’ house in Munich was a meeting place for enlightened and well-educated people of diverse persuasions and professions, young Cahnman was exposed to discussions of all possible issues and trends, from Zionism to socialism, from ethics to aesthetics, from philosophy to women’s problems. He read all there was of Herzl’s Zionist writings, of Martin Buber’s, Leo Baeck’s, and Franz Rosenzweig’s works; he even began an excursion into Jewish demography, into the history of Jewish settlements. An early paper, entitled “Judentum und Volksgemeinschaft,” displayed Cahnman’s characteristic combination of elements—historiography, romantic philosophy, and Jewish ethnicity.7 Already then, Cahnman’s interest in the tribulations of the Jewish diaspora was combined with abiding interest in present-day concerns; he began to collect data on conversion, intermarriage, declining birthrate, and other matters relating to the continuity and vitality of the Jewish community. Cahnman often referred to the period following his university studies as his “social worker” existence. First he became a research associate of the Berlin Chamber of Industry and Commerce (1928–29), followed by a research position at the Institute of World Economics in Kiel (1929–30). The greatest challenge, however, came when in 1930 he was offered the position of Syndikus for Bavaria of the Centralverein, the major defense organization of German Jewry. He served in this capacity from 1930 to 1933 when the organization’s offices were ransacked and ultimately closed in the wake of the Machtergreifung. He continued his work, which had become illegal, until he was imprisoned for a short time in 1934; Cahnman attributed his release to the intervention of his one-time fellow student, Rudolf Hess. Although he published several studies, Cahnman worked fulltime for the beleaguered Jewish community of the southern region. He collected and saved community records, kept statistics, battled German officials for shoring up community resources, and became a liaison man: in 1937, he visited Austria illegally in order to meet with religious leaders and scholars, and went on to Palestine to meet others. In Munich, he organized a retraining of young Jews who lost their jobs, counseled others on emigration and participated in securing food supply to the community. In November 1938, Cahnman became an unwitting participant observer when he was sent to the Dachau concentration camp. After two months he was released on the condition that he emigrate. xii

Introduction

Cahnman left Germany for good on June 20, 1939 and after a short stay in England, emigrated to the United States in April 1940.8 Werner Cahnman’s American experience began at the Brewster Free Academy in Wolfboro, New Hampshire, in a summer seminar for foreign academics where he encountered Herbert A. Miller, a colleague of Robert Park at the University of Chicago. After considering Cahnman’s “Jewish, Bavarian, German Austrian and near Eastern antecedents,” Miller designated him a “race and culture specialist in sociology,” and recommended him as a “visiting Ph.D.” to the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, so that he could “become acquainted with American concerns and methods in sociology,” especially with “the problem of the American Negro.”9 When Robert E. Park came to Chicago on a visit from Fisk University, he found in Cahnman an intellectual equal with whom he could discuss Toennies and Franz Oppenheimer, the geopolitical school in Germany, nationality problems in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire (nowadays again dominating the international scene with the Balkan events), the ecological approach in sociology as well as Cahnman’s experience under the Nazis, and, consequently, “the Jewish problem.” Soon, Park secured for Cahnman an appointment at Fisk and assigned to him the research project, “Race Relations Outside the United States,” with a concentration on the Caribbean area and North Africa—but with no clear research goals. No matter, Cahnman’s initial interest in and talent for comparative research produced a wealth of data—and innumerable discussions with Park on their interpretation. During his stay at Fisk, Cahnman wrote five scholarly papers, four of which “could not have been written without [his] association with Park.”10 Already forty years old when he met Park, at which age one usually has solidified one’s intellectual position, Cahnman said that Park’s powerful personality and his sociological standpoint made him revise and review his stand and compelled him to “incorporate impulses that stem from him with habits of thought” acquired in his youth.11 Cahnman had also discovered Park’s comparative-historical inclinations during many of their discussions about the “Jewish problem.” Despite some disagreements, Cahnman could relate to Park’s expressed opinion that “American sociologists failed to understand the importance of the data of Jewish experience for the understanding of general social processes.” Park thought, namely, that the Jews are the “seismograph that indicates the larger rumblings of history,” even using demographic data to prove his point.12 In addition, Park used Simmel’s essays “The Stranger” and “The Metropolis and Mental Life” to compare it with other “prototypes” of the “marginal man,” such as the Jewish intellectual and the mulatto, “especially the educated mulatto.” Park’s interest certainly coincided with that of Cahnman in this regard. Cahnman points out the interesting fact that this preoccupation of Park had had a subterranean influence in sociology: it was Park who suggested that Everett V. Stonequist write his dissertation on the “marginal man” concept.13 xiii

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Cahnman also recalled his turning into a “Chicago sociologist,” very near to Everett Hughes, and something of an anthropologist through Robert Redfield. He also met Louis Wirth but they never developed a warm relationship in spite of their common interest in things Jewish. This was due to their opposing perspectives on ethnicity in general and Jewish ethnicity in particular. While Cahnman maintained a strong survivalist perspective, “protecting the survival of ethnic groups from both normative and empirical viewpoints,” Wirth insisted on a strong assimilationist outlook.14 After teaching sociology at Fisk and Vanderbilt Universities between 1943 and 1945, followed by a short stretch at the University of Atlanta, it was Wirth who recommended him for a research associate position at the National Jewish Welfare Board beginning in 1946. This proved to be a mixed blessing: Cahnman spoke of his being “relegated to an academic backwater.” In those trying years, he recalled, it was the scholarly solidarity and friendship of such Jewish academics as Salo Baron and Mark Wischnitzer, which sustained him. Thanks to the intervention of the former, the Journal of Jewish Studies accepted Cahnman’s paper “The Decline of the Munich Jewish Community” (between 1933 and 1938), which contained the sets of data he had brought with him upon his escape from Nazi Germany with the intent not to let that once flourishing Jewish community go under without a trace.15 Being relegated to the “academic backwater” did not deter Cahnman from trying out his comparative-historical approach on the most diverse sociological, political, geopolitical issues, or on theoretical as well as actual considerations. A sampling of his writings between 1943 and 1955, published both in academic and general interest journals, are illustrative: “The Mediterranean and Caribbean Regions—A Comparison in Race and Culture Contacts” Social Forces, 1943); “A Regional Approach to German-Jewish History” (Jewish Social Studies, 1943); “Concepts of Geopolitics” (ASR, 1943); “Conflict Patterns in the Near East” and “Theories of Anti-Semitism” (The Chicago Jewish Forum, 1945 and 1948); “France in Algeria” (The Review of Politics, 1945); “The Italians in America” (Jewish Frontier, 1946); “Outline of a Theory of Area Studies” (Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1948); “Frontiers between East and West in Europe” (Geographical Society, 1949); “Negroes and Jews” (Youth and Nation, 1945); “Attitudes of Minority Youth: A Methodological Introduction” (ASR, 1949). Recognizing his aptitude of combining vast historical knowledge, sociopolitical awareness, and shrewd sizing up of alternatives, there were many Jewish scholars, editors, and organizational leaders who invited Cahnman to come to their meetings, contribute to their journals, and use his life experience (as well as contacts) to find solutions to present-day concerns.16 In his own words, Cahnman found his “home” in American Jewish life, when he was asked to join the editorial board of The Reconstructionist, although he could never be considered a bona fide reconstructionist. He remained faithful

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to the magazine until the end of his life, attended all the board meetings and published many articles in the journal.17 In the remaining two decades of his life, Werner Cahnman found his proper place in academia. He was first appointed as a lecturer in sociology at Hunter College (1956–59) and then at Yeshiva University (1958–62). He recalled that he was “rescued for sociology” when the then chairman of the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University, Joseph B. Maier, brought him to Rutgers in 1961. He retired as a full professor in 1968. Although highly respected among his colleagues, he never did become part of the “inner circle” of that faculty either. “He was too fastidious in his ideals and standards, too set in his customs and habits, too German, too Jewish, too much himself,” according to Maier, his close friend and Rutgers mentor.18 Thus, his preoccupation with the conceptual clarification of the term “stranger” was by no means accident and mirrored his fate as a wanderer between worlds and cultures and as a mediator between them. Time and again, he treated the concept as used by Toennies, Brentano, and last but not least, by Simmel, himself a German Jew, to whom the Jews of Europe were the most striking example of the stranger. Frequently, Cahnman engaged in heated, even cantankerous discussions about the term, that is, its proper interpretation. He argued for the validity of the term Vermittler, and against that of the term pariah, used sociologically by Weber and psychologically by Hannah Arendt, as simply not applicable in the case of the Jews of Europe. Cahnman elaborated on this concept in his 1974 essay, “Pariahs, Strangers, and Court Jews,” partly in response to an article by Lewis Coser.19 As was his wont, Cahnman poses the question “as to how and to what extent sociological concepts are applicable to historical reality.” Even within the limitations of a short paper, he touches upon the concepts of pariahs, Parayan, Pariavolk and so on in their respective cultures, ranging from India to the Greek Millet, the situation of the “guest people” in antiquity and the Middle Ages, culminating in the discussion of the “civil improvement of the Jews” in Europe since the eighteenth century. After rejecting the approach that amounts to a “sociology with the hard work left out,” Cahnman spells out his kind of historical sociology: “The relations between Jewish subjects and Gentile sovereigns are part of the entire complex of Jewish-Gentile relations and must be pursued throughout the length and breadth of European history.”20 Cahnman presented his overview up to the point of the Nazi party-state, which declared the stranger, the outsider an implacable foe. As a reflection of his self-understanding, however, he remarked that the stranger, the “marginal man,” can be a neighbor, friend, helper, and healer” if “he is permitted to be an intermediary,” a Vermittler.21 Cahnman always thought of himself as an “intermediary.” Such considerations informed his last, large-scale work, Jews and Gentiles. From a research trip to Israel, he brought back much archival data for his ongoing project and

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succeeded in finishing the manuscript before his death.22 Describing his project, he gave a blueprint of pursuing comparative historical sociological research. The account, while following a historical sequence, is sociological in conception. The question is whether patterns are recognizable that are common to all, or almost all, ages and places in which Jewish history has been enacted. At the same time, while such general patterns may be recognizable, the additional question arises as to the modifications and combinations of patterns which must be assumed to have occurred. Thus, the story reaches from Roman antiquity over the Middle Ages and the era of emancipation to Hitler and beyond to the present American and Israeli scene, both basic similarities and varying dissimilarities may be discerned.23 During his tenure at Rutgers University, Werner Cahnman engaged not only in varied scholarly but also in professional activities. His creative work was unique in that it was a multidisciplinary enterprise, combining knowledge gained from economics, history, sociology, history of ideas, philosophy, and Judaic thought, moving both at the macro-historical as well as the microempirical, social science level. But in the years of his last period (1960s-late 1970s), he crossed the boundary for what had until then been his chosen areas within sociology. To be sure, the historical perspective was always apparent in his earlier writings but it now emerged as an even greater, more systematic concern in sociology. He indeed marked the way of a new sociology “that steers its course between the Scylla of rigid generalization and the Charybdis of sheer empiricism.”24 Professionally, Cahnman charted a new way for sociology as a founding member of the first Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. Thus, his activities and work, in many ways, were a precursor to a new direction within the discipline; it is ironic that when within the ASA the “Comparative Historical Sociology” Section was established in 1982 (with two of the coeditors of the present volume, Judith Marcus and Zoltán Tarr as cofounders and section officers), it was assumed to be the first such section ever. The fact that in its first year the total membership climbed over 500 showed the readiness for new vistas. Even more significant was the publication (with Alvin Boskoff ) of the seminal volume, Sociology and History, in 1964.25 As was noted in a review in the American Journal of Sociology, the volume was issued from the interests expressed in the sessions “Sociology and History,” at the annual meetings of the ASA, and is a “symptom of a welcome historical change in our discipline.”26 Together with another collection on social sciences, the volume was even reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review (January 24, 1965) by C. Vann Woodward of Yale University. As Woodward put it: “much is to be learned from [these volumes] about what is new in an old republic of letters,” although they “can only suggest rather than xvi

Introduction

exhaust examples of the inroads and innovations of the newcomers.” All the reviewers of this “new direction” in the discipline were appreciative but cautious; one of them summed up the undertaking as “a difficult, indeed almost impossible task, and it is not likely to be repeated. We have a distance to go yet before history assumes its proper place within the fold of sociology. All sociologists should be historians to the extent that the problems they deal with are historically based.”27 Cahnman’s work as a Toennies scholar complemented his efforts in historical sociology. In the last decade of his life, he has published several articles on Toennies in relation to other classical sociologists (Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Spencer). To be sure, the credit belongs to Charles Loomis for the translation into English of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. However, with the publication of the edited volume, Ferdinand Toennies: A New Evaluation and the coedited volume (with Rudolf Heberle, Toennies’s son-in-law), Ferdinand Toennies on Sociology: Pure, Applied and Empirical, Cahnman has done more than any American scholar before or since to bring Toennies onto the center stage of sociological theory.28 Toennies had been virtually unknown in the United States in spite of the frequently used German terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and, as Cahnman pointed out, of the frequently mistaken identification with Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarity. Everett Hughes said: American sociologists in following their self-appointed leaders have neglected all but a few European sociologists. Their favorites are Durkheim and Weber. They don’t know anything about Le-Play, Toennies, Simmel, and others. This has been our great weakness. The Chicago people took sociology where they found it. The majority of American sociologists, I fear, find it only at two or three shrines. Cahnman had the misfortune to go to the wrong shrine.29 By the mid-1970s, Cahnman had garnered recognition as a leading Toennies scholar. Indeed, his last public appearance was at the International Toennies Symposium in the summer of 1980 in Kiel, Germany, the scene of his first scholarly position, where he delivered the principal address, entitled, “Toennies und die Theorie des sozialen Wandels” (Toennies and the Theory of Social Change).30 In 1973, there appeared an interview with him in the Reconstructionist, under the heading, “Werner Cahnman at Seventy.” The interviewer noted that he appeared just as busy as an emeritus professor as when he was fully active, to which Cahnman replied, “I would say I am busier.”31 Indeed, after his retirement in 1968, he held visiting positions at the University of Michigan and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City and went to the University of Munich, his old alma mater, as a Fulbright scholar. In addition to his aforementioned two Toennies books, Cahnman contributed numerous articles and reviews on a wide variety of subjects to xvii

Weber and Toennies

an equally varied assortment of journals, both in the United States and in Germany. His large-scale treatment on the nature of historical sociology was first published in Germany.32 Some of his contributions on problems of ethnicity, and Jewish ethnicity in particular, were path-breaking. When the Association for the Sociological Study of Jewry was founded within the ASA, Cahnman was on the editorial board of its own organ, Contemporary Jewry. In 1974 alone, he has published six articles dealing with themes ranging from conceptual clarifications (e.g., “Pariahs, Strangers and Court-Jews”) to typological studies and philosophical interpretations.33 To the end of his life, Cahnman faithfully and prominently participated in the work of the interdisciplinary Faculty University Seminar on “Content and Method of the Social Sciences” at Columbia University. Some of his seminal papers were first presented at seminar meetings, such as the one on “Historical Sociology.” It was also after his retirement that Cahnman conceived the idea of an organization for the “Preservation of Jewish Cultural Monuments in Europe,” which became “The Rashi Association.” Charted in 1978, the association is still in existence and pursues Cahnman’s original vision, “to promote the preservation and restoration” of sites, artifacts, and so forth, in order to “frustrate Hitler’s aim, to obliterate all traces of Jewish life from Germany” and other places in Europe. Just as at the beginning of his career, Cahnman’s last years too were filled with the most varied activities. And just as he acted as an experienced liaison man for Jewish organizations in the early 1930s, his expertise was called upon in the 1970s, on the occasion of the “Forest Hills housing controversy.” Mario Cuomo’s Forest Hills Diary makes mention of Cahnman as “my sociologist friend from Forest Hills.”34 As it turned out, Cahnman again proved to be true to his conviction of the important role of the Vermittler. Werner Cahnman was already terminally ill with cancer when he was ready to branch out into more detailed and deeper studies in the areas of his scholarly concern and competence. He finished an essay on “Hobbes, Toennies and Vico” and delivered a paper at a symposium chaired by Salo Baron, entitled “Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling and the New Thinking of Judaism.”35 The latter is the last, the most elaborate, and the most philosophical of Cahnman’s writings; it deals with one of his cherished “old” themes: the German-Jewish symbiosis. When he died of cancer on September 27, 1980, Werner J. Cahnman left behind the above-mentioned manuscript on the relationship of Jews and Gentiles and an ambitious work, entitled “The History of Sociology,” largely finished; both of these works await publication. Cahnman’s Contributions A reviewer of Cahnman’s edited volume on Ferdinand Toennies had noted in passing that Toennies’s work “deserves more attention than it has received.”36 The same can be said about Cahnman’s work. The similarity does not end xviii

Introduction

here, though. If it is true that Toennies’s “discursive rather than systematic view of the comprehensive problem of human relations does make great demands on the students’ erudition,”37 we may have, in part at least, the reason for the relative neglect in the sociological enterprise of Cahnman’s scholarly work. Since the emigrating German social scientists brought with them as their intellectual luggage and disseminated in the United States the ideas of Weber and Simmel, the theoretical potential and the empirical applicability of Toennies’s concepts, such as, for example, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, remained largely unexplored. Cahnman labored long in the Toenniesian mold to illuminate and compare phases of societal development, and to bring out the dialectical nature of communal and associational relationships. And, as was the case with Toennies’s theory of social change and his empirical studies, Cahnman’s sociological writings have not received the appreciation they deserved. Commentators on the fate of refugee scholars duly noted that there were many (social) scientists whose promising careers were interrupted. What was happening to many was “Die Zerstoerung einer Zukunft” (the destruction of the future), to quote the title of a recent German-language collection. “Destruction” is too strong an expression in Cahnman’s case but the regrettable fact remains that his work is fragmentary. There are social scientists who regard system-building as the chief mark of genuine scholarship. Cahnman’s achievement was of a different sort, said his friend: It lay above all, in his superb ability to sift from the multitude of data furnished by history and experience that which is significant, and to analyze it in such a way as to enhance our knowledge and understanding. His rich lifework, written in German and English, mirrored his fate as a wanderer between worlds and cultures and as a mediator between them.38 We will never know, of course, whether Cahnman would have undertaken those tomes characteristic of traditional German scholarship had historical events taken a different turn. What is certain is that history, which furnished “the multitude of data,” was supplied by the rise of barbarism in his homeland, including the personal experience of being imprisoned in the concentration camp of Dachau. After his immigration to America, history and experience continued to inform his creative sociological work, made him a mediator of European ideas, an “independent scholar” in search of “die objektive Wahrheit.” While his work is fragmentary, it is also unique: it is a multidisciplinary enterprise, combining knowledge gained from economics, history, history of ideas, sociology, philosophy, and Judaic thought. It moves both at the macro-historical as well as the micro-empirical, social science levels. While his treatises encompass complex issues belonging to the history of ideas and philosophy, such as, for example, Schelling’s transmission of the Kabbalah to xix

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German idealist philosophy, his observations of many facets of American life and society are equally brilliant and insightful. As mentioned before, Cahnman’s work on comparative, historical sociology was, in many ways, a precursor to a new direction within sociology. Talking about his lifework, Cahnman tried to classify and describe his contributions to sociology, especially those under the heading “Race and Intercultural Relations.” “Some of my contributions,” he said, “could be classified under three headings: those that emphasize documentation; those that interpret historical data sociologically; and, thirdly, those that stress the theme of symbiosis and conflict.”39 Concerning the first category, he saw the compelling need for documentation in the “midst of the convulsions of our time,” in order to “transfer to a new era what is worth remembering from the preceding one” for the sake of continuity. He then stressed the need for the sociological interpretation of historical data: Historians and sociologists deal with the same subject matter, namely human relations, but unlike the historians, the sociologists are not so much interested in the story itself as in the categories which it contains. In addition, the sociologist is not concerned with isolated phenomena but with relations between phenomena. I believe the present generation is receptive to sociological interpretation because of the felt need to compare and conceptualize the bewildering multitude of historical data, so as to arrive at a systematic view of their relationships. Only in this way can the past serve to guide the future.40 He was the first to stress that the lessons of the past had to be applied “flexibly,” and that considerable skill and training are necessary to do that. The present collection of his writings testify as to Cahnman’s skill and training. The two essays and two reviews on Weber represent Cahnman’s intention to rectify the sad state of the Weber reception in the United States. Since Weber’s writings have been translated into English in bits and pieces obscuring the total aspect of his work, we now have a “static and atomized Weber,” in Cahnman’s words. He sets out to reconstruct and to discuss two major issues of Weberian methodology, Verstehen and “ideal type,” in the historical context of their genesis as ensuing from the century-old debate about the nature of history as a branch of knowledge, and the relation between history and sociology. Cahnman traces the impact of romanticism on the development of history, anthropology and geography, pinpoints the methodological considerations of Humboldt, Droysen, and Dilthey as the precursors of the Weberian method, and discovers the affinity between Droysen’s historical method, understanding through research (forschend verstehen), and Weber’s interpretive understanding (deutend verstehen). According to Cahnman, “sociology for Weber was an auxiliary science in the service of the comprehension of the processes of history.”41 Written thirty years ago, Cahnman’s essays retain their validity as xx

Introduction

the Weber reception in the United States had not made real progress beyond a “static and atomized Weber”; and he hailed the translation of Economy and Society (1968) as possibly leading to a major breakthrough. That it has not commenced is partly due to the reason noted by Cahnman, namely, “the lack of linguistic knowledge among American sociologists.” (We may add that the volume of the political writings of Weber is still unavailable in English, and that the slim volume of Methodology—with all those printing errors, e.g., casual for causal—is only a fragment of the Wissenschaftslehre. This is not to say that there is a lack of secondary literature amounting to a Weber “cottage industry.”) The review essay on Weber’s sociology of religion presents Weber’s interest in the “changing manifestation of religion in historical time.” It is duly noted that Weber’s analysis of the social context of religion is only part of a more comprehensive analysis of social action; another theme discussed is Weber’s contrasting Puritanism and Judaism, especially with regard to the growth of capitalist enterprise. Cahnman’s closing remark retains its relevance and may stand as his legacy: “Let us read Weber critically, let us build on the foundations which he has laid, let us confront argument and counterargument.” The brief review of Mitzman’s Iron Cage displays Cahnman’s irritation with the term “iron cage,” that has been mistakenly attributed to Weber, due to an incorrect translation by Parsons, only to be accepted and used by all who do not know better. While not overly sympathetic to the psychohistorical approach, Cahnman nevertheless gives Mitzman credit for his attention to the affinity of the Weberian and Toenniesian approaches. Writing in the aftermath of the turbulent 1960s, Cahnman truly believed that Toennies’s comprehensive approach to human affairs—macro-and microsociological at the same time—offers itself as a “guide through the Inferno of upheaval.” On the basis of his experience as teacher and scholar, he thought that the time was ripe for a new evaluation of the sociology of Toennies and so he set out to rescue Toennies from neglect and misunderstanding. With a volume devoted to this purpose, he indeed initiated a new evaluation that culminated in conferences and an output of voluminous writings. According to a recent publication in Germany, the result was a kind of “Toennies Renaissance.” (In Germany, at least, this may be the case: in 1987, 1,000 people attended the Third International Toennies Symposium in Kiel.) In several essays of Part 2, Cahnman illuminates Toennies’s intellectual relationship with the works of eminent European sociologists of his time: Marx, Spencer, Weber, and Durkheim. “Toennies and Marx” is of particular interest in light of the fact that Georg Lukács’s interpretation of Marxism in his essay collection, History and Class Consciousness (originally published in 1923) was made available in English only in 1971. Discussing Toennies and Durkheim, Cahnman succeeds in refuting the notion that Toennies’s Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarity are only different terms for the same historical processes. xxi

Weber and Toennies

The discussion of the Toennies-Weber nexus provides a most fascinating reading, touching upon the main points of agreements and disagreements. As for the former, we have the insistence of both on value-free approach to scholarship and teaching; coming from a social-democrat, on the one hand, and from a liberal-nationalist scholar, on the other, this emphasis is most interesting. The essay “Toennies and Social Change” deals with Toennies’s applied sociology as an extension of his pure sociology. Since Toennies has never provided a concise statement about social change as such, Cahnman sets out to cull Toennies’s theory of social change from his total output. Cahnman’s true appreciation of the Toenniesian approach to social change is summed up in his statement that “one can read Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft at one time as if it were the analysis of a historical process and at another time as if it were a system of timeless concepts.” Cahnman also provides a sorely needed treatment of Toennies’s place in American sociology as well as of related ideas in his work and in the phenomenological and symbolic interactionist approach. To be sure, Toennies’s basic concepts Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are frequently quoted and “more often utilized without quotation, an unmistakable indication that they have entered the mainstream of sociological thinking.”42 Among the most notable elaborators of Toennies’s basic concepts are Robert E. Park and his disciples in the Chicago School of sociology, and Talcott Parsons; Cahnman mentions prominently the valuable contribution of Charles P. Loomis who translated Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. He points out, however, that several concepts and theories that are indebted to the Toenniesian line of approach, sacred-secular theory, the folk-urban continuum, the pattern variables, and others, have taken effect almost anonymously and without due knowledge of and reference to Toennies’s own writings and his whole imposing lifework. Cahnman was aware of the lack of personal contacts and directly traceable influences between Toennies and representatives of phenomenology (Husserl et al.) and symbolic interactionism (Cooley, Mead), though he comes up with some affinities and offers them as incentives for future explorations. Consciousness is an active agent in phenomenology, and while for Toennies the decisive term is will, it represents only one aspect of consciousness. Thus, while their positions are related, they are by no means identical. As for Mead and Toennies, there is nothing to show that they were aware of each other’s work. The passages from Mead’s writings, cited by Cahnman, are suggestive of related ideas of Toennies. He discusses the affinity between Toennies and Mead concerning affirmative and negative human relations: as for “negative human relations,” Cahnman contrasts Mead’s antisocial types (selfish or impulsive man) with Toennies’s corresponding types all the while keeping in mind the divergences insofar as Toennies zeroed in on the organization of society and Mead on human conduct. xxii

Introduction

In the opening essay of Part 3, Cahnman draws strict demarcation lines between his historical sociology and eight mainstream sociological approaches. Historical sociology is humanistic sociology with its focus on man and not on the system. Man being the measure of things, historical sociology cannot be scientific in the way a mathematical statement is. It has to build upon the great tradition of Vico, Tocqueville, Maine, and Toennies at the macro level; at the micro level, the models are W. I. Thomas, Cooley, and Mead. Three examples of Cahnman’s own work are mentioned: the treatise on village Jews,43 another on religion and nationality, and, finally, the paper on the Mediterranean and Caribbean regions (the latter two are found in this volume). Throughout the essay, Cahnman uses the terms sociological historian and historical sociologist interchangeably. Comparative historical sociology has come of age since Cahnman’s efforts within the field and it is safe to say that he was preparing the way by directing attention to the comparative-historical aspect of the works of Weber and Toennies. In his 1986 article, Randall Collins justifiably called the 1980s the “Golden Age of historical and comparative sociology.”44 According to a widely used textbook in the field, thirty-four (20.6 % share) of the 165 articles printed in the ASR between 1976 and 1978 were comparative and/or historical.45 The same approach is also well established in the neighboring social sciences, especially in political science and economics. Mindful of his stated opinion that at the macro level, historical sociology has to build on the great tradition of Vico and others, Cahnman provides a more detailed analysis of Vico’s role and importance as forerunner in his “Vico and Historical Sociology,” and further elaborates on the same theme in his posthumously published (1981) essay dealing with Hobbes, Vico, and Toennies. Vico is presented here as precursor of romantic and historical thought; we find a thoughtful discussion on the convergence of the positions of Vico and Hobbes and their combined influence in Toennies’s thought, culminating in the proposition that the promise of Toennies for the future of sociology rests on his implicit combination of these seemingly opposing older traditions. Cahnman’s intriguing review essay “The Historical Sociology of Cities” delivers a critical dissection of the work of two leading urban sociologists who assume that preindustrial and industrial cities represent closed and mutually exclusive systems. In his opinion, the exclusive use of these terms with regard to cities result in blurring the distinction between tribal, feudal, and patrimonial societies, and between the clan-dominated city of the East, the politically defined city of Greek and Roman Antiquity, and the economically oriented city of the European Middle Ages. The following four papers of Part 3 dealing with urban history, the historical typology, social stratification and location and ecology of cities are the first four chapters of the book How Cities Grew: The Historical Sociology of Cities (1959), co-authored by Cahnman, who had had an ongoing interest in the understanding of the emergence and development xxiii

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of specific societies, with a special focus on those “undergoing a demographic, economic and social transformation of urbanization.”46 Drawing extensively on the work of historians of renown (Coulanges, Pirenne, Bloch et al.) who searched for clues to causal conditions and adaptations to social change in general, and to urbanization, in particular, Cahnman provides a sweeping view of urban development, examining the typology or structure of cities from biblical times to the modern metropolis. These treatises demonstrate the application of the principles of historical sociology found in his essay of the same title, namely, that sophisticated use of comparative materials and typological devices can be enormously helpful in producing works that are “both sociologically oriented and historically relevant.” At the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the ASA in August 1960, Cahnman delivered a paper entitled “Culture, Civilization and Social Change,” marking the “new direction” in sociology. Noting that he aimed to contribute only one element to a genuinely sociological theory of social change yet to be achieved, he sketched the process of change from tribalism to urbanism by examining the concepts of culture and civilization.47 The enlarged and revised version concluded the volume, Sociology and History, and is reprinted here under the title “The Rise of Civilization as a Paradigm of Social Change.” The aim here is to offer a theoretical framework, based on historical evidence, which may be put to good use in analyzing social change. The transition from tribalism to urbanism is described by applying the terms of “monocultural” (tribal) society, with its multipurpose kinship roles, and “multicultural” society, with differentiated economic roles. His use of the term “multicultural,” thirty years before it came into vogue in academia, illustrates Cahnman’s unique talent for historical categories, albeit his use of the term is not political but strictly scholarly. His intention was not to reduce social change to urbanization but to investigate the combined development of industrialization and urbanization; he was after the sociological element that causes social change within the supersession of familial by territorial society. In the best tradition of comparative historical analyses, his inquiry moves from ancient Rome to modern America by looking at processes of federation, fusion, and anomie. When examining the newest cities of Africa (“vast laboratory of social change”), the traditional, historical model needs modification, and here Trotsky’s theory of combined development (“skipping intermediate stages”) proves handy. Cahnman concludes his essay with raising the issues of social-psychological consequences, and of the possible compatibility of a unifying moral order with cultural diversity. Cahnman credits his association with Park during his stay at Fisk University in the 1940s for resulting in four papers on race and culture contrasts. The opening paper of Part 4, “Religion and Nationality,” was delivered there in 1943, submitted by Park to the AJS (1944), and reprinted in Sociology and History. As so often, Cahnman’s aim is theoretical as well as historical; the Parkian influence is shown in his cautionary attitude toward abstract schemata. xxiv

Introduction

While he briefly discusses nationality as a territorial principle in Western societies since the Roman Empire, the main concern here is with a definition and explanation of the Turkish millet system, regarded as an “ideal type,” when nationality appears as a familial or religious principle. Throughout, the stress is on continuity. Exactly fifty years later, we may find Cahnman’s concluding remarks in this essay distressingly prophetic in that “the world we live in seems to be rapidly . . . expanding (i.e. globalizing), . . . but it must not make us overlook the fact that the more intimate forces . . . are not dead; they [were] only pushed beneath the surface.” And so it can happen that “populations that have lived side by side . . . , even in the face of frequent conflict, have been uprooted . . . , starved and butchered.” Fragmentation and ethnic conflicts in the successor states of the Habsburg Empire dominate the news nowadays; how did they come to pass and what can be done about them are topical issues at the international scene. Thus, the problem of “reconciliation of nationalities” is a serious one. Since the 1930s, Cahnman had been in contact with Austrian organizational leaders, both Jewish and Catholic, as well as scholars and others who were closely connected with Jewish national movements. As he recounts in an unpublished manuscript, “My Relation to Jews and Judaism” (1979), Cahnman had long been doing research into the rise of the Jewish national movement in Austria. He centered it around the person of Adolph Fischhof, a Viennese Jew originally from Hungary, a medical doctor turned political scientist and the author of a famous pamphlet, “Oesterreich und die Buergschaften seines Bestandes” (1869). In Cahnman’s opinion, Fischhof ’s work may shed some light on the problem of “how several nationalities ought to be able to coexist in a single state”; Fischhof’s “utopia” consisted of a multinational, multicultural coexistence in a state organized as a confederation, informed, no doubt, by a liberalism laced with romanticism. Cahnman then contrasts Fischhof’s design with that of Albert Schaeffle, a Protestant from Wuerttemberg.48 Cahnman had an all-abiding interest and strong views on the importance of ethnicity; he maintained a strong survivalist perspective, projecting the survival of ethnic groups from both normative and empirical viewpoints. In the essay “Nature and Varieties of Ethnicity,” Cahnman traces the story back to the Greeks who provided the terminology, following up with an account in the Roman and Ottoman Empires and concludes with present manifestations of the problem. He discusses ethnicity, the biologically defined groupings, and demos, the geographically defined groups of the nation, which became dominant in the East and the West of Europe, respectively, with Germany and Italy as transitional cases. Problems have arisen with the superimposition of Western ideas upon the East, that is, the victory of the principle of identity of nationality and territory, and the concomitant rejection of diversity. This had to bring misery to millions of human beings in areas where ethnic groups interlock in such a way as to defy clear-cut territorial separation. We are xxv

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witnessing in our century the situation when peoples who had been living side by side in cooperation and conflict for long periods of time have been exposed to dislocation, expulsion and outright genocide. Modern European history as well as the postcolonial history of Third World countries and of the former Soviet Union vindicate Cahnman’s view. Cahnman concludes his examination with the question: “Is America different?” He sees America as a basically territorial or demotic society with its associational differentiation, chiefly ethnic in character and in conjunction with class differentiation (occupations), to which the role of ethnicity in the social network should be added. This world civilizational state of affairs permits many loyalties that compete and cooperate with each other for economic advantage and political and institutional power. Similarly to “Religion and Nationality,” the closing essay of this volume, “Mediterranean and Caribbean Regions: A Comparison in Race and Culture Contact,” was written during Cahnman’s stay at Fisk, and was first published in 1943. While Park disliked his paper entitled “France in Algeria” because of the fact that the Algerian story documented the failure of integration and the persistence of ethnicity, recounted Cahnman, he much liked the “Caribbean story,” which contrasted the Hispano-American way in race relations with the Anglo-American one.49 Cahnman states emphatically that “economic considerations alone” cannot even begin to explain the “complexities of cultural differentiation”; thus, the problem cannot be regarded as simply a problem of colonialism. He notes that only a comparative study of race and culture contacts can illuminate the difference between the Mediterranean and Caribbean regions. In the case of the former, it was the unity of the faith that set the pattern upon which the colonies were founded; thus, cultural distinctions, not racial differentiation was the overriding factor. Not so in English colonization, says Cahnman, as “no Englishman has ever acquired a colony in honor of Christ,” or any such impracticality. Their practical sense for cooperation and compromise, supported by racialism and abstentionism (of the Puritans) determined the outcome on the North American continent. Cahnman concludes that while half-breeds were not accepted into white society as in the case of Latin America, the “colored populations” were provided with their own ambitious and educated leadership, which, in turn, is responsible for the “Negro consciousness and Negro achievement” unrivaled elsewhere. In the Appendix, Cahnman’s partly historical-sociological, partly autobiographical writing, entitled “Rudolf Hess or an Introduction to the Emergence of German Geopolitics,” appears in print for the first time. The historicalsociological aspect of it is part of a larger one, in addition to the journalistic and biographical interest in the story of the most mysterious prominent member of the Nazi movement. Cahnman reports in some detail on the special preoccupation of German scholarship with Raum (space) from Friedrich List and Alexander von Humboldt, crystallizing in Hitler’s manic obsession with xxvi

Introduction

Lebensraum with all of its disastrous consequences. We learn that it was Karl Haushofer at the University of Munich, teacher to both Cahnman and Hess, who awoke their interest in problems of Raum. We do not know how much of Haushofer’s ideas were transmitted to Hitler via Hess; we only experienced the tragic course of events when he attempted to put those theoretical ideas into practice during the six years of World War II. Notes 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

See Werner J. Cahnman and Alvin Boskoff, “Sociology and History: Reunion and Rapprochement,” in Werner J. Cahnman and Alvin Boskoff, eds., Sociology and History. Theory and Research (New York: The Free Press, 1964), pp. 1–18. While recognizing that sociology and history are different academic disciplines, unlike in origin and intention, the editors stress that both deal “with the same subject matter: human interaction.” Thus, they are partners and competitors at the same time (p. 1). Many of the forty-two selections by forty authors still make for an exciting and highly informative reading. The volume consists of three main parts: “Evaluation of Theories”; “Recent Research,” with the following subareas: (1) Feudalism and Power in Various Societies; (2) Empire, Nationality and Religion; (3) Enterprise, Labor and Social Change; (4) Political Behavior and Social Structure; (5) The Arts, Literature and Science); and “Conclusion.” The volume is unfortunately out of print. Ibid., p. 3. It is then stated that the “genuine differences between sociologists and historians stem not from logical or practical obstacles, but from legitimate but somewhat arbitrarily selected aims.” Joseph B. Maier and Chaim I. Waxman, “Werner J. Cahnman: An Introduction to His Life and Work,” in Joseph B. Maier and Chaim I. Waxman, eds., Ethnicity, Identity, and History. Essays in Memory of Werner J. Cahnman (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers, 1983), p. 1. The editors correctly note Cahnman’s “superb ability to sift from the multitude of data furnished by history and experience that which is significant, and to analyze it such a way as to enhance our knowledge and understanding.” Ibid. The original title was, “Der oekonomische Pessimismus und das Ricardo’sche System” (1927, published in Munich in 1929). As Cahnman noted in the Preface to Sociology and History, the guidance both teachers have given him in former years made the conception of the book possible. See p. ix and p. 563. Cf. Cahnman’s recollections in the “Hess” essay and the frequent references to these mentors in several essays of this volume. Cahnman, “Methodological Note,” in Year Book XIX of the Leo Beck Institute (London, 1974), pp. 128–130. For the essay, “Village and Small Town Jews in Germany,” see Joseph B. Maier, Judith Marcus, and Zoltán Tarr, eds., German Jewry. Its History and Sociology. Selected Essays of Werner J. Cahnman (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989), pp. 43–68. Cahnman’s very first article was published in Der Morgen in 1926. It has never been translated into English. His thinking at the time was profoundly influenced by Arthur Ruppin’s Juden der Gegenwart (English version: The Jews in the Modern World, London, 1934) along with Davis Trietsch’s Palaestina Handbuch. xxvii

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8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

xxviii

For a more detailed account of Cahnman’s activities and studies of this period, including his account of his time in Dachau, see Maier, Marcus and Tarr, eds., German Jewry. esp. the Introduction, and parts I and II. Werner J. Cahnman, “Robert E. Park at Fisk,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 14 (1978): 328–336. As nothing was known about Park’s last years at Fisk University, Cahnman put on record Park’s positions in the last two years of his life about research, the teaching of sociology, human ecology, and “especially about various aspects of race and intercultural relations,” with a concluding evaluation of Park’s theoretical notions. Cahnman, “Robert E. Park at Fisk,” 334. Two of the papers, “Religion and Nationality,” and “The Mediterranean and Caribbean Regions” are to be found in Part 4 of this volume. The former owed its publication directly to Park who sent it to the AJS. Only one of the five papers, entitled “The United Nations of Europe,” did not find its publisher. In light of today’s events, its time has just now arrived. See also Maier and Waxman, eds., Ethnicity, Identity, and History, p. 7. Cahnman, “Robert E. Park, 334. He devotes considerable space to Park’s disdain for purely social-scientific treatises, “logical analyses” and such, and his preference for works that were “not sociology” but were about people. “Park was not interested in splitting concrete people into abstract roles, except in the way of a very preliminary and clearly auxiliary approach.” Cahnman perceives the “[William] James-[John] Dewey influence on Park,” who was an “executor of pragmatist philosophy” (p. 31). Park often expressed his idea that “sociology ought to deal more with people and less with concepts and methods,” especially as ends in themselves rather than as a means to the end of understanding “people” (p. 330). Cahnman mentions the following Parkian examples: the downward rate of births and deaths among Jews is surely followed in due time by lower rates among the population at large. Similarly, “when the Jews become concentrated in metropolitan areas, so also will the population at large after a brief interval of time.” Ibid., 331. Ibid. 331. Everett V. Stonequist was the founder of the Sociology Department at Skidmore College (1930) and served as its chair for forty years; the fact that he popularized the concept of “marginal man” is still proudly recalled there. Maier and Waxman, “Werner J. Cahnman: An Introduction to His Life and Work,” in Ethnicity, Identity and History, p. 7. Cahnman, “The Decline of the Jewish Community: 1933–38,” in Jewish Social Studies, 3, no. 3 (1941). Reprinted in Maier, Marcus and Tarr, German Jewry, pp. 83–95. The article was based on a census of the Jewish population of Munich and vicinity, taken on the 16th of May, 1938 by the statistical bureau of the local Jewish community, in order to show the statistical effects of the Nazi policy on the demographic structure of this group. According to Cahnman, the decline of this specific community was typical for southern Germany; his soberly worded final note is able to re-create what the circumstances were like: “In its final stages, when the work required particular care and attention, the study was carried out in noisy rooms while the synagogue was being demolished and the evacuation of the community building located on Herzog Maxstrasse had begun” (p. 95).

Introduction

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

For an account of Cahnman’s loose associations and publications during this period, see Maier and Waxman, Ethnicity, pp. 7–9 and the selected bibliography. Ibid., p. 8. Joseph B. Maier’s account in Maier and Waxman, Ethnicity, p. 9. See Lewis A. Coser, “The Alien as a Servant of Power,” American Sociological Review, 37, no. 5 (1972): 574–81. Cahnman’s essay was originally published in the Archives Européennes de Sociologie (1974); it is reprinted in Maier, Marcus, and Tarr, German Jewry, pp. 15–28. See Cahnman, “Pariahs,” in German Jewry, pp. 15–16. For Cahnman, historical sociology is not to be used “to verify a hypothesis”; rather, phenomena should be “critically investigated because they are . . . endowed with intrinsic interest.” For example, in order to grasp the significance of the concepts of “pariah and stranger,” one must “analyze them as well as a number of related concepts,” and must “scrutinize them regarding their applicability” (p. 16). Ibid., p. 26. The hitherto unpublished manuscript is being prepared for publication by the editors of this volume, and will be published by Transaction Publishers under the title The Sociology of Jews and Gentiles: A History of Their Relation. Cahnman said about his project: “I have been working on a comprehensive, yet concentrated, account of Jewish-Gentile relations for a long time. I believe that a scholarly conceived, yet fluidly written, account of JewishGentile relations is essential for the self-understanding of the present generation.” Their relations refer “to the mutuality of contacts, positive as well as antagonistic” (from the Newsletter of the Association for the Sociological Study of Jewry, 1975). Ibid., pp. 20–21. See Maier and Waxman, Ethnic Identity, pp. 9–10. Cf. note 1. In their introductory essay, Cahnman and Boskoff speak of “reunion and rapprochement” between sociology and history. The contributors come from both disciplines; it is an illustrious list. Among the contributors are Marc Bloch, Reinhard Bendix, Joseph Ben-David, Robert A. Bellah, E. Digby Baltzell, Norman Birnbaum, Hamilton A. R. Gibb, Florian Znaniecki, Immanuel Wallerstein, Robert A. Nisbet, Thomas F. O’Dea, Rupert B. Vance, and Robin M. Williams. It is regrettable, indeed, that the volume has never been republished. Review of Roscoe C. Hinkle in AJS, (May 1965): 731. Review of S.D. Clark of the University of Toronto in American Sociological Review (December 1965): 951. Werner J. Cahnman, ed., Ferdinand Toennies: A New Evaluation (Leiden, Holland: E.J. Brill, 1973); Cahnman and Rudolf Heberle, eds., Ferdinand Toennies on Sociology: Pure, Applied and Empirical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). Most of the articles on Toennies are to be found in this volume. Quoted in Maier and Waxman, Ethnicity, p. 10. The paper has been published only in German in the Zeitschrift fuer Soziologie, 1981. Ira Eisenstein, “Werner Cahnman at Seventy,” Reconstructionist, 39, no. 5 (June 1973): 24–33. xxix

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32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48.

49. xxx

The essay “Historical Sociology: What It Is and What It is Not,” was originally published in Baydia N. Varma, ed., The New Social Sciences (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), pp. 107–122. It is to be found in this volume. The German original, “Soziologie und Geschichte,” was published in 1972. See the selected bibliography in Maier and Waxman, Ethnicity, pp. 321–331. Some of the essays are reprinted in Maier, Marcus and Tarr, German Jewry and one of the most significant contributions, “Nature and Varieties of Ethnicity” is in the present volume. See Cahnman, “The Forest Hills Experience,” Reconstructionist, 41, no. 5 (1975): 24–28. Cahnman’s self-description is informative: “I am a Forest Hills resident, a sociologist who is a race and intercultural relations specialist, and I am active in Jewish life. It goes without saying that I am aware of the complexities of urban living. I believe I know the needs of the poor as well as of the aspirations of the neighbors in the midst of whom I live” (p. 25). Both of these works were published posthumously. The former is reprinted in the present volume. The latter has been republished in Maier, Marcus, and Tarr, German Jewry, pp. 209–248; It has recently been “discovered” in Germany and is being translated into German for publication. Herman Strasser, “Review of Ferdinand Toennies: A New Evaluation. Essays and Documents. Edited by Werner J. Cahnman,” in Contemporary Sociology, 5, no. 4 (September 1975): 547. Ibid., p. 545. In Maier and Waxman, Ethnicity, p. 1. Eisenstein, “Werner Cahnman” in Reconstructionist: 25. Ibid., 26. Cahnman’s review appeared in Social Forces, 28, no. 2 (December 1969): 269. Cahnman, “Introduction,” to Ferdinand Toennies, p. 1 Maier, Marcus, and Tarr, eds., German Jewry, pp. 43–68. See Randall Collins, “Is 1980s Sociology in the Doldrums?” AJS, 91, no. 6 (May 1986): 1346. The seminal works of Barrington Moore, Charles Tilly, and Gerhard Lenski are prominently mentioned, while Cahnman is missing even though it is pointed out that the “imposing work of Max Weber has become increasingly revealed” for American sociologists. W. Lawrence Neuman, Social Research Methods (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991). Cahnman and Boskoff, “Sociology and History: Review and Outlook,” in Sociology and History, p. 560. The paper was subsequently published under the same title in The Sociological Quarterly, 3 no. 2 (April 1962): 93–106. Cf. “The Rise of Civilization as a Paradigm of Social Change,” in Cahnman and Boskoff, Sociology and History, pp. 537–559. Just as the national (or nationalistic) and ethnic conflicts dominate many discussions, there were many liberal and socialist intellectuals in the Hapsburg Empire who grappled with these problems, among them Otto Bauer, the pre-Marxist Lukacs, and Oscar Jaszi, minister of nationalities of the 1918 Hungarian liberal government and later professor of political science at Oberlin College. See Cahnman, “Robert A. Park at Fisk,” 334.

Part I Perspectives on Max Weber

1 Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences In recent decades Max Weber has become known as a major proponent of social action theory, but his writings have been translated into English in bits and pieces in such a way that the total aspect of his work has been obscured.1 As a consequence, a static and atomized Weber has emerged, divorced from the historical background against which he must be understood. However, in the present context, there is more at stake than the proper interpretation of a single theorist. Max Weber’s basic concepts of “understanding on the level of meaning” and of the “ideal type,” and especially of rational social action as the paradigm of an “ideal type,” are the result of a century-long discussion about the nature of history as a branch of knowledge. An awareness of this discussion is indispensable for the evaluation of the relations between history and sociology. As a matter of fact, Max Weber’s (and, to some degree, Ferdinand Toennies’s) brand of sociology, that is, sociology as a generalized conception of sociocultural reality, emerges as one of the answers, perhaps as the answer, to problems that agitated many of the best minds for a considerable period of the time. Obviously, the story of how this came about, if told in full, would transcend the limits of a survey article. The main locale is Germany, but there are related developments in England that would bear scrutiny. Further, there is a most variegated philosophical background to the story, extending from Hobbes and Kant via many intermittent links to Dilthey and Rickert which, for lack of space as well as competence, can be merely referred to here and there in the account that follows. However, since practically all philosophies and philosophically relevant theoretical systems that have a bearing on the methodology of historical research and the nature of historical knowledge have been surveyed in masterly fashion by Ernst Troeltsch, it would seem permissible to ask the reader to consult this work for a more comprehensive kind of information.2 The following discussion is restricted to outlining the 3

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principal approaches that serve to put into relief the methodological controversy in the social sciences. Romanticism, Idealism, and the Theory of History The revolutionary impact which the romantic movement of the early nineteenth century has had on modern thought can hardly be overrated. By romanticism, we mean the revulsion against uniformity, generality, calculated simplicity, and the reduction of living phenomena to common denominators; the aesthetic antipathy to standardization; the abhorrence of platitudinous mediocrity. More positively, romanticism is the attentiveness to the detailed, the concrete, the factual; the quest for local color; the endeavor to reconstruct in imagination the distinctive lives of peoples remote in space, time, or cultural condition; the cult of individuality, personality, and nationality; indulgence in the occult, the emotional, the original, the extraordinary.3 The repercussions of this volcanic outburst of individualized energy are still with us: in modern music and art, in progressive education, in existentialist philosophy, in psychoanalysis, and in a host of nationalistic and charismatic movements. Both the loosening of standards and the quest for a new community are romantic in character. The sentence, ascribed to the poet Novalis, “where you are not, there is happiness,” has often been quoted as the essence of the romantic spirit. In the context of the social sciences, the romantic revolution has had a profound impact on the development of the academic disciplines of history, geography, and anthropology. Of these, history arrests our attention, not so much per se, but because the “historical method” at that point began to claim the dignity of a universal approach to the study of human affairs. Symptomatic of this approach is the “historical school of law, whose basic philosophy is expressed in Carl von Savigny’s words: “There is no absolutely singular and separate human existence; rather, what may be considered singular, or individual, from one point of view, is part of a larger whole, if seen from another point of view. Accordingly, every individual human being, at the same time, must be thought of as member of a family and a people [folk], as the continuation and evolution of the epochs of the past.”4 Accordingly, the historical school of law opposed the idea that institutions are the result of conscious reflection and deliberate planning. Law in particular, if it was not to be disruptive of societal bonds, should aim not at systematization and codification, but should be conceived of as the result of slow “organic” growth out of custom and usage, that is, as an expression of the “mores” and, indeed, the entire “culture” of a people. This is the meaning of the often-quoted term Volksgeist”.5 There is much here that anticipates Sumner’s dictum that “the mores are always right,” but historically the connection is rather with the counterimage, which English common law seemed to provide to the Code Napoleon. Especially pertinent is Edmund Burke’s reference to the “policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed 4

Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences

inheritance derived to us from our forefathers and to be transmitted to our posterity . . .”; this “policy” appeared to him as “the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection and above it.”6 Burke’s influence on Savigny, Eichhorn, and other leading spokesmen of the “historical school of law” is attested to by Carl Menger, one of the protagonists of the “Methodenstreit,” but it is interesting to note that Burke’s German translators, A. W. Rehberg and Friedrich Gentz, rendered the term partnership in the celebrated Burkean phrase in which a nation is defined as “a partnership of past, present, and future generations”—as Gemeinschaft”7 This is the unromantic origin of a romantic concept. What was true continuity in England became a yearning for it in Germany. What has been said about the study of law and institutions also applies to the study of linguistics, another favorite object of the historical, or holistic, approach. Language is an expression of culture, as we would say. In the historical approach, then, the individual manifestation is seen as part of a whole rather than as the application of a general law. In this context, one can understand why the eminent historian Georg von Below, contemporary and counterpart of Max Weber, could say that he derived his brand of sociology directly from romantic thought.8 In defining sociology as the study of relations between individuals, on the one hand, and the groups and collectivities to which the individual belongs, on the other, he expressed the opinion that sociology is an “approach” to societal data rather than an independent branch of knowledge- an approach that emphasizes that the actions of individuals do not originate in the individuals themselves but are derived from the nonvolitional and transmitted reality of their groups. (One must note the unabashedly collectivistic nature of this definition as against Max Weber’s definition of “social action” as merely “oriented” to the actions of others.) Von Below credits the romantic inspiration with the discovery of the twin concepts of “collectivity” and “personality,” the tertium comparationis being that both are distinguished by uniqueness and unity. In other words, they have the quality of “historical” phenomena. Sociology as an independent academic discipline only intermittently adopted a comparable approach, most notably in the Durkheimian concept of representations collectives. One cannot understand Durkheim’s position in sociology if one overlooks his indebtedness to De Bonald, Maistre, Boeckh, and Fustel de Coulanges.9 Cultural anthropology, a related discipline to which Durkheimian sociology had a particularly strong affinity, is much more clearly romantic and collectivistic in inspiration, and the historiography of the nineteenth century rests squarely upon the foundations of romantic thought. However, a difficulty arises at this point in that romantic philosophy expresses the worldview of the artist more adequately than it does the worldview of the scientist. To be sure, the new historiography contained positivistic, or scientistic, elements inasmuch as it stressed reliance on factual data and a rigorous critique 5

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of sources, that is, inductive procedure- the slow ascent from the particular to the universal- as against the lofty, deductive reasoning of the philosophers. But Wilhelm von Humboldt, in his influential essay “Ueber die Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers,” following Schelling, added that to ascertain what actually happened was to present merely the raw material of history, not history itself.10 To give Gestalt to disconnected data, that is, to infuse them with life, the historiographer would have to become creative. In this regard, he was to be compared to the poet: he must internalize reality in order to reorganize it independently in the light of a constructive “idea.” Humboldt, a linguist of distinction, observed that it might seem “objectionable” to confound the spheres of the scholar and the artist in such fashion, but he saw “the difference which neutralized the danger” in the circumstance that historical imagination, in contrast to the imagination of the poet, was to be guided by trained experience; it was to become “the art of combination.” To combine properly, that is, with a view to arriving at the correspondence of a living Gestalt, was to “understand.” Precisely how this was to be done, however, remained unsaid. Humboldt’s views were shared by the dean of nineteenth-century historiographers, Leopold von Ranke, as evidenced by the famous concluding sentences of Ranke’s essay “The Great Powers.”11 They were considered a guiding star by the systematizer and defender of the historical method, J.G. von Droysen. Droysen’s concise Grundriss der Historik, first published in 1867, translated into English in 1893, is a magna charta of the historical method.12 Foreshadowing Dilthey, the essence of the historical method is defined by Droysen as “forschend zu verstehen,” that is, to establish facts on the basis of strict rules of evidence and to infer from these exterior manifestations the moving force that is in the mind of man. This is said to be possible because the researcher who attempts to understand is a total personality like his object (paragraph 10). But the mechanism of understanding differs from the act of understanding, which is more than explanatory; it is creative (paragraph 11). Generally, according to Droysen, historical research does not explain the later as necessary sequence to the earlier, or the actual phenomena as repetitive instances of general laws. Such sequences do exist; but if this were all that was to be said about it, human life, deprived of liberty and responsibility, would lack moral character (paragraph 37). In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, this kind of humanistic realism was bound to clash with the claim of Comtean sociology to be a “new history,” conceived in the spirit of positive science. In his History of Civilization in England, H. T. Buckle, referring to Comte as a trail blazer for what needed to be done “to raise the standard of history,” complained that while in all other fields of inquiry the need for generalization was universally admitted, so that the laws could be discovered by which the facts are governed, “the unfortunate peculiarity of the history of man [was] that, although its separate parts have been examined with considerable ability, hardly anyone has attempted 6

Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences

to combine them into a whole and ascertain the way in which they are connected with each other.”13 Buckle was trying to show that environmental factors accounted for man’s behavior. His work was presociological inasmuch as it centered attention on determinants of social action rather than on social action itself, but at the time it appeared it stood for the “sociological,” or “materialistic,” interpretation of history and was widely read. Droysen, in an impassioned review of Buckle’s work—published with other pertinent essays in the appendix to Grundriss—attacked Buckle not on substance, but on method and, through method, on approach.14 He doubts that the procedures employed in the physical and biological sciences are the only methods that can claim to be scientific in character; in fact, he denies that they are applicable to the human realm. No science, he asserts, is a mere collection of isolated facts; history, in particular, shows that the human ego does not exist by itself, but is a part of larger wholes, that the past of the collectivities that encompass man and his works continues to live in the present, and that the moral categories, which are in evidence everywhere, must be recognized as autonomous values. Droysen’s reply has “the touch of the poet,” even as he tries to come to grips with the requirements of the scientific method. But where Buckle is self-assured, Droysen is groping. His answers are not free of contradictions; for instance, how “freedom of the will,” combined with “divine providence,” maintains itself in the face of environmental “circumstances,” is not explained. Even more serious was the admission that the theoretical foundations of the procedures by which the affairs of man may be studied are by no means firmly established. Such a theory, which would formulate “not the laws of history, but the rules of historical research,” was expected from renewed efforts in the future.15 Efforts in this direction were made in the generation following Droysen, especially by Dilthey, Windelband, Rickert, and Simmel.16 It is not the purpose of this paper to enter into a detailed analysis of these philosophies as they bear on the problems of historical knowledge, and of their agreements and disagreements.17 What is important in the present context is that, as a result of their epistemological clarification of basic concepts, such as nature and culture, law and event, and science and history, a new sociology was ushered into existence, which turned its back on any attempt to ascertain the laws of historical development- now recognized as selfcontradictory- and instead it developed a methodological approach to historical research based on the establishment of sociology as a formal system of “social relations” (Toennies, Simmel) or of “social action” (Max Weber). In Max Weber’s definition, which is widely accepted, action is considered “social” only if and insofar as it is meaningfully oriented to the action of others; otherwise, we are confronted with a mere reaction to stimuli, which may be socially relevant, but does not constitute social action.18 The moral, that is, the value-oriented element in history, so fervently defended by Droysen as the essence of history, is herewith preserved. 7

Weber and Toennies

This moral, or “historical,” quality of “social action” is further fortified methodologically in Max Weber’s definition of sociology as “a science which attempts to understand social action on the level of meaning” (deutend verstehen). The word deutend is here decisive, as the affinity between Droysen’s definition of the historical method as forschend verstehen and Weber’s definition of the sociological method as deutend verstehen can hardly be overlooked. The German word forschen points to the painstaking procedures of factual research, thus precluding reliance on mere “intuition” as the basis of “understanding.”19 The word deuten links “meaningful interpretation” to its scientific goal, namely “causal explanation.” But Max Weber goes a step further. As he puts it in the notes to his definition, “meaningful interpretation” looks for evidence (Evidenz), that is, any mode of proof, or confirmation, which may carry conviction. According to Max Weber, such evidence can be “either of a rational (logical, mathematical) or of an empathic, emotional, artisticreceptive character.”20 Following Dilthey and Simmel more than Windelband and Rickert at this point, Max Weber leans over backwards to accommodate the Humboldtian and Rankean tradition in historiography.21 He recovers his positivistic posture immediately by establishing “rational social action” as the “ideal type” of all social action; but, as will be shown later, his “rationalism” is merely formalistic, not substantive, in character. We must now turn to delineating the genesis of the concept of the “ideal type” in the famous Methodenstreit, the methodological controversy in the social sciences. Socioeconomic Institutionalism versus Theoretical Economics The Methodenstreit is concerned with the relations between the historical and theoretical approaches in the social sciences. It arose within the field of what was then called political economy, but as a result of the arguments and counterarguments in which the combatants engaged, institutional economics and a historically oriented sociology made their appearance.22 That the controversy should have arisen in the field of economics is not surprising. The modern science of economics had come to the fore in the “age of reason,” pari passu with the growth of the entrepreneurial classes and that “civic society” that seemed to base its existence neither on custom and tradition nor on political authority, but on the interplay of individual interests. These interests could be isolated from other social forces and it was possible to show that they were not only reasonable in themselves but that their summation yielded intelligible laws that explained the formation and fluctuation of prices in a market and, more especially, the monetary rewards for the disposal of fixed and fluid capital, landed property, and manual labor. The underlying nominalistic assumption was that the social world was an aggregate of individual wills, which, if acting economically, that is, in accordance with the principle of the relative scarcity of the productive factors, could be presumed to be acting rationally; and that, if such were the case, enlightened self-interest would serve the ends of 8

Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences

society, as far as the economic sphere was concerned, better than any other principle or motive. All this sounded like a revelation at the time, but, as can be seen in retrospect, this position, that is here produced in great brevity and without reference to the objectification which the theory underwent from Smith to Ricardo, raised a great many questions. Was rational economic action, as supposed by classical theory, the expression of a universally valid law of human behavior? Was it to be conceived as a theoretical model? Or was it to be understood as a theoretical model that, at the same time, reflected the “nature” of economic processes, that is, the reality of economic life? Or was it an “ought-to-be,” a guideline for economic policy? All these elements were present, lending themselves to enthusiastic advocacy, but also provoking critical doubts and determined opposition. In the camp of the advocates, the Smithian and Ricardian theoretical models were soon transformed into doctrinaire recipes, imposed upon a reluctant reality. They were used as a club by which to beat down corporate entities, such as guilds or unions, and to ward off state intervention that threatened to interfere with the “pursuit of happiness.” This was not classical, but “vulgar” economics, to use the contemptuous Marxian expression, but the dividing line between the two was blurred. However, confusion was more confounded in the other camp. To be sure, there was solid ground on which to base a stand in opposition. Whatever its scientific merits, a purely chrematistic economics clashed everywhere, except perhaps in the English midlands and in some port cities, with older patterns of thought and action, which may best be characterized by pointing to the derivation of the term economics from the Greek oikos, that is, a self-contained, family-based household.23 Within such a household, purely economic considerations were subordinated to moral goals that are shared and transmitted in a particular culture. Accordingly, the historians of culture, especially the adherents of the historical school in Germany, drew attention to “the scantiness of authority which the institution of private property in its present form can derive from history; and to urge on broad scientific and philosophical grounds a reconsideration of the rights of society as against the rights of the individual.” These were the words of Alfred Marshall;24 in the two or three generations preceding him, the kind of society that served as a model for collectivistic philosophies had been rediscovered in Greek, Roman, Germanic, and Celtic antiquity as well as in the experience of the British India Service by such scholars as August Boeckh, A. H. L. Heeren, G. L. von Maurer, N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, and Henry S. Maine.25 We shall return to the collectivistic theme presently. At this juncture, it should merely be noted that Henry Maine’s terms, “status” and “contract,” have become an inheritance of sociology; but Ferdinand Toennies- who learned a great deal from Maine, and after him, Max Weber- went a step further. 9

Weber and Toennies

Ferdinand Toennies was not directly involved in the Methodenstreit, but his major work might have made the entire controversy seem unnecessary, if it had been understood properly at the time of its first appearance (1887).26 Toennies was aware of the arguments of natural law as well as the counterarguments of the historical school against the generalizations of natural law: he realized that the rationalistic approach, while identical with scientific procedure, was far from exhausting the varieties of social action.27 He devised the concepts of “essential will” and “arbitrary will” and their institutional counterparts of Gemeinschaft” and Gesellschaft, as formal, or “normative” concepts in sociology. Thus, family, clan, village, friendship may serve as approximate examples of Gemeinschaft, but they are Gemeinschaft only to the extent to which they coincide with the ideal conceptual image of Gemeinschaft. City, state, industry, public opinion may serve as examples of Gesellschaft in the same way. In other words, viewed in the light of normative concepts, actual societies, especially of the Gesellschaft type, are always mixed. Yet, the formal aspect of the terms used and their historical connotation are inseparable. According to Toennies, human societies have developed, or are going to develop, from Gemeinschaft, that is, from primitive agrarian communism, or communal village organization, through individualism, which he considers only as an “ideal limiting point,” to Gesellschaft, that is, an associational society. Ultimately, Gesellschaft may turn out to be a planned, bureaucratic, or “socialistic,” society, but on its way to that goal the voluntaristic element, as exemplified in commercial activities, prevails. This amounts to saying that arbitrary, reflection-based, rational processes, apart from their value as a conceptual model, also indicate an increasingly potent historical trend. Max Weber says the same thing when he views “in a certain sense and within certain limits . . . the entirety of economic history as the history of the nowadays victorious economic . . . rationalism.”28 In this sense, the theoretical construct summarizes a historical process; formal sociology is transformed into cultural, or historical sociology. It is remarkable that value judgments, so strenuously disavowed by both Toennies and Weber as formalists, recur in this context with a vengeance. Toennies characterizes the trend toward Gesellschaft as a process of aging29 while Weber considers the heyday of capitalism in the nineteenth century as “the dawn of the iron age.”30 Perhaps we have been anticipating too much, but the complexity of the mature conclusions of Toennies and Weber in a way exonerates their predecessors in the discussion on methodology. We are going to summarize the principal points of this discussion by referring chiefly to the two protagonists of the Methodenstreit: Gustav Schmoller, the leader of the younger historical school, and Carl Menger, the initiator of the Austrian branch of marginal utility theory.31 But while Menger can stand by himself, we will have to refer to Roscher, Knies, and Hildebrand, the representatives of the older historical school, along with Schmoller, chiefly because Max Weber’s subsequent polemical remarks were directed against Menger, on the one hand, and against 10

Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences

Roscher and Knies, on the other, while they spared Schmoller; probably because of the latter’s dominant position in the Deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik. As far as polemics against untenable positions of the historical school are concerned, Max Weber sides largely with Menger, but he turns against him when he develops his own concept of the ideal type, which is a vindication of the implicit methodological assumptions of historical research. It is most important to realize that the historical school of economics, older or younger, does not present a unified ideological front. The reason lies in the nature of the field of economics itself, which is generalizing in procedure and nominalistic in assumption and thus contrasts not only with the emphasis on the “unique,” but also with the collectivistic tendencies and artistic aspirations that are of the essence in history writing. German students of theoretical economics received intensive training in historical fields at the same time; in addition, they lived in a country which even in the second half of the nineteenth century was not yet fully drawn into the capitalistic nexus, and they thus retained their attachment to an older economics of the all-inclusive “household.” The very terms Volkswirtschaft and Volkswirtschaftslehre (“national economy” and “national economics”), which were used by German authors, point in that direction; Karl Buecher’s theory of stages household economy, city economy, and national economy—viewed the later stage as an enlargement of the former. Roscher had defined the purpose of his work as “the description of what peoples and nations have wanted and felt regarding economic matters, the goals which they pursued and reached, the causes which have made them pursue and reach these goals.”32 Carl Menger later correctly pointed out that this kind of naive realism barred the road to the formation of scientific laws in economics since single economic units, not collectivities, were the carriers of economic action.33 Schmoller, in reviewing Roscher’s work, emphasized that, contrary to what is required for quantitative procedures, qualitative observation faced the difficulty that collectivities, not merely individuals, had to be analyzed; but, more sophisticated than Roscher, he added that “out of a thousand inexhaustible details” one had to grasp what is “important, typical, general, and to combine it imaginatively” (in Bildern).34 However, the differences between the “important,” the “typical,” the “general” are not further pursued. In another context, Schmoller distinguished between “exact causal knowledge,” proceeding from the parts to the whole, which explains immediate causal sequences, and a “teleological principle of reflection,” proceeding from the whole to the parts, which does not impart certain knowledge, but is indispensable for the elucidation of “ultimate causes and purposes.” The concept of “organism,” he added, was such a teleological, or idealistic, construct.35 Here, a linkage between Kantian idealism and neoKantian formalism becomes visible; but the approach is groping and eclectic, not synthetic, in character. 11

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Indeed, eclecticism marks the methodological approaches of the historical school of economics throughout. In his paper “Roscher and Knies and the Logical Problems of the Historical School of Political Economy,”36 Max Weber points out that Roscher (incorrectly) believed, as did his disciples Bruno Hildebrand and Karl Knies, in collective action as a reality in and of itself, rather than as a resultant of individual actions while he (correctly) conceived of historical generalizations as aiming at the significant rather than the generic; but Weber also showed that it was not Roscher’s intention to replace the generalizations of the classical economists, which are generic in character, with a historical typology and even less with historical descriptions of unique situations of an economic nature. What Roscher and his disciples, including Schmoller, disliked was the use by theoretical economists of the deductive, or philosophical, method, meaning the reasoning from general premises to either actual occurrences or policy propositions which would bend economic actuality to prescriptive rules.37 That this was not so much the procedure of Smith and Ricardo as the one of their doctrinaire successors, is here beside the point. What is decisive is that Roscher as well as Schmoller, far from intending to replace theory with history, believed rather that the application of the “historical method” would help economists to arrive at a better, that is a more general, theoretical formula in the future. Roscher thought that “Adam Smith and his immediate successors established the rule, but that the newer writers [i.e., historians and socialists] undermined it by means of a multitude of exceptions” and that the need was now “for such an enlargement of the rules that the exceptions could be included in it.”38 In other words, theory, instead of being an abstraction from reality, was to become identical with reality itself. Ironically, Roscher termed this procedure, which is as unhistorical as it is anti-theoretical, the historical or physiological method. In view of this stated position, Carl Menger is correct when he points out that the historical school of economics bears only superficial similarity to the historical school of law.39 It is true that the fundamental organicism of the representatives of the historical school of law was shared by the representatives of the historical school of economics, but there the similarity ends- or almost ends. Whereas consistently held organicist views—from Savigny to Sumner—lend themselves to conservative politics, corresponding views on the part of historical economists were compatible with a liberal stance in politics and especially with the fervent advocacy of welfare state measures in the field of social legislation. To be sure, the latter inclination might be interpreted as an emphasis on security versus adjustment and a spiral return, as it were, to the larger community,40 but there is overwhelming evidence in the writings of historical economists that their historicism is largely empiricism and their methodological approach naturalistic in character.41 Roscher goes so far as to speak of “natural laws” of history.42 This would tend to make of history a 12

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“positive science” along Comtean lines—a position which, in Max Weber’s view, amounts to a contradiction in terms. Later, Roscher’s parallelism of history and physiology was superseded by the parallelism of history and psychology, first under the influence of Wundt, then under the influence of Dilthey. The latter especially emphasized that whereas nature was “outside” of us and therefore “foreign” to us, “society was our world” because historical experience was psychic experience writ large.43 Even though Schmoller reviewed Dilthey favorably, Schmoller’s view of psychology hardly assimilated the elements of a sociology of “understanding” that were contained in it.44 For him, scientific psychology meant a science dealing with the varieties of verifiable experience. It meant empiricism, as opposed to rationalism, the diligent assembling of facts that speak for themselves as opposed to premature theorizing from one-sided premises.45 The one-sidedness resided in the assumption on the part of classical as well as marginal utility theorists that only one psychological factor, namely acquisitiveness, or self-interest, was operative in economic action. In his argument against Menger, Schmoller predicted a bright future for theoretical economics, but only “through the utilization of the entire historical-descriptive and statistical material, which is now being brought into shape, not through further distillation of the already a-hundredtimes distilled rules of the old dogmatism.”46 Menger agreed with Schmoller on the psychological foundation of economic phenomena, but insisted that the one-sided reliance on self-interest was proper scientific procedure.47 He further accused Schmoller of “detail-mongering” (Kleinmalerei) and predicted that no “exact theory” could be derived from it.48 This is undoubtedly true, but it is equally true that the emphasis on the unbiased attention to original sources, which the historical school fostered, led to the investigations of the Verein fuer Sozialpolitik, some of which Max Weber participated in, to Le Play’s independent investigation of workingmen’s budgets, to Tooke and Newmarch’s phenomenal History of Prices, and to the entire social survey movement, which, starting with Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London, contributed much toward the appreciation of social reality. If Schmoller were classified as a sociologist rather than as an economist, many of the pieces in his writings that are otherwise puzzling would fall in line.49 The connecting link is provided by institutional economics. Institutionalism owes much to romanticism and the historical school, especially to the trend toward culture history, which was born of both. It contains elements of universalism as well as empiricism. “Essentially,” says Schmoller, “political economy (Volkswirtschaft) includes government and society, custom and law; it cannot rest on the shaky foundations of dreamt-up robinsonades.”50 Schmoller missed the meaning of economy theory (or any other theory in the social sciences), which either isolates one factor in order to arrive at an “exact theory,” as Carl Menger had put it, or established an “ideal type” of social action, as Max Weber would say; but he focused the attention of social 13

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scientists on the need of applying to the full reality of social life the results gathered by the isolating and abstracting procedures of the theorists. Max Weber, in naming the collective work that he was to edit toward the end of his career Grundriss der Sozialoekonomik, and including his expanded essay “Economics and Society” in it, has thereby put the capstone on Schmoller’s work. The study of what is “economically conditioned” and “economically relevant”—in contradistinction to what is purely “economic”51—became the subject matter of sociology. Max Weber’s relation to Carl Menger and what he stands for is not so easily characterized. Weber mentions Menger at various points, if only obliquely and without doing full justice to Menger’s contribution.52 Where he meets him head on, he refers to him, somewhat darkly, as “the creator of the [marginal utility] theory.”53 Weber argued as a latter-day disciple of the historical school, trying to rectify the school’s regrettable inconsistencies, but his sharpest disapproval was directed against mistaking theoretical concepts for segments of reality itself. Indeed, Menger’s position served as a paradigm for that kind of misconception. To be sure, Menger’s criticism of the belief that out of the sheer amassing of facts would arise at some future day of glory the magnificent edifice of an all-inclusive theory had been much to the point. The empirical-realistic trend in theoretical endeavors, according to Menger, could only lead (a) to empirical laws, that is, the knowledge of factual regularities in the sequence and coexistence of phenomena, and (b) to Realtypen, that is, basic forms, or typical images of reality, with a greater or lesser scope for deviations.54 But such empiricism, he added, could not lead to the formulation of “exact laws,” according to which “what has been observed in one case must invariably recur, if exactly identical factual conditions are maintained.”55 Menger further insisted that the difference between the theoretical sciences of nature and of society rested with the phenomena they investigated, not with the methods they used.56 Weber agreed with the recognition, which is inherent in Menger’s statements, that it is equally impossible to replace the historical knowledge of reality with the formulation of “exact laws” and to arrive at “exact laws” by a mere comparison of historical observations, but he objected to Menger’s claim that reality, while not deducible from a single set of “exact laws” (as, for example, the laws of economic theory), might be deducible from an aggregate of such laws, that is, from theoretical statements encompassing all the segmental factors which are operative in human affairs.57 Indeed, the knowledge of the totality of a historical situation, including the causal relations involved, if at all attainable, cannot possibly be the result of a summation of theoretical principles because even if one were to heap concept upon concept ad infinitum, no semblance of life could be derived from such a mountain of lifelessness. Menger, as much as Schmoller, was under the spell of scientific psychology, whereas Weber thought that human motives, far from “explaining” the emergence and the operation 14

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of social institutions, could be made comprehensible only on the basis of institutional analysis. For that purpose, the tool of the “ideal type” was forged. Max Weber’s Sociology: A Positivistic Interpretation of Idealism As a student of law and economics, and especially because of his early interest in economic history and in the history of law, Max Weber could not help being sensitive to the implications of the methodological controversy among leading economists that agitated the scholarly community in Germany at the start of his academic career. The issue at stake was the reconciliation of the idealistically based, but at the same time meticulously accurate, historiography of the nineteenth century with the accepted scientific code, which required conformity with the laws of causality. In line with these intentions, the papers on Roscher and Knies attempted to demonstrate that the intermixture of historical and naturalistic elements was unsatisfactory from the standpoint of historical logic, not only—as Menger had shown earlier—from the standpoint of theoretical clarity. The paper “Objectivity in the Theory of the Social Sciences and of Social Policy” carried the argument against Menger; it was in this context that the concept of the “ideal type” was first developed.58 According to Weber, Menger was caught in a double prejudice: that naturalistic laws are possible in the establishment of cultural sciences and that such “exact laws” are conditioned psychologically, that is, in the case of theoretical economics, on the egoistic, or acquisitive drive.59 In contradistinction, Weber maintained that the propositions of abstract economic theory are a special case of a kind of concept construction that is peculiar to the cultural sciences. This does not necessarily exclude the formulation of theoretical propositions in the field of economics as “exact laws”; but it must be recognized that another interpretation is called for insofar as these propositions are relevant in a sociocultural context.60 In this case, economic theory does not express a law, but presents a model; it offers “an ideal image of events in the commodity market under conditions of a society organized on the principles of an exchange economy, free competition and rigorously rational conduct.”61 We are dealing here with an accentuation, or enhancement (Steigerung), of actually existing elements of reality—in this case of “rational action”—to the point of their fullest potentiality, amounting to the image of an “utopia.” This definition of economic theory at the same time defines the “ideal type.” The “ideal type,” then, is not a description of concrete reality, or even of the essential features of such a reality (eigentliche Wirklichkeit); it is not a hypothesis; it is not a “schema” under which a real situation, or action, is subsumed as one instance; it is not a generic concept or a statistical average. Rather, it is “an ideal limiting concept with which the real situation or action, is compared,” so that it may be properly appraised in line with the categories of “objective possibility” and “adequate causation.”62 In Economics and Society, where the earlier methodological disquisitions are presented in a condensed way, it is 15

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said that ideal typical constructions delineate “what course human action of a certain kind would take, if it were strictly purposive-rationally oriented, undisturbed by error or emotions, and if, furthermore, it were unambiguously oriented toward one single, especially an economic, purpose.”63 Again, as an example of such constructions he offered the concepts of the “pure” theory of economics. All of this amounts to saying that “rational social action,” exemplified in the ideally conceived economic situation, is the prototype of the “ideal type.” This does not involve a “rationalistic bias,” however. “Rational social action” merely serves as a base type while concrete social action, whether founded on erroneous calculation or decidedly nonrational, that is, traditional or affectual, enters as a variant.64 The term variant in this context does not denote a deviation from regular aspects of reality; it stands for all of reality, as against the “ideal type” which, as a concept, is deprived of “real existence.” If one holds that the principles of pure economic theory are universally valid laws, it follows that they are operative at all times and under all circumstances, if other variables are held constant, and that they cannot, for this reason, be considered as mere aids for the causal analysis of concrete reality. As already stated, this is not Max Weber’s position. In substantial agreement with Toennies, but also with such American sociologists as Park and Becker, Weber regards the market model as typical of a Gesellschaft type of society and therefore inapplicable to traditional societies. It is also considered inapplicable to a “charismatic” situation, which Weber characterizes as “specifically foreign to economic considerations” (spezifisch wirtschaftsfremd).65 The further qualification must be added that, of all historical societies, only modern occidental society approximates the typical “associational society” to a significant degree. Consequently, “pure” economic theory of eighteenth and nineteenth century derivation, in Weber’s opinion, expresses primarily the “idea” of a historically given society which is uniquely oriented on the principles of rational action, namely, modern capitalism.66 It would not be incorrect to say that “formal” and “historical” aspects converge in Weber’s ideal-typical construction, but it should be understood that the formal aspect remains subordinated to the historical one. The academic discipline of sociology may be said to rest on the assumption that the establishment of concepts and types of a formal nature, including “ideal types,” is an end in itself. In a wider sense, however, the validity of the concept rests with its applicability to concrete situations, in line with the principles of “objective possibility” and “adequate causation.” Consequently, concepts of this kind need not be verified in each and every instance, as would be the case if they were abstract natural laws. They are just as valuable if they are not verified, or verified only to a degree, because they are primarily heuristic in nature; they are formed ad hoc, and have no independent and timeless validity. They serve the purpose of making concrete cultural, or historical, situations accessible to human understanding.67 16

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Not every concept used in the investigation of concrete reality is in the nature of an “ideal type”; but the boundary lines between “ideal types” and “individual concepts,” or “relatively historical concepts”—to use Rickert’s term—are fluid.68 By “individual concepts,” we mean such clearly dated and localized concepts as the American Civil War or the battle of Gettysburg, which are the stock-in-trade of historians; by “relatively historical concepts,” or “historical totality concepts,” we mean concepts referring to relatively undated and nonlocalized collective phenomena, or configurations, like “the Protestant ethic,” “Chinese literati,” or “Indian castes.” Even such a comparatively broad and seemingly undated and nonlocalized concept as “ethical prophecy” (“missionary prophecy”) belongs in this context because it refers primarily to ancient Hebrew prophecy. Alexander von Schelting has pointed out that concepts of this sort have a double face: if seen from the outside, that is, compared with other historical configurations, they express the uniqueness of a single collective phenomenon; while if seen from the inside, that is, with reference to the multitude of events within such a configuration, they assume a rather general, possibly even a generic character. He further maintains that only the completely generalized concept of “rational social action,” and perhaps (by way of contrast) “traditional” and “charismatic” social action, deserves the designation as the true and only “ideal type.”69 (We called it, somewhat more cautiously, the prototype of the “ideal type.”) At this point, however, Schelting’s position is open to doubt. For while it is correct to say that terms like “economic man” or “price formation under the condition of free competition” represent neither absolutely nor relatively historical individuals, even these very general terms are not considered by Max Weber to be equally relevant to all times and places, but chiefly to a historical configuration called “modern capitalism.”70 One must therefore conclude that the “ideal type,” even in its most generalized expression, shares to some degree the characteristics of “historical totality concepts.”71 Schelting may be quite right in asserting that ideal-type concepts and historical-totality concepts should be kept rigorously apart, but this constitutes an extension, not an interpretation, of Weber. Four other such extensions, two constructive and two critical, may be mentioned here. One, by Arthur Spiethoff, puts the emphasis on “historical reality concepts,” or “real types.”72 According to Spiethoff, the multiplicity of socio-economic phenomena and their transformations may be encompassed by a series of “typical examples,” or “economic styles” (Musterbeispiele and Wirtschaftstile), which reflect not an exemplary utopia, as would “ideal types,” but actual configurations: they are “corresponding images” (Abbilder) of concrete reality. For every socioeconomic style a theory may be formulated, for instance a theory of capitalistic development, while a truly general theory would have to combine such partial and realistic, or historical, theories in highly abstract statements. A corresponding image emphasizes the regular as well as the essential features 17

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of concrete reality, but differs from our “ideal type” insofar as it must include “disturbing elements”; comparable to an artist”s painting, the “ideal type” must not. Spiethoff ’s economic Gestalt theory is a sophisticated elaboration of Schmoller’s empirical emphasis. However, while accommodating “exact theory” in Menger’s sense more readily than Max Weber would have been inclined to do, it is hardly the synthesis of scientific and historical approaches that Max Weber had in mind. Spiethoff ’s aim is to arrive at limited, that is, historical theories rather than at theoretically valid heuristic propositions. Contrary to Spiethoff and more in line with Schelting, Howard Becker attempts to reduce the involvement of the “ideal type” with time and locale by emphasizing its character as a tentatively “constructed type.”73 What is accentuated here is not so much the historical singularity of ideal-typical models as the pragmatic utility of bringing the greatest possible number of isolated phenomena under a concept of considerable generality. The “prediction of the recurrence of social phenomena,” irrespective of time and place, is the goal.74 This position is likely to lead away from Weber’s as well as Spiethoff ’s intentions, which are directed at the understanding of processes of historical significance but also of historical limitation. Becker admits that the social scientist can work only with relatively undated and nonlocalized types, but the example which he offers of a “constructed type,” namely the one of a “marginal trading people,” ranges far and wide across time and space. It is so general that it explains less of the concrete reality of Jews, Armenians, Parsees, Chinese, Greeks, and Scots than of the nature of marginality itself. One huge step further, Sjoberg’s “constructed type” has shed all tentativeness: the “preindustrial city” is an inflexibly constructed procrustean bed upon which every urban reality from Katmandu to Florence is stretched.75 The type has become an end in itself, and the reification of concepts, a danger that Max Weber strove to avoid, is an accomplished fact. Critically speaking, Carlo Antoni would seem to score a most telling point.76 Analyzing Max Weber’s sociology of the city, he maintains that the ideal type of the citizen, namely, the urban middle classes in medieval northern Europe, is “useful for the analysis of this population in its historical individuality and as such is no longer ideal but real”; and he concludes that sociology is thereby “resolved into history.” Indeed, the occidental city—and likewise modern bureaucracy—is seen by Max Weber as an incident in the development of modern capitalism, which, in turn, is characterized by a prevalence of purposive rationality in social action unparalleled at any other time and place in the memory of man. But the possible coincidence of the ideal and the real at one particular instance in history does not invalidate the usefulness of idealtypical construction in relation to a series of other instances where the ideal and the real are to some degree, or even widely, apart. If this is conceded, the convergence of historical and sociological research in ideal-typical construction is vindicated.77 18

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Compared with Antoni, Firey’s related argument is of considerable complexity. It resumes the culturally oriented opposition of the historical against the theoretical school of economics without, however, directly referring to Max Weber.78 Firey’s chief targets are the “methodologically rationalistic theories” of human ecology, especially the “pure” theory of the location of industries, as formulated by Max Weber’s brother, Alfred Weber.79 This theory is constructed along the line of Ricardian economics, assuming free movement of goods and services and rational, or, cost/price-oriented, social action. Firey admits that it is legitimate scientific procedure to specify certain premises as given and to conclude from these unknown variables even though the premises do not present themselves to direct observation. The theoretical ecologist, he says, may “limit himself to the study of those locational processes which would operate if space were only an impediment and social systems . . . only economizing agents.” But when Firey denies that this is a “pure” theory, applicable to all times and places and instead asserts that it is a historically conditioned “capitalistic” or “contractualistic” theory, he not only disregards the heuristic value of models, but also argues against himself. If “pure” ecological theory adequately describes spatial adaptation in a contractualistic value system, it is neither anemic nor historically wrong, as Firey, following Sombart at this point, asserts. Rather, we are confronted with the coincidence of a pure theory of rational action and a historical situation of high rationality. Even more than in the case of Antoni, such coincidence does not preclude the use of a pure or ideal-typical model for the analysis of situations that are culturally divergent. We must forego here further elaboration. What, we may rather ask, is the meaning of Weber’s gigantic effort in terms of the history of ideas? Talcott Parsons has outlined the development of the concept of “social action” from Alfred Marshall to Max Weber as a key concept in sociology, but in replacing typological conceptualization as a means with systematic sociology as an end he has departed from Max Weber’s notion of the role of sociology among the social sciences. Parsons correctly calls to mind Weber’s fear that “organic sociology” might induce “illegitimate reification,”80 but this hardly justifies the statement that Weber’s “general polemical animus” was directed against the “idealistic position,” that is, against the principles underlying the position taken by the historical school.81 Max Weber counted himself among the “children” of the historical school; he came to fulfill and not to destroy. He was a restorer of idealism; his objection against the representatives of the historical school was that they regarded empirical, that is, historical and statistical investigation as a means—even as the means—to the end of theory construction. For Weber, the roles were reversed: he believed concepts to be not ends in themselves, but means to the end of recognizing significant relations of an individualconcrete character.82 Consequently, Weber’s animus was directed against the assumption that scientifically valid concepts necessarily would have to be of a monistic, that is, a naturalistic character.83 19

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The reason why this has not been immediately evident to interpreters is that in attempting to formulate the non-naturalistic logic of human relations in history, Max Weber had to clear away a number of misconceptions. He brushed aside any attempt to mix idealistic and naturalistic concepts as merely demonstrating their mutual incompatibility.84 While he recognized the essentially holistic approach inherent in historiography, to designate it for this reason—in the Rankean and Humboldtian fashion—as “art” rather than as “science” appeared to him as a renunciation of historiography’s claim to the logical validity of its finding.85 Finally, he rejected the elevation of the Volksgeist to the dignity of an ultimate cause because he saw in it an unwarranted reification of holistic concepts.86 Social action remained the action of individuals; collectivities, like family, nation, government, joint stock company and so forth were defined as “probabilities” (Chancen) that under certain circumstances a certain kind of action may take place with regard to them, and no more.87 However, turning the argument the other way around, Max Weber conceded that in the mind of individual actors collectivities are real as a motivating force; he could have added that they are “real in their consequences.” In this view then, in Kantian fashion, collectivities are considered as ideas that while not “real” in any existential sense, nevertheless are necessary for our understanding of reality. In this regard, Max Weber follows Schmoller, not Menger; he goes beyond Schmoller in that he does away with uncritical empiricism, returning to the idealistic position, as it were, on a new level of scientific validation. The new level is reached in ideal-typical construction and involves the interpretation of holistic images in nominalistic terms. The question as to whether and to what extent Max Weber has succeeded in establishing this veritable coincidentia oppositorum as the cornerstone of the social sciences will provide work for social scientists for a long time time to come. Notes 1.

20

The writings of Max Weber, insofar as they are available in English, are listed in the “Bibliographical Note on the Writings of Max Weber” which is appended to Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber—An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1960). A complete bibliography of Max Weber’s writings in German is contained in the appendix to Marianne Weber, Max Weber—Ein Lebensbild (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1926). The lucid introduction of Talcott Parsons in Max Weber, the Theory of Social and Economic Organization, transl. by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947) should be consulted, although its main concern differs from the one pursued here. Recently, Parsons has moved much nearer to the interpretation arrived at in the present paper in his introduction to Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, transl. by Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). The preface of the translator of this edition and the appendix entitled “The Background and Fate of Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft” are likewise worthy of consideration.

Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1922). The best account in English of the revolutionary impact of romanticism on occidental thought that is known to me is contained in Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being—A Study of the History of an Idea (New York: Harper, 1960; first ed. 1936), chaps. 10 and 11, esp. p. 293. The German literature on the topic is legion. Carl von Savigny in Zeitschrift fuer Geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft, Vol. 1 (Berlin, 1815), 3ff. Carl von Savigny, Ueber den Beruf unserer Zeit zur Gesetzgebung (Heidelberg, 1814). Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Collected Works, Vol. 3 (London, 1792), 58ff. Cf. Otto Brunner, Neue Wege der Sozialgeschichte (Goettingen: Vandenhock and Ruprecht, 1956), 227, and Gunnar Rexius, “Studien zur Staatslehre der historischen Schule,” Historische Zeitschrift, 107(1911). Gentz translated Burke’s “partnership” as Gemeinschaft; Adam Mueller took over the term from Gentz, and Toennies from Mueller. Georg von Below’s views on romanticism, sociology, and history are found in Die Deutsche Geschichtschreibung von den Befreiungskriegen bis zu unseren Tagen (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1916); “Soziologie als Lehrfach,” Schmollers Jahrbuch fuer Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich, 43 (1919), 127ff.; “Der Streit um das Wesen der Soziologie,” Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik, 124 (1926), 219ff.; “Die Entstehung der Soziologie,” Deutsche Beitraege zur Wirtschafts-und Gesellschaftslehre, 7 (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1928). The connection of Durkheim with romantic thought is best indicated in Robert A. Nisbet, “Conservatism and Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology, 58, no. 2 (Sept. 1952), 167–175. It should be noted, however, that romanticism and conservatism, while historically overlapping, are not conceptually identical. There is the ferment of decomposition in romanticism, but also the desire for reconstruction; and decomposition is the work, reconstruction the aim of revolutionaries. Durkheim’s “conservatism” is therefore more in doubt than his indebtedness to romanticism. On the other hand, it should be noted that, while Durkheim’s terms of “mechanical” and “organic” solidarity bear comparison with Toennies’s terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, the value emphasis is on the former by Toennies and on the latter (“Gesellschaft” = organic solidarity) by Durkheim. One of the reasons why Durkheim’s affinity to romantic, and idealistic thought has been played down may be that German and French scholars used to be habitually antagonistic to each other. However, Charles Gide and Charles Rist, A History of Economic Doctrines, 2d ed. (London: George C. Hurop and Co., 1948), 392; or Histoire des Doctrines Économiques, 5th ed. (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1926), 462 draw attention to the similarities as well as the dissimilarities between Durkheimian sociology and the historical school of economics. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ueber die Aufgabe des Geschichtschreibers, Vol. 1, Ges. Werke (Berlin, 1841); cf. Troeltsch, Der Historismus, 243–277; Edward Spranger, “Wilhelm v. Humboldt’s Rede ueber die Aufgabe des Geschichtschreibers und die Schelling’sche Philosophie,” Historische Zeitschrift, 100 21

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11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

22

(1908), 54ff; Paul Honigsheim, “Schelling als Sozialphilosoph und seine Auswirkungen in Deutschland” Koelner Zeitschrift fuer Soziologie, 6 (1953–54), 1–11; Joachim Wach, Das Verstehen—Grundzuege einer Geschichte der hermeneutischen Theorie im 19. Jahrhundert, Vol. 1 (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1926–1933), 227ff. Leopold von Ranke, Die Grossen Maechte (Inselbuecherei No. 200, Leipzig, 1916). Ranke stressed the ascent from careful factual research involving attention to particulars to “imaginative reconstruction” (Anschauung) of an entire course of events; each is considered indispensable to the other. Cf. Sigmund Neumann, “Die Stufen des preussischen Konservatismus,” Historische Studien, 90(Berlin, 1930), 7ff. J. G. von Droysen, Grundriss der Historik, 3rd ed. (Leipzig, 1883; first ed., 1858); trans. by E. B. Andrews as Outline of the Principles of History (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1893). Henry T. Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol.1 (New York: 1871; first ed. 1857–61), 3. J. G. von Droysen, “Erhebung der Geschichte zum Rang einer Wissenschaft,” Grundriss der Historik, 47ff. Cf. “Natur und Geschichte,” Ibid., 69ff. J. G. von Droysen, “Kunst und Methode,” Ibid., 81ff. An excellent brief analysis in English of the controversy about nature and history, from Buckle and Droysen to Windelband and Rickert, is contained in Fred Morrow Fling, “Historical Synthesis,” American Historical Review, 9. no. 1 (Oct. 1903), 1ff. Troeltsch, Der Historismus, 509–530, 550–565, 572–596 et passim. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft [W.u.G.] (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1922), 1, 2; A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons trans., Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 88, 90. Wach, Das Verstehen, vol. 3, says that its “systematic character” differentiates forschend verstehen from ordinary procedures of understanding. Weber, Wirtschaft, 2; Henderson and Parsons, op. cit., 90. In the introductory note to W.u.G., Weber expressis verbis refers to Georg Simmel, Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1923), but not to Dilthey; however, cf. Renate Wanstrat, “Das Sozialwissenschaftliche Verstehen bei Dilthey und Max Weber,” Schmoller’s Jahrbuch, 70 (1950), 19ff. That Max Weber knew Droysen’s “Historik” must be assumed; but Droysen’s influence on Dilthey, Rickert, and Simmel is confirmed by Wach, Das Verstehen, vol.1, 261, vol. 3, 137. The influence extends both to the nature-culture dichotomy and to the concept of “understanding” that is derived from it. The literature concerning the “Methodenstreit” is fully quoted in Gerhard Ritzel, Schmoller versus Menger—Eine Analyse des Methodenstreits im Hinblick auf den Historismus in der Nationaloekonomie (Ph.D. diss., University of Basel, printed in Frankfurt, 1950); a lucid, brief account is found in Gide and Rist, History, 383ff.; a somewhat essayistic treatment in Joseph A. Schumpeter, Economic Doctrine and Method (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 152ff.; and in Edgar Salin, Geschichte der Volkswirtschaftslehre, 4th (Bern: A. Francke, 1951), 126ff.; cf. Felix Kaufmann, Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), esp. chaps. 10 and 16 and Wilhelm Dilthey’s concise statement

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23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Leipzig, Berlin, Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1921–60), 49. Brunner, Neue Wege, 42ff.; cf. Max Weber, W.u.G., 54, 189, 518 et passim and Ferdinand Toennies, Community and Society (quoted below), 54. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 1st ed. (London and New York: Macmilian, 1890), 67ff. August Boeckh, Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener (Berlin, 1817; Engl. trans. The Public Economy of Athens (London, 1828); A. H. L. Heeren, Ideen ueber die Politik, den Verkehr und den Handel der vornehmsten Voelker der alten Welt (Vienna, 1817; Engl. trans. Historical Researches into the Politics, Intercourse and Trade of the Principal Nations of Antiquity (London, 1833–34); G. L. v. Maurer, Geschichte der Markenverfassung in Deutschland (Erlangen, 1853); Geschichte der Hofverfassung in Deutschland (Erlangen, 1862–63); Geschichte der Dorfverfassung in Deutschland (Erlangen, 1865– 66); Geschichte der Staedteverfassung in Deutschland (Erlangen, 1869–71); N. D. Fuestel de Coulanges, La Cité Antique (Paris, 1864; Engl. trans. 1874; now available in a Doubleday Anchor edition); Henry S. Maine, Ancient Law (London, 1861); Village Communities in East and West (London, 1871). Ferdinand Toennies, Community and Society, trans. and ed. by Charles P. Loomis (East Lansing: Michigan University Press, 1957); the introduction and notes contained in that edition are particularly valuable. Cf. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York and London: McGrawHill, 1937), 686ff. Toennies renders an account of the origin of his theoretical convictions in “Mein Verhaeltnis zur Soziologie,” in Richard Thurnwald, ed., Soziologie von Heute (Leipzig: C. & L. Hirschfeld, 1932); cf. Rudolf Heberle, “Das Soziologische System von Ferdinand Toennies,” Schmollers Jahrbuch, 75 (1951), 385ff.; of additional interest is Ferdinand Toennies, “Ethik und Sozialismus,” Archiv fuer Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 25 (1907), 513ff. and vol. 27(1909), 895ff., because of the combination of idealism and socialism that is contained in it, coupled with a pronounced criticism of the historical school. Max Weber, Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1923), 15. The sentence is found in the opening chapter, dealing with “basic terms,” which remained untranslated. In “Mein Verhaeltnis zur Soziologie” Toennies rejects the imputation of value judgments in this regard, emphasizing that in actual societies Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft types of social organization are always mixed. But in the same paper, historical currents are indicated also and the trend of thought is not entirely clear. Max Weber, General Economic History, trans. Frank H. Knight (New York: The Free Press, 1950), 369. Menger’s case was ably presented to American readers in Eugen v. BoehmBawerk’s paper “The Historical versus the Deductive Method,” Ann. of the Am. Ac. of Pol. and Social Science (July 1890–June 1891), Vol. I, 244ff. Wilhelm Roscher, Grundriss zu Vorlesungen ueber die Staatswirtschaft nach geschichtlicher Methode (Goettingen, 1843), Vorwort, IV. Carl Menger, Untersuchungen ueber die Methode der Sozialwissenschaften und der Politischen Oekonomie insbesondere (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 23

Weber and Toennies

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

24

1883), 83ff. The English edition: Carl Menger, Problems of Economics and Sociology. Ed. with intro. by Louis Schneider (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1963) has been published after this paper was completed. Gustav Schmoller, Zur Literaturgeschichte der Staats und Sozialwissenschaften (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1888), 165; reviewing Roscher. Gustav Schmoller, op. cit., 139, 140; reviewing Lorenz v. Stein. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Wissenschaftslehre [G.A.W.] (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1922), 1ff. Schmoller, Zur Literaturgeschichte, 147ff. et passim. Schmoller’s position is not altogether clear. He accuses the classical economists of “rationalism” (144), “abstraction” (149, 249), and “dogmatism” (279), but he also accuses them of a merely “mechanistic” procedure (144) and he contrasts this procedure to the “teleological-dialectic” procedures of Hegel and his followers; the latter, as the former, are said to lead to nothing but “abstract categories” (144). He dislikes both Hegel and Ricardo and praises Roscher for using the “totality of cultural phenomena” as background for a “realistic,” that is, a “historically” based science of economics (144). Roscher’s argument against the “philosophers” is found in Das Leben, Werk und Zeitalter des Tukydides (Goettingen, 1842), 19, 24. It may be interesting to note at this point that Charles H. Cooley shared the distrust of Schmoller and his school against the “economic theorist” who appeared to him “like a man who should observe only the second hand of a watch; he counts the seconds with care, but is hardly in a position to tell what time it is.” However, Cooley also thought that the methods of the historical school are “too empirical to hold out much prospect of an adequate theory of process.” Sociological Theory and Social Research (New York: Henry Holt, 1930), 251ff. Wilhelm Roscher, “Der gegenwaertige Zustand der wissenschaftlichen Nationaloekonomie und die notwendige Reform derselben,” in Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift (Stuttgart und Tuebingen, 1849), 174ff. Menger, Untersuchungen., 200ff. Rupert B. Vance, “Security and Adjustment; The Return to the Larger Community,” Social Forces, 22, no. 4 (May 1944): 363–370. Roscher, op.cit.; Menger, op. cit., 100ff., 209ff.; Weber, G.A.W., 1ff., esp. 17. Wilhelm Roscher, Grundriss zu Vorlesungen ueber Staatswirtschaft nach geschichtlicher Methode, vol. 4 (1843), 2, 5 et passim. Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, 253. For an English account of Dilthey’s thought, cf. H. A. Hodges, Wilhelm Dilthey: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944). Schmoller also reviewed favorably Simmel’s Philosophie des Geldes, expressing satisfaction that this “psychological approach to socio-economic phenomena” had originated in Schmoller’s seminar. Gustav Schmoller, Zur Literaturgeschichte, 147; Grundriss der Allgemeinen Volkswirtschaftslehre (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1920), 117 et passim. Gustav Schmoller, op. cit., 279. Menger, op. cit., 71ff. Carl Menger, Die Irrthuemer des Historismus in der deutschen Nationaloekonomie (Vienna, 1884), 37.

Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences

49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

Heinrich Herkner, “Gustav Schmoller als Soziologe,” Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik, 118 (1922), 118, 1ff., esp. referring to one of Schmoller’s last works, Die Soziale Frage—Klassenbildung, Arbeiterfrage, Klassenkampf (Munich und Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1918). Gustav Schmoller, Grundriss., 283, 287, et passim. In terms of institutional economics, the point can indeed be made that collectivities, such as Maine’s “village communities,” are the units of social action and that such action takes place along traditional lines, not according to economic rationality; insofar as individuals act in this context, they do so as executors of communal decisions. Weber, G.A.W., 162, 163; Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 64, 65. Weber, Ibid., 3, 12, 42, 372 (“Die Grenznutzlehre und das psychophysische Grundgesetz”); Weber says that “Menger presented excellent ideas which, however, were not carried to their methodological conclusion.” Max Weber, Ibid., 187 (Shils, 87). Menger, Die Irrthuemer, 36, 37. Menger, Ibid., 40. Menger, Ibid., 39. Weber, G.A.W., 188 (Shils, 88). Weber, Ibid., 146ff. (Shils, 49ff.). Weber, Ibid., 187ff. (Shils, 87ff.); 131, 360ff. This is a slightly different way of putting it than that found in Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 819. Weber, G.A.W., 190 (Shils, 89). Weber, Ibid., 190, 191, 192, 194 (Shils, 90, 93). Weber, W.u.G., 4 (Henderson and Parsons, 96). This formulation is based on G.A.W., 371; cf. 130, 496. Weber, Ibid., 2, 3 (Henderson and Parsons, 92). Max Weber uses the word Stoerung, which may mean “variant” as well as “disturbance.” What is “disturbed” is conceptual purity. Parsons uses the term disturbance which, however, may give rise to misinterpretation. Cf. G.A.W., 496. Weber, W.u.G., 142 (Henderson and Parsons, 362). Weber, Ibid., 211, 360, not translated Weber, G.A.W.., 176, 192 (Shils, 75, 91). Weber, G.A.W., 170, 172, 191, 202, 203, 204, 212, 214 (Shils, 69, 72, 90, 101, 102, 103), 287, 370 et passim; Weber, W.u.G., 9 (Henderson and Parsons, 109). Alexander von Schelting, Max Weber’s Wissenschaftslehre (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1934), 333ff., cf. 73. Weber, W.u.G., 10 (Henderson and Parsons, 110); Schelting, op. cit., 356ff. “The historical significance of the capitalistic period and hence the significance of marginal utility theory (as well as of any other economic theory) for the understanding of that period rests with the fact that . . . under present conditions of life the approximation of concrete reality to the theoretically established principles is steadily increasing [italics mine], involving the fate of ever larger strata of the world’s population, and it appears that this trend will continue” Weber, G.A.W. (“Grenznutzlehre”), 371. 25

Weber and Toennies

71.

72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80.

26

Werner Bienfait, “Max Weber’s Lehre vom geschichtlichen Erkennen,” Historische Studien, (Berlin, 1930): 194, differentiates between “epochal phenotypes,” which are identical with “individual concepts,” “epochal genotypes,” such as “medieval Christianity” or “occidental capitalism,” and “ideal phenotypes,” like “marginal utility theory” or “ethical prophecy.” I would classify the latter among “epochal genotypes,” as would Schelting, but I am inclined to agree with Bienfait that Max Weber emphasizes the “ideal phenotype” in his methodological treatises, but tends toward “epochal genotypes” in his actual research. This may be a source of the “confusion” in interpretation about which Bendix, Max Weber, 281, complains. Arthur Spiethoff, “Die Allgemeine Volkswirtschaftslehre als geschichtliche Theorie,” Schmoller’s Jahrbuch, 56 (1932), 891ff.; and “Anschauliche und reine Theorie und ihr Verhaeltnis zueinander,” Edgar Salin, ed., Synopsis, Festgabe fuer Alfred Weber (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1948). Cf. Schelting, op. cit., 73. For an English version, see Arthur Spiethoff, “The Historical Character of Economic Theories,” Journal of Economic History, 12, no. 2 (Winter 1952), 891ff., and Frederick C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma, Enterprise and Secular Change—Readings in Economic History (Homewood, IL.: Richard D. Irwin, 1953), chaps. 25 and 26 (“Introduction to Arthur Spiethoff ” and “Pure Theory and Economic Gestalt Theory. Ideal Types and Real Types”). Spiethoff, one time assistant to Schmoller and the latter’s successor as editor of Schmoller’s Jahrbuch, has made a reputation for himself with “historical” theories in the field of business cycle research and real estate economics. Cf. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 816. Howard Becker, Through Values to Social Interpretation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1950), 106–114. Paul Honigsheim, “In Memoriam Howard Becker,” Koelner Zeitschrift fuer Soziologie and Sozialpsychologie 12 (1960), Heft 3: 3–8. Gideon Sjoberg, The Preindustrial City—Past and Present (New York: The Free Press, 1960), 21, 63, 108 et passim. Carlo Antoni, From History to Sociology, trans. Hayden v. White (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959), 182, 183. Cf. my review of Carlo Antoni’s book in Sociological Review 25, no. 1 (Feb. 1960): 120. My contention is borne out by Max Weber’s letter to Georg von Below of June 21, 1914, wherein he expresses the opinion that “what is specifically characteristic of the medieval city . . . can really be developed only through the statement of what is lacking in the other (ancient, Chinese, Islamic) cities.” He considers this procedure to be “the very modest comparative work” which sociology can do for history. The letter is published in Georg v. Below, Der Deutsche Staat des Mittelalters (Leipzig: Ouella & Meyer, 1925), XXIV, and is in part reproduced in English in Reinhard Bendix, “Max Weber’s Interpretation of Conduct and History,” American Journal of Sociology 51, no. 6 (May 1946): 518ff. Walter Firey, Land Use in Central Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947), 229ff. Alfred Weber, Theory of the Location of Industries, trans. by Carl Joachim Friedrich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929); cf. Firey, op. cit., 22ff. Talcott Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, Pure and Applied (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 81–82. However, the “functional” approach, for which

Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences

81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87.

Parsons pleads, is itself organicist in character and hence subject to a similar objection. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1937), 601ff., esp. 602. Max Weber, G.A.W., 205 (Shils, 106); cf. 168, 171, 185, 203 (Shils, 69, 72, 86, 101). When Weber argues against representatives of the historical school, he speaks with great respect, merely trying to rectify the logical inconsistencies in the work of the revered masters. This is done with regard to Roscher, Knies, Schmoller, Eduard Meyer, and also Ranke (G.A.W., 214). I am in agreement, at this point, with Albert Salomon, “Max Weber’s Political Ideas,” Social Research, 2: 368. But when Weber speaks about the “naturalistic prejudice,” and the “naive faith” of its addicts, his attitude is openly antagonistic, ranging from mild condescendence to sarcastic contempt. An example for the latter is the paper on “Energetische Kulturtheorien” (G.A.W., 376ff.), which is directed against the “allegedly exact sociological method” of O. Ostwald and E. Solvay and what Weber considers its “Comtist and Queteletist” inspiration. The difference between Droysen’s argument against Buckle and Weber’s argument against the epigoni of the monistic “faith” is that Droysen is apologetic while Weber is aggressive. Max Weber, G.A.W., 41. Ibid., 209 (Shils, 107). Ibid., 9, 10, 210 (Shils, 99, 102, 107). Weber, W.u.G., 6, 7, 9 (Henderson and Parsons, 102, 103, 107).

27

2 Ideal-Type Theory: Max Weber’s Concept and Some of Its Derivations Theoretically, Max Weber’s concept of the ideal type rests on the generalized concept of rational social action, but it tends to become a historical totality concept when applied to research problems. Taking this statement as a basis, some subsequent theoretical modifications of the ideal type concept are reviewed as well as some derivations from Max Weber that use the typological construct of modern capitalism and rational bureaucracy as a point of departure in research. These research efforts are shown to be Weberian in approach even if they deviate substantially from Weber’s findings. However, if the disturbing elements are incorporated into the concept, a corresponding image rather than an ideal type is bound to emerge. I The concept of the ideal type, as developed by Max Weber in his arguments against the economist Carl Menger, is seemingly a generalized concept; actually, however, it is embedded in a historical matrix.1 According to Weber, Menger was caught in a double prejudice: that naturalistic laws are possible of establishment in the cultural sciences and that such exact laws are conditioned psychologically, that is, in the case of theoretical economics, on the egoistic, or acquisitive drive.2 In contradistinction, Weber maintained that the propositions of abstract economic theory are a special case of a kind of concept construction which is peculiar to the cultural sciences. This does not necessarily exclude the formulation of theoretical propositions in the field of economics as exact laws, if it is only recognized that another interpretation is called for insofar as these propositions are relevant in a sociocultural context.3 In this case, economic theory does not express a law, but presents a model; it offers “an ideal image of events in the commodity market under conditions of a society organized on the principles of an exchange economy, free competition and rigorously rational conduct.”4 We are dealing here with an accentuation, or enhancement (Steigerung) of actually existing elements of reality—in this case, of rational 29

Weber and Toennies

action—to the point of their fullest potentiality, amounting to the image of a utopia. This definition of economic theory at the same time defines the ideal type. The ideal type, then, is not a description of concrete reality, or even of the essential features of such a reality (eigentliche Wirklichkeit); it is not a hypothesis; it is not a schema under which a real situation, or action, is subsumed as one instance; it is not a generic concept or a statistical average. Rather, it is “an ideal limiting concept with which the real situation or action, is compared,” so that it may be properly appraised in line with the categories of “objective possibility” and “adequate causation.”5 In “Economics and Society,” where the earlier methodological disquisitions are presented in a condensed way, it is said that ideal-typical construction delineate “what course human action of a certain kind would take, if it were strictly purposive-rationally oriented, undisturbed by error or emotions, and if, furthermore, it were unambiguously oriented toward one single, especially an economic, purpose.”6 Again, as an example of such constructions, Weber offered the concepts of the pure theory of economics. All of this amounts to saying that rational social action, exemplified in the ideally conceived economic situation, is the prototype of the ideal type. This does not involve a rationalistic bias, however. Rational social action merely serves as a base-type while concrete social action, whether founded on erroneous calculation or of a decidedly nonrational, that is, traditional or effectual character, enters as a variant.7 The term variant in this context does not denote a deviation from regular aspects of reality; it stands for all of reality, as against the ideal type which, as a concept, is deprived of real existence. If one holds that the principles of pure economic theory are universally valid laws, it follows that they are operative at all times and under all circumstances, if other variables are held constant, and that they cannot, for this reason, be considered as mere aides for the causal analysis of concrete reality. As was already stated, this is not Max Weber’s position. In substantial agreement with Toennies, but also with such American sociologists as Park and Becker, Weber regards the market model as typical for a Gesellschaft type of society and therefore inapplicable to traditional societies. It is also considered inapplicable to a charismatic situation, which Weber characterizes as “specifically foreign to economic considerations” (spezifisch wirtschaftsfremd).8 The further qualification must be added that, of all historical societies, only modern occidental society approximates the typical associational society to a significant degree. Consequently, pure economic theory of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century derivation, in Weber’s opinion, expresses primarily the idea of a historically given society that is uniquely oriented on the principles of rational action, namely, modern capitalism.9 It would not be incorrect to say that formal and historical aspects converge in Weber’s ideal-typical construction, but it should be understood that the formal aspect remains subordinated to the historical one. The academic discipline of sociology may be said to rest on the assumption that the establishment of concepts and types of a formal nature, including ideal 30

Ideal-Type Theory

types, is an end in itself. In a wider sense, however, the validity of the concept rests with its applicability to concrete situations, in line with the principles of objective possibility and adequate causation. Consequently, concepts of this kind need not be verified in each and every instance, as would be the case if they were abstract natural laws. They are just as valuable, if they are not verified, or verified only to a degree, because they are primarily heuristic in nature; they are formed ad hoc, and have no independent and timeless validity. They serve the purpose of making concrete cultural, or historical, situations accessible to human “understanding.”10 Not every concept used in the investigation of concrete reality is in the nature of an ideal type; but the boundary lines between ideal types and individual concepts, or relatively historical concepts—to use Rickert’s term—are fluid.11 By individual concepts, we mean such clearly dated and localized concepts as the American Civil War or the battle of Gettysburg, which are the stock-in-trade of historians; by relatively historical concepts, or historical totality concepts, we mean concepts referring to relatively undated and nonlocalized collective phenomena, or configurations, like “the Protestant ethic,” “Chinese literati,” or “Indian castes.” Even such a comparatively broad and seemingly undated and nonlocalized concept as “ethical prophecy” (missionary prophecy) belongs in this context because it refers primarily to ancient Hebrew prophecy. Alexander von Schelting has pointed out that concepts of this sort have a double face: if seen from the outside, that is, compared with other historical configurations, they express the uniqueness of a single collective phenomenon; if seen from the inside, that is, with reference to the multitude of events within such a configuration, they assume a rather general, possibly even a generic character. But it is dubious whether Schelting’s dictum is fully justified that only the completely generalized concept of rational social action and perhaps—by way of contrast image—of traditional and charismatic social action deserves the designation as the true and only ideal type.12 (We prefer to call it, somewhat more cautiously, the prototype of the ideal type.) For, while it is correct to say that terms like economic man or price formation under the condition of free competition represent neither absolutely nor relatively historical individuals, even these very general terms are not considered by Max Weber to be equally relevant to all times and places, but chiefly to a historical configuration called “modern capitalism.”13 One must therefore conclude that the ideal type, even in its most generalized expression, shares to some degree the characteristics of historical totality concepts.14 II Schelting may be quite right in asserting that ideal type concepts and historical totality concepts should be kept rigorously apart, but this constitutes an extension, not an interpretation of Weber. Five other such extensions, 31

Weber and Toennies

three constructive and two critical, may be mentioned here. One, by Arthur Spiethoff, puts the emphasis on historical reality concepts, or real types.15 According to Spiethoff, the multiplicity of socioeconomic phenomena and their transformations may be encompassed by a series of typical examples, or economic styles (Musterbeispiele and Wirtschaftsstile), which reflect not an exemplary utopia, as would ideal types, but actual configurations; they are corresponding images (Abbilder) of concrete reality. For every socioeconomic style, a theory may be formulated, for instance, a theory of capitalistic development, while a truly general theory would have to combine such partial and realistic, or historical theories in highly abstract statements. A corresponding image emphasizes the regular as well as the essential features of concrete reality, but differs from our ideal type insofar as it must include disturbing elements; comparable to an artist’s painting, the ideal type must not. Spiethoff’s economic Gestalt theory is a sophisticated elaboration of Schmoller’s empirical emphasis. However, while accommodating exact theory in Menger’s sense more readily than Max Weber would have been inclined to do, it is hardly the synthesis of scientific and historical approaches which Max Weber had in mind. Spiethoff ’s aim is to arrive at limited, that is, historical theories rather than at theoretically valid heuristic propositions. Contrary to Spiethoff and more in line with Schelting, Howard Becker attempts to reduce the involvement of the ideal type with time and locale by emphasizing its character as a tentatively constructed type.16 What is accentuated here is not so much the historical singularity of ideal-typical models as the pragmatic utility of bringing the greatest possible number of isolated phenomena under a concept of considerable generality. The “prediction of the recurrence of social phenomena,” irrespective of time and place, is the goal.17 This position is likely to lead away from Weber’s as well as Spiethoff ’s intentions, which are directed as the understanding of processes of historical significance but also of historical limitation. Becker admits that the social scientist can work only with relatively undated and nonlocalized types, but the example which he offers of a constructed type, namely the one of a “marginal trading people,” ranges far and wide across time and space. It is so general that it explains less of the concrete reality of Jews, Armenians, Parsees, Chinese, Greeks, and Scots than of the nature of marginality itself. One huge step farther, Sjoberg’s constructed type has shed all tentativeness: the “preindustrial city” is an inflexibly constructed Procrustean bed upon which every urban reality from Katmandu to Florence is stretched.18 The type has become an end in itself and the reification of concepts, a danger which Max Weber strove to avoid, is an accomplished fact. Talcott Parsons’s attempt to compress the totality of human behavior into five dichotomies called “pattern variables” is a different matter altogether.19 In using the word “dilemma” to indicate the element of choice that the actor has with regard to these dichotomies, or alternatives, Parsons makes it clear 32

Ideal-Type Theory

that the pattern variables are merely convenient schemata antecedent to the description and analysis of any kind or aspect of concrete reality. They are boxes, or drawers, which contain the ingredients—presumably all the ingredients—out of which the investigator is to construct the ideal-typical concepts that might then serve the purpose of describing and analyzing a concrete situation. In this way, Parsons proposes to overcome what he terms the “ad-hoc-ness” of the Weberian procedure which he believes cannot be mastered by less erudite scholars—and he fears that that is what we are. Indeed, in substituting the crutch of system for the insight of understanding a fundamental change is likely to occur. Where Parsons comes nearest to the systematic formulation of ideal types, he casts the capitalistic system in the universalistic-achievement pattern, the feudal system in the universalisticascription pattern, classical Chinese society in the particularistic-achievement pattern, and Spanish-American society in the particularistic-ascription pattern.20 In this context, Charles Loomis has drawn attention to the affinity of the Parsonian pattern variables to the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft dichotomy of Toennies which Max Weber expanded into the trichotomy of the traditional, rational, and charismatic aspects of social action.21 If this is so, Parsons is placed in the vicinity of Schelting inasmuch as he agrees with Schelting’s designation of the forms of social action as the only true ideal types. But Max Weber’s actual fusion of an ideal type concept and a historical totality concept is thereby abandoned, with the possible consequence that reality instead of being an object of investigation, is reduced to that which tests the preconceived model of a system. In overcoming “ad-hocness,” one loses flexibility. Critically speaking, Carlo Antoni would seem to score a most telling point.22 Analyzing Max Weber’s sociology of the city, he maintains that the ideal type of the citizen, namely, the urban middle classes in medieval northern Europe, is “useful for the analysis of this population in its historical individuality and as such is no longer ideal but real,” and he concludes that sociology is thereby “resolved into history.” Indeed, the occidental city—and likewise modern bureaucracy—is seen by Max Weber as an incident in the development of modern capitalism, which, in turn, is characterized by a prevalence of purposive rationality in social action unparalleled at any other time and place in the memory of man. But the possible coincidence of the ideal and the real at one particular instance in history does not invalidate the usefulness of idealtypical construction in relation to a series of other instances where the ideal and the real are to some degree, or even widely, apart. If this is conceded, the convergence of historical and sociological research in ideal-typical construction is vindicated.23 Compared with Antoni, Firey’s related argument is of considerable complexity. It resumes the culturally oriented opposition of the historical against the theoretical school of economics without, however, directly referring to Max Weber.24 Firey’s chief targets are the “methodologically rationalistic theories” 33

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of human ecology, especially the “pure” theory of the location of industries, as formulated by Max Weber’s brother, Alfred Weber.25 This theory is constructed along the line of Ricardian economics, assuming free movement of goods and services and rational, that is, cost-price oriented social action. Firey admits that it is legitimate scientific procedure to specify certain premises as given and to conclude from these to unknown variables even though the premises do not present themselves to direct observation. The theoretical ecologist, he says, may “limit himself to the study of these locational processes which would operate if space were only an impediment and social systems . . . only economizing agents.” But when Firey denies that this is a pure theory, applicable to all times and places and instead asserts that it is a historically conditioned capitalistic or contractualistic theory, he not only disregards the heuristic value of models—he also argues against himself. If pure ecological theory adequately describes spatial adaptation in a contractualistic value system, it is neither “anaemic” nor historically wrong, as Firey, following Sombart at this point, asserts. Rather, we are confronted with the coincidence of a pure theory of rational action and a historical situation of high rationality. Even more so as in the case of Antoni, such coincidence does not preclude the use of a pure or ideal-typical model for the analysis of situations which are culturally divergent. III There are interpretations and continuations of Max Weber in American sociological literature, such as the one by Reinhard Bendix,26 or explications of ideal type theory, based on Max Weber, such as the one by McKinney,27 which show to what extent Max Weber has been taken for granted in American sociology. But it appears more relevant in the present context to review some of the derivations from Max Weber which use his scheme as a point of departure in research and are therefore Weberian in approach although they may be not merely complementing but even contradicting Weber as far as the result are concerned. I am selecting for this purpose two related ideal-typical concepts that are at the same time historical reality concepts, namely, modern, rational capitalism and modern, rational bureaucracy. The examples, which could be expanded, are taken from the contributions in my book (together with Alvin Boskoff; see note 29). Concerning capitalism, Max Weber’s thesis that the Calvinistic forms of Protestantism provided the ingredient that brought about the modern, rationally conceived capitalistic enterprise as against earlier forms of commercialism and capitalism is well known. But the fact that Max Weber wrote his essay. “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” early in his career and the additional fact that this essay was among the earliest pieces of writing by Max Weber to be translated into English has tended to distort the subsequent scholarly debate about the subject. From his later publications, especially “Ancient Judaism,” the chapters on the sociology of religion in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 34

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and also from passages in the posthumous Economic History,28 it is clear that the Protestantism-Capitalism thesis must be seen in the context of the entire development of the Judeo-Christian West, in contradistinction to the BuddhistHinduist East. From the missionary prophecy of the Hebrews to the rational organization of the Benedictine and Cistercian monastic orders in the early middle ages, to the late flowering of ascetic Protestantism, and finally to the caput mortum of the secularized industrial society of our days runs a thread that is nowhere present in the genuine traditions of the East. However, whether these traditions are to be located in religion per se or, as Bryce Ryan maintains in his paper, “Social Values and Social Change in Ceylon,”29 in the family structure, the caste system, and the educational institutions of that country, is less relevant than that the traditions are present and that they are not conducive to the development of a capitalistic spirit. One must keep in mind, at any rate, that religion in the East is part of the total social structure, not a specialized institution, as in the West. Essentially, therefore, Ryan’s paper adds to the negative support of Max Weber’s thesis in the same way as does Weber’s own treatise on the religions of China and India. However, Norman Jacobs30 goes considerably beyond Weber insofar as he explores the possibility of a genuine capitalistic development in societies which have no part in the Judeo-Christian value system of the West. Discerning between precapitalistic societies that can or cannot develop capitalism, he arrives at the conclusion that the feudal, that is, the contractual institutions of Japan provide a traditional matrix within which a spontaneous capitalistic development could occur. Typologically speaking, Japan becomes thus comparable to Europe while China represents an “oriental” type of society that is not structurally conducive to the development of capitalism. Another successor to Max Weber, K. A. Wittfogel,31 approaching the problem as a student of the genuinely noncapitalistic “oriental” society, corroborates Jacobs’s statement, which transcends Weber substantially, but is entirely Weberian methodologically. The same can be said, within the European development, of Norman Birnbaum’s conclusion that the potentialities for the development of both capitalism and Zwinglianism were simultaneously present in the city of Zurich in the sixteenth century.32 If, as he says, the route in any case led in the direction of capitalism, Protestantism appears as a supporting element of considerable impact, but not as a root cause. To sum up, one can say that Jacobs complements the Weberian thesis scientifically while Birnbaum modifies it historically. Concerning bureaucracy, it must be understood that Max Weber saw the emergence of modern rational bureaucracy as paralleling the development of modern capitalistic enterprise and both as twin elements in the tendency toward the increasing rationalism and rationality that he thought characterized the totality of modern life. Consequently, Max Weber analyzed the phenomenon of modern bureaucracy both as a “historical reality concept,” 35

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contrasting it to earlier forms of public administration, and ideal-typically, that is, in accordance with the generalized concept of rational social action. It is likely that Max Weber’s intention was to construct a real type, but it cannot be gainsaid that what actually emerged was a highly generalized concept of the near-pure Platonic idea of a perfectly functioning rational bureaucracy, which has never existed in the past and is not likely to come into existence in the foreseeable future. Subsequent research was therefore bound to use the Weberian concept of bureaucracy strictly ideal-typically, that is, as a theoretical model which had to be complemented and modified in various ways. Among the examples that I am choosing for illustration, Robert M. Marsh’s “Formal Organization and Promotion in a Preindustrial Society” extends Max Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy beyond the confines of what Max Weber would have called a “modern” bureaucracy into an investigation of Chinese officialdom in the nineteenth century.33 He finds the Chinese system of promotion wanting in rationality inasmuch as advancement appears more strongly related there to extrabureaucratic variables (purchase of office, age, family background, personal favors, preferential treatment) than to bureaucratic variables, such as seniority in office and achievement. But while Max Weber might have been inclined to describe these findings as typical of a premodern patrimonial or praebendal system of administration, Marsh points out that comparable extrabureaucratic variables are operative in modern bureaucracies also.34 Similarly, William Miller, in his study, “The Business Elite in Business Bureaucracies,”35 extends Max Weber’s analysis to the administration of business and industry— the tertium comparationis being large-scale organization. He bears out Marsh’s contention about the importance of extrabureaucratic variables in modern bureaucracies by showing that administrative and technical competence was a less important factor in the development of leadership in American business organization than “knowing the ropes” in personal relationships. Possibly, we are here confronted with an intrabureaucratic phenomenon— clique formation—and the question arises whether a phenomenon of this kind should be considered a modification of a type or whether it would have to be included in a typological formulation. In the latter case, we are constructing a typical example or corresponding image of reality, including the disturbing elements, in Spiethoff ’s sense rather than an ideal type. The procedure would then be comparable to Robert K. Merton’s complementation of the ideal-typical model of bureaucracy by the introduction into the bureaucratic equation of the disturbing element of dysfunction.36 The very rationale of bureaucracy promotes the trained incapacity and other features of red tape. In this fashion, the concept of modern rational bureaucracy is reduced to a heuristic device. To be sure, this is what an ideal type—theoretically—is supposed to be, but it is not what the artist rather than the scientist in Max Weber intended to create in his culture case study of the industrial society 36

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of our time. With the concept of “dysfunction” an ironic, almost Kafkaesque, light is made to play upon the entire notion of a necessarily increasing rationality in modern life. In other words, increasing rationality appears more as an implicit institutional goal than as a reality that is possible of actual attainment. Consequently, we must not be afraid that we will ever reach the frightening castle of Kafka or Orwell’s 1984; the larger the scale of bureaucratic operations, the larger its irrational, that is, its informal and even its outright “dysfunctional” elements are likely to loom. However, to make the irony complete, it should be added that this would have seemed a comforting notion to Max Weber. Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

The concept of the “ideal type” was first developed in the paper. “Objectivity in the Theory of the Social Sciences and of Social Policy,” in Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Wissenschaftslehre [G.A.W.] (Tuebingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1922), pp. 146 ff.; cf. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, Max Weber in the Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, IL.: The Free Press, 1949), pp. 49 ff. For the genesis of the concept compare Werner J. Cahnman, “Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences,” in Werner J. Cahnman and Alvin Boskoff, Sociology and History. Theory and Research (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), pp. 103–27. Max Weber, G.A.W., pp. 187 ff.; Shils and Finch, op. cit. pp. 87ff., pp. 131, 360 ff. This is a slightly different way of putting it than that found in Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 819. Max Weber, G.A.W., p. 190; Shils and Finch, op. cit. p. 89. Max Weber, Ibid., pp. 190, 191, 192, 192, 194; Shils and Finch, Ibid., pp. 90, 93. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft [W.u.G.] (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1922), p.4; Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. by A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 96. This formulation is based on G.A.W., p.371; cf. pp.130, 496. Weber, W.u.G., pp. 2, 3; Weber, The Theory, p. 92. Max Weber uses the word Stoerung which may mean “variant” as well as “disturbance.” What is “disturbed” is conceptual purity. Parsons uses the term disturbance which, however, may give rise to misinterpretation; cf. Weber, G.A.W., p. 496. Weber, W.u.G., p. 142; Weber, The Theory, p. 362. Weber, W.u.G., 211, 360 (not translated); G.A.W., pp. 176, 192; Shils and Finch, pp. 75, 91. Max Weber, G.A.W., pp. 170, 172, 191, 202, 203, 204, 212, 214; Shils and Finch, pp. 69, 72, 90, 101, 102, 103, 287, 370 et passim; Weber, W.u.G., p. 9; Weber, The Theory, p.109. Alexander von Schelting, Max Weber’s Wissenschafstlehre (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1934), pp. 333 ff; cf. p. 73. Weber, W.u.G., p. 10; Weber, The Theory, p. 110; A.v. Schelting, Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 356 ff. “The historical significance of the capitalistic period and hence the significance of marginal utility theory (as well as of any other economic theory) for 37

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14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

38

the understanding of that period rests with the fact that . . . under present conditions of life the approximation of concrete reality to the theoretically established principles is steadily increasing [italics mine], involving the fate of ever larger strata of the world’s population, and it appears that this trend will continue” Max Weber, G.A.W. (“Grenznutzlehre”), p.371. Werner Bienfait, “Max Weber’s Lehre vom geschichtlichen Erkennen,” Historische Studien, 194 (Berlin, 1930), differentiates between “epochal phenotypes,” which are identical with individual concepts, “epochal genotypes,” such as medieval Christianity or occidental capitalism, and “ideal phenotypes,” like marginal utility theory or ethical prophecy. I would classify the latter among “epochal genotypes,” as would Schelting, but I am inclined to agree with Bienfait that Max Weber emphasizes the ideal phenotype in his methodological treatises, but tends toward epochal genotypes in his actual research. This may be a source of the confusion in interpretation about which Bendix complains. Cf. Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber—An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1960), p.281. Arthur Spiethoff, “Die allgemeine Volkswirtschaftslehre als geschichtliche Theorie,” Schmoller’s Jahrbuch 56 (1932): 891 ff.; and “Anschauliche und reine Theorie und ihr Verhaeltnis Zueinander,” in Edgar Salin, ed. Synopsis, Festgabe fuer Alfred Weber, (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1948); cf. Schelting, Wissenschaftslehre, p. 73. For an English version, see Arthur Spiethoff, “The Historical Character of Economic Theories,” Journal of Economic History, 12 (Winter 1952): 891 ff., and Frederick C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma, Enterprise and Secular Change—Readings in Economic History (Homewood, IL.: Richard D. Irwin, 1953), chaps. 25 and 26. Spiethoff, one time assistant to Schmoller and the latter’s successor as editor of Schmollers Jahrbuch, has made a reputation for himself with historical theories in the field of business cycle research and real estate economics. Cf. Schumpeter, History, p. 816. Howard Becker, Through Values to Social Interpretation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1950), pp. 106–14. Paul Honigsheim, “In Memoriam Howard Becker,” Koelner Zeitschrift fuer Soziologie and Sozialpsychologie (March 12, 1960): pp. 3–8. Gideon Sjoberg, The Preindustrial City—Past and Present (New York: The Free Press, 1960), pp. 21, 63, 108, et passim. Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 76–79, 80–84, 88; cf. Max Black’s critique of the pattern variables when applied to single persons—not necessarily systems—in Max Black, “Some Questions about Parsons’ Theories,” in Max Black’s, ed., The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), pp. 284–88. Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, IL.: The Free Press, 1951), pp. 180–200; cf. Parsons and Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action, Fig. 19, p. 258. Charles P. Loomis, Social Systems; Essays on Their Persistence and Change (Princeton, NJ: D. van Nostrand, 1960), p. 119, n. 7, quoting Talcott Parsons et al., Working Papers in the Theory of Action (Glencoe, IL.: Free Press, 1953), pp. 207–8.

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22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Carlo Antoni, From History to Sociology, trans. Hayden V. White (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959), pp. 182, 183. Cf. my review of Carlo Antoni’s book in American Sociological Review (Feb. 25, 1960): 120. My contention is borne out by Max Weber’s letter to Georg von Below of June 21, 1914, wherein he expresses the opinion that “what is specifically characteristic of the medieval city . . . can really be developed only through the statement of what is lacking in the other (ancient, Chinese, Islamic) cities.” He considers the procedure to be “the very modest comparative work” which sociology can do for history. The letter is published in Georg von Below, Der deutsche Staat des Mittelalters (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1925), p. xxiv, and is in part reproduced in English in Reinhard Bendix, “Max Weber’s Interpretation of Conduct and History”, American Journal of Sociology 51 (May, 1946): 518 ff. Walter Firey, Land Use in Central Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947), pp. 229 ff. Alfred Weber, Theory of the Location of Industries, trans. by Carl Joachim Friedrich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929); cf. Firey, Land Use, pp. 22 ff. Bendix, “Max Weber’s Interpretation.” John C. McKinney, “Constructive Typology and Social Research,” in John T. Doby et al. eds., An Introduction to Social Research (Harrisburg, PA.: Stackpole Co., 1954), pp. 139–98. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 3 (Tuebingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1923). Ancient Judaism, trans. and ed. by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale (Glencoe, IL.: The Free Press, 1952); W.u.G., pp. 227–356; The Sociology of Religion, trans. by Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963); Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Muenchen & Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1923), pp. 138, 295, 311; General Economic History (New York: Collier Books, 1961), pp. 120, 254, 267. Bryce Ryan, “Social Values and Social Change in Ceylon,” in Werner J. Cahnman and Alvin Boskoff, Sociology and History: Theory and Research (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), pp. 197–205. Norman Jacobs, The Origin of Modern Capitalism and Eastern Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1958); cf. Cahnman and Boskoff, op. cit., pp. 191–96. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). Norman Birnbaum, “The Zwinglian Reformation in Zuerich,” in Cahnman and Boskoff, op.cit., pp. 328–36. Robert M. Marsh, “Formal Organization and Promotion in a Preindustrial Society,” American Sociological Review, 26 (August, 1961): 547–56; cf. Cahnman and Boskoff, op.cit., pp. 205–15. Cf., however, Robert M. Marsh, The Mandarins: The Circulation of Elites in China, 1600–1900 (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), p. 185, where in conformity with Max Weber, the complementary statement is made that a patrimonial-praebendal type of administration as well as a specifically bureaucratic one may maintain a system of promotion on a basis of seniority and objectively determined achievements.

39

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35.

36.

40

William Miller, “The Business Elite in Business Bureaucracies: Careers of Top Executives in the Early Twentieth Century,” in William Miller, ed., Men in Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 286–306; cf. Cahnman and Boskoff, op.cit., pp. 389–404. Robert K. Merton, “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality” in Social Theory and Social Structure, rev. (Glencoe, IL.: The Free Press, 1957), pp. 195–206.

3 Notes on The Sociology of Religion by Max Weber As the best minds among the present generation in America turn from purely individualistic concerns to social considerations, the personality and the work of Max Weber assume increased importance. But recapturing Max Weber’s categories of thought in an English translation has been beset with difficulties. His essay “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” which was translated into English at an early date, has become justly famous; but, taken as an isolated piece rather than as a link in a chain of reasoning, it has tended to obscure the intentions of its author instead of clarifying them. Max Weber did not mean to say—in a reversal of the familiar Marxian thesis—that ideas “determine” the nature of socio-economic phenomena, nor did he mean to describe Protestantism as the originator of capitalism. He was more interested in functional interrelationship than in a simple cause and effect sequence. Exploration of Effects of Religion on Change Beyond this methodological concern, however, he strove mightily to make explicit to himself and to others the mainsprings of our modern industrial society. He found them in increasing rationalization, that is, in the ever more pronounced domination of life by the means-ends nexus. It was in this context that he turned to the study of religion, not because he saw in religion a prime determinant of events and processes in social life, but because he recognized in religion the most sensitive indicator of existential consciousness. Contrary to Emile Durkheim, then, who, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, attempted to analyze religion as a timeless principle of societal organization, Max Weber was interested in the changing manifestations of religion in historical time, and in the explanatory quality of religion for the study of social change. Now with the publication in a separate volume of the chapters on the sociology of religion, which form an essential part of Max Weber’s magnum opus, Economy and Society, we can begin to understand his conception of the role of religious thought and institutions in the development of modern society, that 41

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is, in the making of our own world. We can also see with greater clarity than in his Ancient Judaism the position that he understands Jews and Judaism to occupy in the general order of things. Still, one must be aware of the larger treatises by Max Weber—on the Protestant ethic, on the religions of China and India, and on ancient Judaism—and one must remain cognizant of the fact that Max Weber’s analysis of the social context of religion is only part of a more comprehensive analysis of social action in the contexts of law, politics, economics, classes, status groups, large-scale organizations, and so forth. Religion as Social Fact But the chapters on the sociology of religion, which have been brought together in the present volume entitled The Sociology of Religion (Beacon Press, London), are of decisive importance. Ephraim Fischoff (a sociologist and a rabbi) has provided the excellent translation as well as appendices containing a summary of Max Weber’s life and of the background and fate of his major work. The lengthy introduction is by Professor Talcott Parsons of Harvard University. Professor Parsons, himself a translator of significant portions of Max Weber’s work, and partly responsible for American interest in Weber’s “theory of action” and its ramifications in many areas of sociological concern, has given us here a new and mature interpretation of the structure of Max Weber’s thought. Parsons’s introduction is indispensable for serious readers. The Sociology of Religion does not deal with religion as an independent system of thought but as a manifestation of human strivings. The book is not concerned with the eternal “truth” contained in a religious system or with the metaphysical content of its symbolism, but rather with religion as a specific kind of social behavior, that is, as a social fact. This fact has many facets, but it also permits of generalized treatment. For instance, it is possible to say that the belief in the supernatural is universal; one may even say that no known society is free of it. However, the aid of the supernatural is sought initially in the interest of worldly concerns, such as health, sustenance, long life, and the fending off of dangers of all kinds. Many developmental paths open up from this point of departure. The principal alternative is between the maintenance of an established, or traditional order, and a substantial change in that order. Within an established order, the differentiation between the roles of the magician who is interested in ad hoc effects, and the priest who is interested in perpetuating a cult, is of particular importance. Change, on the other hand, occurs through a process of rationalization, which comprises both intellectual clarification and normative control. The agent of that process is the prophet. The magician and the priest are particularists, but the prophet is the bearer of a universal message. The further the process of rationalization progresses, the more universal the context becomes. 42

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Innovation of Charismatic Leadership The phenomenon of prophecy is crucial for societal development. How can the “breakthrough” of prophecy, the transformation of an established social order, be brought about? There must be contact between peoples, and there must be social unrest; but Weber takes these conditions for change for granted and centers his interest on the individual person who promotes the change. This person, who is neither traditionally nor legally legitimated, is said to be endowed with charisma, that is, the quality of leadership that he is thought to possess. Charismatic leadership marks a revolutionary venture. Prophets may claim to restore the meaning of ancient lore while they deprecate its current usage, and they may be lawgivers and teachers to the people from whom they spring. But, conceptually speaking, prophecy is innovation. Instead of customary action, that is, action oriented to what has always been done in a certain fixed and transmitted way, prophecy demands action oriented to what ought to be, that is, a systematized vision of “a new heaven and a new earth.” Here again, various versions are possible and are recorded as such in the annals of history. There is “exemplary” prophecy and there is “ethical,” or “missionary,” prophecy. Exemplary prophecy corresponds to the immanent, all-pervading concept of divinity which is characteristic of India and the Far East; this concept is individualized (not individualistic) and elitist in character. To follow the master is the end-all and the be-all of exemplary prophecy. It carries the disciple away from the pursuits of this world into the contemplation of eternity. Ethical prophecy, on the other hand, derives from the concept of a creator-god who is personalized, active and demanding. It aims at the transformation of man and his world, and results in the formation of holy congregations. The exemplary prophet is a vessel; the ethical prophet is an instrument. Ethical prophecy was born in the Near East, and the Hebrew Bible is not its only but is its most lasting document. Ancient and Rabbinic Judaism, Islam, the Christianity of the Apostles and the Church Fathers, Roman Catholicism and “ascetic” Protestantism all were modeled in the image of ethical prophecy and became bearers of an ever farther-reaching rationalization of life. In our time, the point has been reached where “rational social action,” deprived of its religious fountainhead, has become a caput mortum in the world, racing toward an undefined destiny. Where Religions Differ But there are important distinctions. Leaving out of consideration Islam, a warrior religion rather than a religion based on the middle classes, Judaism shares with Catholicism the emphasis on the individual’s activities in fulfilling particular religious injunctions as tantamount to insuring his own chances for salvation. But the ecclesiastical provision of grace was less developed in Judaism than in Catholicism, and this resulted in the Jew having more responsibility 43

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for himself. In this respect, there was greater affinity between Judaism and ascetic Protestantism, especially Puritanism. The Puritan felt himself to be among the “elect” who are called upon to do the work of the Lord. As he wanted to gain the certainty of predestination, he rationalized his conduct, with the effect that he not only gave evidence of his “blessed” status, but also amassed worldly goods, which he was not permitted to use for personal comfort. He had to administer them in the spirit of “stewardship.” Out of this spirit grew the modern enterprise, not capitalism as such—which is age-old—but its rationalized, systematized, depersonalized expression, the basis of the industrial society in which we live. Max Weber devotes considerable space to showing that Judaism, while preparing the ground for this development, nevertheless could not independently proceed along the same line as Puritanism. Role of Judaism for Weber What are the reasons for this? The first thing that comes to mind is that Judaism is frankly naturalistic as far as the enjoyment of wealth and of sex is concerned, and far from ascetic in inclination. Biblically speaking, the blessing of the Lord is upon the righteous, but it is not through their righteous deeds that the world is to be redeemed. However, according to Max Weber, the social status of the post-biblical Jew made redemption through righteousness all the more difficult to achieve. In Weber’s analysis, the post-exilic Jewish religion reflects the “Pariah” condition of the Jewish people. The Jews, defeated, subjected and humiliated, could not conceive of individual salvation except on condition that the entire social order be reversed, through the coming of the Redeemer who would restore Zion to its worldly glory and turn the tables on the Gentiles. True enough, with this goal in sight, every step in the life of the observing Jew had to be meticulously regulated and the entire people had to be raised to a middle class position of conscious rationality or, as Max Weber calls it, “lay (as opposed to priestly) intellectualism.” Quoting Philo, he reminds us that Rabbinic Judaism invented universal education. But the regulation of everyday life was more ritualistically than ethically conceived, and the world at-large was utterly irrelevant as long as Zion lay in ruins. Although the Jew had to conduct himself as if redemption could occur at any moment, nevertheless, such conduct could not “hasten the end,” which was conceived of as a miraculous event. Nonparticipation in Creative Growth of Enterprise If one adds to the preconditions the uncertainty of life in the ghetto, one understands why Max Weber comes to the conclusion that Jews have not creatively participated in the specifically “modern” features of capitalistic development, especially the growth of enterprise. In this regard, they were followers rather than initiators. To be sure, the role of Jewish financiers in the emergence of the modern state is of considerable significance, but Weber does not consider 44

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this aspect of the story at any length. Certainly, the Oppenheimers and the Rothschilds felt no kinship with popular movements and no call to use their worldly success for the enhancement of the name of the Lord. At best, what they were concerned about, apart from their personal fortunes and those of their relatives, was the reputation of the Jews. A quality of “strangeness” remained in the Jew’s relation to his environment. As a result of these complex developments, the prophetic message was stifled and the rational essence of Judaism was encapsuled in traditional behavior. Judaic scholars might dispute the correctness of Max Weber’s blunt characterization of Judaism as a “Pariah” religion, that is, a credo marked by resentment, even on historical grounds. Perhaps the best way of putting it would be to say that expressions of resentment in Judaism were found at all times side by side with the continued affirmation of a universalistic vision, but that the latter tended to be blurred by cries of anguish in times of persecution and humiliation. If Weber Were Alive Today Beyond deliberations of this sort, one can apply to Max Weber sociological categories that he himself has taught us. His theory of resentment ought to be understood as derived from unmistakably Protestant religious roots which, moreover, have been “transvaluated” in Nietzschean fashion. Yet, while an observation of this kind in a way would “explain” Weber’s classifications and conclusions, it would not necessarily invalidate them. It is probably more useful to pursue the line of argument that Professor Parsons sets forth. Parsons points out that considerable changes have occurred since Max Weber’s death. The “Pariah” status of the Jews has been modified to a significant degree in America, “not only through greater toleration of Jews by Gentiles, but also by a new level of Jewish acceptance of the legitimacy of the outside order,” that is, of society-at-large. When we speak of America, we speak of our society, not of the society of only the Gentiles. Max Weber already commented about the ready welcome extended by Puritan-minded America to “Reformed Jews” and those “trained by the Educational Alliance,” even to the point of absorption. He referred to the situation that he found in the beginning of the present century. To this must now be added the incorporation of Judaism as an active ingredient in the life and hopes of America. Indeed, the analysis can be extended a step further. There is no doubt that prophetic Judaism has been reformulated in the socialist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that Jewish participation in these movements has been conspicuous. Jews are likewise to be found in the forefront of a host of battles for human rights and social betterment as well as in the forefront of scientific advancement. If Max Weber were alive today, he would have to admit that this marks another “breakthrough” along the path of the rationalization of all aspects of human existence. He certainly would not disregard the religious roots of this development. 45

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But does recognition of this kind offer grounds for contentment? We should not delude ourselves into believing that a mere verbal claim for the possession of the prophetic message will carry conviction. One hears Jewish spokesmen refer to “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” but if official Judaism remains encapsuled in righteous self-defense, while the great movements of the day run to high tide, our socialists and humanists will go astray as the early Christians once did. Admittedly, the problem is not easy of solution, but nothing is gained by rejecting the tools which the sociology of religion as well as the wider fields of the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of social movements have to offer. Let us read Max Weber critically, let us build on the foundations that he has laid, let us confront argument and counterargument, but let us not dissipate our strength in a vain attempt to crawl back into the womb of the idealized ghetto, in the forlorn hope that the great events of our age will rush by, spend their force, and spare us. In a free world, Judaism will be a religion of freedom, or it will have lost its reason for existence.

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4 A Review: Mitzman’s Iron Cage Arthur Mitzman’s book (The Iron Cage. An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970]) starts off on the wrong foot. Max Weber never used the expression “The Iron Cage.” In his celebrated paper, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” Weber refers to the care for worldly goods, which is carried “like a light cloak, to be discarded at will” by the saintly men of the seventeenth century. However, in the nineteenth century, he continues, “fate has decreed that the cloak should become an encasement (Gehäuse), hard as steel.” Indeed, one does not carry a “cage.” Our spiritual nature is not “imprisoned,” as in a cage, in worldly concerns; they are a heavy burden, an encumbrance, an encasement. Furthermore, we do not carry a “housing,” as Mitzman indicates as a possible translation, besides the translation “cage.” Nor is it permitted, except by psychoanalytic guesswork, to conclude that the “encasement, hard as steel,” has anything to do with the home of Max Weber’s father in Charlottenburg. When Weber spoke in 1893 about the insecurity surrounding the seemingly “secure house” that the creators of the Bismarckian German Reich had built, he intended to arouse his listeners, who belonged to an older generation, to a recognition of the perils that threatened the nation. The analysis of this one passage (pp. 106–107), to which others could be added, demonstrates the dangers of an overenthusiastic psychohistorical approach. However, in other respects, the psychohistorical approach makes sense in Weber’s case, because of the sharply antagonistic personalities and attitudes of his parents and Weber’s personal involvement in the rift between them. The death of Weber’s father occurred a few weeks after the son had ejected him, in defense of his mother, from his newly established Heidelberg home. An oedipal complex was thus stirred up, along with other components of Weber’s contradictory personality. The result was an incapacity for sustained work that lasted for an entire decade. But more than an emotional earthquake was involved. The father’s despotic harshness in personal relations, combined

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with pliability in political matters and his ethics based on success, contrasted with the mother’s sternly puritanistic piety. But what does it all mean? Could the theory of affinity between Puritanism and capitalism be derived from the parental conflict? One would rather assume the opposite. I would be inclined to draw a conclusion, which is not entirely like Mitzman’s, that the powerful passions that tore Weber apart are a reflection of his double heritage. Weber’s sharp “either-or” position, which became more pronounced as the years went on, that one must choose between the ethics of the Mount and a cosmic love, that is, an ethics of conviction in personal life and an ethics of responsibility or of fortiter peccare in matters of statecraft, coupled with an assertion that there is no bridge between them, was an imprint of the culture that Weber grew up in. Lutheranism assigns God and Caesar to two different realms. As classically expressed in Kleist’s play, “Prinz von Homburg,” no compromise is possible in the Prussian tradition between the clear-cut rules of war and “lovelier sentiments.” To be sure, the cultural imprint became all the more incisive because of the parental conflict. Mitzman is very right when he emphasizes that the contradiction in Weber’s personality as well as in his work became more pronounced in the last decade of his life, after he had emerged from his oedipal trauma. He reacted to the deepening cultural pessimism of the era and the flickering romantic-heroic excitement that went with it. Much has been made of Weber’s stress on the power of religious ideas versus the Marxian stress on the efficacy of the socioeconomic substructure. Actually, that stress is only a footnote to the general theme of rationalization. From ethical prophecy to the ora et labora of the Benedictine order, then to Lutheranism and Calvinism, and finally to Capitalism and the inexorable growth of bureaucratic structures, runs a single thread of the “disenchantment of the world.” Weber’s sympathy, or rather his grim anxiety, is on the side of personality against rationality. There is a bifurcation of his sympathy in favor of both the vita contemplativa of the exemplary prophet and the vita activa of the heroic actor, the Buddhist monk, and the feudal lord. The Nietzschean as well as the Tolstoian influence is powerful. Either a philosophy of joyful strength or a philosophy of charitable compassion may be followed; in either case a philosophy of self-reliance, never a counsel of philistine mediocrity. It is not the aristocrats, but the plebeians, who adhere to the rules of rational calculation. Weber’s attraction to East European students and his close ties to the neo-elitist George-Kreis can be explained from this double aspect of personality revolt. “Charisma” in Weber’s sense, then, is the refuge of those who wish to escape from reason. And yet, as a political commentator, Weber knows that rationality rules in the affairs of this world and that one can disregard its requirements only at the peril of utter defeat. I don’t think that the desperate erotic adventure of Weber’s last years will influence his image in the history of thought. But one must take 48

A Review

stand on the problem of ideal-typical construction in the social sciences, and on the postulate of a “value-free” approach. In these regards, as well as in regard to the concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, a comparison with Toennies is called for. Mitzman says nothing about ideal-typical procedure. In my paper, “Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences” (Sociology and History, 1964), I have emphasized that the Weberian contradiction is noticeable in his methodology, especially regarding the ideal type concept, in that Weber attempts the coincidentia oppositorum of an interpretation of holistic images in nominalistic terms. By way of contrast, Toennies’s mathematical concept of a “normal type” is more sharply etched. Mitzman is outspoken as far as the rejection of a valuefree science is concerned. Surely, Weber’s concepts are overloaded with value ingredients (I have tried to show this for the concept of the “pariah-people”). One must admit that hardly any one of us can expect to escape temptations of this kind, but Toennies is right when he says in the first preface to Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) “that the deliberate avoidance of this ever-present danger is the very essence of the scientific attitude.” One must be grateful to Mitzman for his attention to the affinity of Weber’s and Toennies’s approaches. Mitzman starts out with the misunderstanding of “arbitrary will” as arbitrary power, but later in the text, he underlines the coincidence of Weber’s and Toennies’s notions on modern socialism as predominantly Gesellschaft-like versus primitive Communism as Gemeinschaftlike, as well as their agreement on related points. Both consider Gesellschaft or “rationality” inescapable and Gemeinschaft or “personality” in danger of attrition, but with a difference: Toennies’s recognition of the expansion of purpose and rationality is informed by resignation to fate and by the hope that the ravages of reason may be remedied by the perfection of reason. There is no such serenity in Weber’s comprehension of the situation, which instead is tinged with heroic despair.

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Part II Comparative Approach to Toennies

5 Toennies and Marx: Evaluation Toennies attested to his affinity to Marx in numerous passages throughout his writings, but in the process of incorporating Marxian notions into his “pure” as well as his “applied” sociology and combining them with other elements in his total system of thought, he has transformed them decisively. Toennies admired Marx as a thinker, extolled his worldhistorical importance, hailed the liberating power of the movement that his thought had inspired, and did not fail to criticize Marx where he felt that criticism was due: still, the integration, transformation, and re-creation of Marxian concepts, which Toennies undertook and which was difficult for Toennies’s contemporaries to understand, stands out more than anything else in retrospective evaluation. The passages that have been selected and which could have been reinforced by others, illustrate the transformation that has occurred within what seemingly is but a piece of interpretation. Considerations of space have prevented the inclusion of the nine points of critical objections that are elaborated in the concluding pages of Toennies’s booklet on Marx’s life and work, but they will be referred to implicitly in the summary that follows. Toennies uses elements of Marxian ideas in a different combination and thereby produces different results. Marx, Toennies points out, analyzes the capitalistic process as one producing surplus value in the course of the conversion of use value into exchange value. Marx admits that qualified labor (skilled labor, scientific labor, managerial labor) produces a multiple of the value of simple labor, and he counters the complication in the labor theory of value that arises from the introduction of advanced technology by means of the concept of the “average rate of profit”. Toennies accepts these theorems, but adds the observation that the combination by the manufacturer of a number of previously isolated workingmen and the addition of raw materials and machinery amount not merely to a simple addition to the total value, but actually to an enhancement of it—involving a kind of a “multiplier” effects—so that the productive power that the workingman develops in a societal context appears inseparable from the productive power of capital. Toennies further agrees with Marx (Capital, III, 1, p. 308) that commerce and commercial 53

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capital are older than the capitalistic mode of production and that profit is created in circulation, not only in production, but he misses in Marx the clear recognition that productive (industrial) capital is not essentially different, merely more effective and at the same time more problematic than commercial and lending capital. For the merchant, industrial production is but another means of employing capital—although one, to be sure, that has far-reaching consequences. On the other hand, Toennies argues that Marx, while emphasizing that the exploitation of labor by capital is a historical, not a universal phenomenon, nevertheless disregards the development of manufacture réunie (factory) from manufacture séparée (domestic industry) and ultimately from working for one’s own account. As a result of these and related considerations, Toennies concludes—beyond Marx—that labor and commerce are opposed yet complementary functions of social life, representing, respectively, concrete and equal value versus abstract and surplus value, spontaneous (essential) will and Gemeinschaft versus calculating (arbitrary) will and Gesellschaft. Toennies’s late statement in this regard (in Marx, Leben und Lehre, p. 135) agrees with his early statement (in: GuG, p. 57, Loomis, p. 80) that the worker and the artist, typologically, are men of Gemeinschaft while the merchant, as a trader or as production manager, is the man of Gesellschaft. In brief, it is the position of Toennies, which in this form is not found in Marx, that arbitrary will comes first, logically as well as historically, and that the emergence of trade and ultimately of capitalism is a structural sequence. In this fashion, Toennies turns the economic thesis of Marx into a sociological proposition. Toennies underscores the contradiction that is indicated, but not elaborated by Marx, namely, that the work of the entrepreneur in directing the course of the enterprise represents value producing labor and at the same time exploitation of labor. He concludes that both the enhanced productivity of labor and the introduction of labor unions into the picture can increase the wages of labor, if circumstances are favorable, but never to the extent that they reach their true value—“true”, that is, in the light of Marxian concepts. This can only be done, he contends, if worker’s cooperatives enter into the process of production on their own account. Toennies adds that Marx neglects the difference between production for the impersonal market and production for the needs of a living community because he is insensitive to the efficacy of moral decisions. He admits that Marx, in terms of his personality, is fired by ethical pathos; but in terms of Marx’s theory, the emphasis is on the conquest of political power by the proletariat as the contradictory, yet necessary, outcome of capitalistic development. It is not clear at this point whether Toennies fully appreciates the formidable, if disguised, ethical character of Marx’s theory. What he says is that the claimed “inevitability” of the outcome of the historical process is unsubstantiated, in spite of the learned terminology employed by Marx, and that his approach is in the nature of “prophecy,” that is, that it largely amounts to millenarianism or eschatology. What is meant is more 54

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than the observation that Marx’s prediction is not scientific in nature; it is implied that his political prescription is not sufficiently realistic. In a remarkable passage (Marx, Leben und Lehre, p. 144), which is based on participant (“empirical”) observation as well as on “pure” theory, Toennies arrives at the statement that few workingmen will be able to appreciate and act upon Marx’s ingenious theory of exploitation while almost all of them will readily agree on the obvious immorality of exploitation, that is, on the evils of imposed labor as against free labor. Indeed, the indignant reaction may surpass the limits of social class. Toennies adds that the efficacy of ethical incentives that, to be sure, grow out of the conditions of production, surpasses the efficacy of the isolated forces of material development. Only if a new man appears will a new society be born. If the foregoing is understood, the selections which are offered, their complex reasoning notwithstanding, will be seen to be falling in line. They are selected because they emphasize Marxian sociology rather than Marxian economics; consequently they deal chiefly with the “materialistic” interpretation of history and the dialectic approach that is essential to it. Toennies misses a clearly elaborated theory of history in Marx, but mentions three points which he believes are at least indicated in the Marxian system. First, the materialistic theory of history, so-called, has nothing to do with philosophical materialism: a variety of world-views may be compatible with it. What this approach amounts to, he argues, is rather a realistic, or anthropological, view of man as a being that exists and perpetuates himself and is engaged in the business of making a living; this natural-biological as well as socioeconomic substructure is the relatively independent variable, as against the more dependent variables of the legal, political, and ideological superstructure. Yet, Toennies pleads (Marx, Leben und Lehre, p. 141) that the oft-quoted Marxian statement that man’s existence determines his consciousness ought to be modified in the sense that man’s existential situation merely conditions (italics are mine) his consciousness in a more effective and immediate manner than is the case the other way round. Consequently, Toennies’ formula is both more comprehensive and more cautious than the formula ascribed to Marx. Second, the materialistic interpretation of history, far from being a weird invention of Marx, is identical with the entire trend of modern scientific thinking that comprehends man not as an emanation of God, or a transference, as it were, of the divine spark to the lower spheres, but as an animal-like creature on his way up to a possible perfection in the future. Especially, Toennies observes a basic—although largely unspoken—affinity between the Marxian emphasis on the production and reproduction of life and a philosophical voluntarism in Schopenhauer’s sense, on the one hand, and the Lamarckian or Darwinian descendence theory, on the other. Economics is here identified not so much with reflection and arbitrary will, but with the elementary need of securing one’s own and one’s family’s well-being, and hence with essential 55

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will. This makes for an interesting variant in Toennies’s thinking: economics in terms of making a living is emphasized here against economics in terms of making a profit. Third, the genetic, dynamic, and essentially dialectic approach of Marx is posed against the static and analytic approach of the classical economists. Dialectics implies that the completed form carries within itself the principle of its negation, so that labor is paid as well as not paid in the process in which exchange value evolves out of use value rather than being fixedly contrasted to it. Out of the transitions that occur in reality ultimately arises the synthesis: the free and natural man amidst the instrumentalities of the modern world. But with Toennies this is a possibility, not, as with Marx, a certainty. To be sure, for both Marx and Toennies, man’s decisions count for something in the shaping of his life. There is, however, a subtle divergence: for Marx, the process of production directs the will that is destined to change it, while for Toennies an extreme preponderance of arbitrary over essential will contains the chance, but not the assurance, of a reversal.

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6 Toennies and Spencer: Evaluation In his autobiographical account in Thurnwald’s symposium as well as in the second preface to GuG and elsewhere, Toennies traces the path of his intellectual development, as far as English sources are concerned, from Hobbes to Spencer and thence to Sir Henry Maine. Along this line, Spencer, indeed, marks a midway point. He shares with Hobbes the nominalistic and utilitarian basis although he lacks Hobbes’s remorseless clarity; rather, in tune with the eighteenth-century optimists, Spencer deludes himself into believing that competition among unfettered individuals will somehow bring about the harmony of the social whole. Maine, however, maintains against the classical economists that in ancient societies the community is the decision-making factor and the individual, at best, an executive organ. German romantic authors had reached similar conclusions. Spencer’s importance for Toennies rests with the fact that he provides him with a training ground on which to test the relative validity and the interdependence of these opposed positions. The formulation of Toennies’s own theorems is the result. Toennies hails Spencer as a man of many insights and as the initiator of sociology as a science, but he charges him with a lack of historical understanding and philosophical sophistication; besides, Spencer is said to have remained enmeshed in the prejudices of time and place. We will return to these strictures later. It is Spencer’s glory, according to Toennies, that he has made the idea of evolution the cornerstone of his sociological theory. Toennies does not condone Spencer’s mistaken equation of evolution and history, but he emphasizes the dynamic element in the concept of evolution as a decisive advance over the static fixity of the Hobbesian system. Toennies heartily endorses Spencer’s view that man has evolved from nature and remains part of it and that man’s culture, once it makes its appearance, is forever engaged in a process of becoming. Specifically, it is the differentiation of previously homogeneous matter that necessarily leads to integration into newly formed wholes, that is, to a true emergence. Toennies refers not only to Spencer’s major works in this regard, but also to such early papers as “The Development Hypothesis” (1852) and “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (1857). In Toennies’s 57

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view, Spencer appears as one of the pioneers of modernity in that he derives man from raw beginnings and has him move toward greater complexity with the passage of time rather than make him descend from angels and sink into depravity. Toennies even detects affinities to dialectic and romantic philosophy in this approach. He quotes, for instance, Spencer’s Principles of Biology (vol. 1, p. 13) where Spencer designates the concept of activity as the dynamic element of life, and also his last work (Facts and Comments, 1902) where he opposes the then conventional identification of mind and intellect. When Spencer goes so far as to add that “emotion is the master, intellect the servant,” Toennies recognizes a voluntaristic element, reminiscent of Schopenhauer. But he admits that Spencer had no clear notion of these connections. As a matter of fact, because of this lack of awareness, Spencer fails to exhaust the dialectical potentialities inherent in his approach. If existence is change, Toennies argues, then evolution must have its contrasting counterpart in dissolution. To be sure, Spencer admits (in First Principles, 6th ed., p. 474) that dissolution may at some time in the future undo what evolution has brought about, but he dismisses this consideration as being of little interest. This is amazing because, when it comes to problems of biology and psychology, Spencer notes that life and death, the appearance from the invisible and the disappearance into the invisible, are complementary and sequential processes; yet, he does not draw the conclusion that “the battlefield of life is strewn with dead varieties, genera and species” and that in the struggle for existence “death is the condition of life”; this is how Toennies puts it in the obituary article on Herbert Spencer (in Deutsche Rundschau, 194). With regard to the solar and sidereal systems, Spencer concedes that decline may gain preponderance over growth (although he adds that a new birth may start then and there), but not with regard to the varieties of man. It seems that Toennies attributes the omission to the bias of time and place, that is, to the fact that Victorian England, to Spencer, was the last word of progress and the promise of perfection on the way from status to contract. Indeed, Toennies observes, One must fear that this passionate predilection has dimmed rather than illuminated Spencer’s judgement about the existing interdependencies (in social life). To be sure, in his book The Study of Society he could not warn his readers enough about the various kinds of bias (religious, political, patriotic) in sociological reasoning; yet, one might say that, because he did not keep himself free from patriotic bias, he succumbed to free-trade bias.” (“Herbert Spencer’s soziologisches Werk” in SStuKr vol. 1, pp. 75–104) Toennies admires Spencer’s grand conception, the boldness of his effort, his persistence in execution, and the “magnificent probity”of his deliberations (Deutsche Rundschau), but he charges him not only with permitting his value judgments to interfere with the proper scientific interpretation, but also with 58

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blatant disregard, even ignorance, of the facts of historical development. When Spencer speaks of warlike and peaceful societies and the underlying attitudes of combativeness and sympathy. Toennies comments that the great turning-point where even the able-bodied and fighting man gets converted from war and hunt to regular work for the sake of his family’s subsistence is reached when agriculture can and must require his labor, no matter how the taming of domestic animals and a possible intervening stage of nomadic life may be related to it. From way back the peoples have known about the significance of this transformation and have acknowledged in celebrations, myths and symbols that their historical existence has started then and there.” (SStuKr vol. 1, pp. 82–83). Similarly, when elaborating upon the evolutionary development of simple, compound, doubly and trebly compound societies, Spencer proceeds from the lowest stage, as represented by the Veddah, Bushmen and Eskimos, all the way to the highest, in which are included ancient Mexico, Assur and Egypt, the Roman Empire, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia, but not the urban civilizations of Rome and Corinth, Florence and Nuremberg, which “by the silent and solemn agreement of those who are capable of thinking in historical terms” belong to the most important manifestations of human social life (SStuKr, vol. 1, pp. 96–97). Toennies observes that Spencer’s artificially constructed categories do not stand up in the light of factual investigation. The confusion, which becomes worse, confounded when Spencer shifts to the dichotomy of “military” versus “industrial” societies, derives from the exaggerated tendency displayed by him of carrying through a preconceived universal “scheme of development” in the face of “undeniably powerful facts”. Spencer, Toennies points out, does not conceive of the regularities—not to speak of the peculiarities—of specific, as against general, cultural developments; he knows nothing of the differentiations between aryan and semitic, oriental and occidental, southern European and northern European social constitutions and histories. He simply contrasts the voluntary contractual relations of a work-and-exchange oriented industrial civilization with relations that are anchored in coercion, military or otherwise. It is not even clear whether coercive savagery comes first in time, to be followed by a peaceful commonwealth, or whether the militant type is not equally pronounced among the later centralized states and empires. The most fruitful and most fact-supported version that Spencer develops is the one of a Rousseau-like trichotomy whereby a peaceful original stage is assumed which, after an intervening stage of development that is strongly coercive in nature, leads to a peaceful world civilization on a higher level of industrial organization. However, Toennies’s main argument against Spencer, and the one from which his major theorems of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft have been 59

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developed, is directed against the assumption of an original coercion and the false antagonism of coercion versus contract that still reverberates in the first part of Durkheim’s De la division du travail social, the general anti-utilitarian animus of Durkheim notwithstanding. Communality, whether in conditions of primitivity or in the midst of a high civilization, Toennies maintains, is not based on coercion but on natural cohesion; not on authoritarianism and punitive law, but on sympathy. This term, which is used by Spencer and derived by him from the utilitarian tradition of the Scottish moralists, could have been taken advantage of for a more adequate analysis of social cohesion than the one based on fear and coercion, if its initial individualistic connotation had been developed sociologically. Here is one of the major neglected leads in the Spencerian system, which, however, if it were to be made usable, would have to be purged of its inherent contradictions. A comparison of the introductory chapter of Spencer’s “Political Institutions” (in Principles of Sociology, vol. II, part 5) and the second volume of the Principles of Psychology leads Toennies to the conclusion that Spencer does not equate the advance of civilization with an increase in humanitarian attitudes, as might have been expected; if this is true, the way is free for the formation of the concept of Gesellschaft, in accordance with which, on the basis of contractuality and the means-end cleavage, regulation, coercion and destructive wars can become, and indeed have become, more pronounced than in the imagined early stage of savagery.

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7 Toennies and Weber: Comparison Toennies and Weber have much in common although there are differences that must not be overlooked. Both are typologists, even if their conceptualizations of ideal-typical procedure are not identical. As comrades-in-arms in the Verein fuer Sozialpolitik and cofounders of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Soziologie, both Toennies and Weber were strong proponents of sociological research; they engaged in significant empirical investigations, especially regarding the condition of the working class, and they advocated the establishment of institutions (Forschungsinstitute) in support of such investigations. Both Toennies and Weber held to the opinion that social science—like all science—would have to be “value-free”, in the sense that the phenomena under investigation must be studied according to objective criteria, regardless of whether one likes or dislikes the results of the investigation. That this goal is more difficult to achieve for the historian and the social scientist than for the biologist or chemist, makes the requirement more, not less, necessary in the social sciences. Toennies’s position is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the first preface to Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). As he puts it, he considers it natural and therefore unavoidable “that one’s conception of what ought to be determines one’s recognition of what is and has been, and even one’s expectation of the future,” but he insists “that the deliberate avoidance of this ever-present danger is the very essence of the scientific attitude.” Max Weber could not have expressed the gist of the matter more sharply. He agreed with Toennies on the principle that the proclamation of political or moral preferences and judgments ought to be clearly separated from scholarly evaluation and analysis. Both men abhorred the habit of some of their academic colleagues to pronounce as objective scientific truth what really were subjective political, or even emotional choices. Beyond their related positions on procedure, both Toennies and Weber highly appreciated the substance of each other’s work. This is amply documented for Toennies who, although considerably older, survived his younger colleague by a decade and a half, but it has been doubted as far as Weber is concerned. The suggestion that Weber meant to argue implicitly against Toennies has recently been made by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, in their three 61

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volume edition of Max Weber’s Economy and Society (vol. 1, pp. xcvi–xcvii). Their contention is that Weber expressed himself with “somewhat distant politeness”—and no more—about Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, and they continue: “there is no indication that the work was a major influence on his [Weber’s] intellectual development, and Economy and Society appears partly conceived in opposition to it.” This statement is substantiated by what Roth and Wittich call “the definitive critique of Toennies by René Koenig” (Koelner Zeitschrift fuer Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, vol.7, pp. 348–420); it is, indeed, an echo of Koenig’s elaborate, but lopsidedly conceived essay. If one goes from these evaluations to the data themselves, the most direct personal reference to Toennies, if not by Max Weber himself, at least by Marianne Weber (Max Weber’s wife and faithful companion) occurs in the latter’s Max Weber—Ein Lebensbild (p. 396), where Toennies, who stayed with Weber in Heidelberg during the international philosophical conference in 1908, is characterized as a “profound thinker” who, however, is “somewhat tongue-tied and awkward of expression” (“tiefsinnig und schwerfluessig”). In the very first paragraph of Economy and Society, Weber mentions GuG, as “a beautiful [not merely fine] work” to which the reader is referred as background material. And in a note to the discussion of “communal and associative relationships” (Roth and Wittich, p. 41), he explains that “this terminology is similar to the distinction made by Ferdinand Toennies in his basic [not merely pioneering] work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft; when Weber adds that Toennies has given these terms “a more specific meaning than would be convenient for the present discussion,” he simply means to say that he intends to use Toennies’s concepts for classificatory purposes only, and not in the sense of the fundamental distinctions that Toennies had in mind. Indeed, while Toennies formulated his basic concepts early in life (in GuG) and then elaborated upon them until he arrived at a final and more inclusive formulation (in Einfuehrung in die Soziologie), Weber’s early writings largely are either casuistic or methodological in nature; when he passed away, he had just about reached the stage of theory formation. In the older Part II of Economy and Society, written chiefly in the years 1911–1913 as well as in the 1913 essay “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology” (in Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Wissenschaftslehre), Weber used the term Gemeinschaft in the pre-Toenniesian general sense of “social group”; he considers Gemeinschaftshandeln as the equivalent of what he later called “social action,” Gesellschaftshandeln as any rationally conceived or organized social action. By 1920, according to Weber’s own testimony, which has been confirmed in a note to the translation of Weber’s text by Talcott Parsons, his terminology had become much more closely related to Toennies’s categories (Roth and Wittich, pp. 40 f.; cf. Henderson and Parsons, pp. 136 f.). Weber speaks in this passage of Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung (the processes of becoming a community or an association) rather than of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as social 62

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entities because he does not deal with basic concepts in “pure” sociology but with historical processes in “applied” sociology; yet his definition of a communal social relationship as “based on a subjective feeling of the parties, whether affectional or traditional, that they belong together” and of an associative social relationship as resting on “a rationally motivated adjustment of interests or a similarly motivated agreement” was entirely acceptable to Toennies. Likewise, Toennies did not object to Weber’s trichotomy of communal action, associative action and conflict; he merely excluded—for instance in his papers “The Nature of Sociology” and “The Divisions of Sociology”—consideration of “negative” relationships, such as conflict, from pure sociology and relegated them to social psychology, possibly to applied and empirical sociology. In the latter context, he used the term “pathology”. What distinguishes Toennies from Weber is that he goes beyond Weber’s methodological “sharpening of the knives”. He emphasizes (Einfuehrung, p. 6) that action rests on volition which is translated into action by thought, and that thought, in turn, differs with regard to its relation of means to end; if means and end are unified, we are in the presence of essential will, if they cleave apart, arbitrary will is exercised. Consequently, for Toennies, Weber’s purpose-rational social action relates to arbitrary will while value-rational as well as affectually and traditionally oriented social action are related to the concept of essential will. Essential will is considered in three stages: volition derived from liking and feeling; volition derived from habit, leading to action based on attitudes, chiefly those of conviction or faithfulness; and volition derived from thinking, leading to action based on conscious deliberation. When this point is reached, essential will is likely to merge into arbitrary will, which is volition derived from thinking, inasfar as thinking becomes separated from such motivations as conviction, faithfulness, conscience and the like and turns out to be directed exclusively toward a desired end. In a note to his paper “End and Means in Social Life” (SStuKr vol. 3, pp. 3–5), which is devoted to the memory of Max Weber, Toennies develops a related argument around the concepts of “ways” and “goals.” There are many ways to a goal: they are shorter or longer, beautiful or obnoxious, convenient, or exerting. Clearly, if possible, one prefers a way that combines the advantages of being short, beautiful and convenient but, if faced with a decision, one sacrifices what he can do without: the hiker has time and strength and accordingly he chooses scenic beauty and physical challenge while the businessman proceeds on the assumption that time is money and that to save unnecessary effort is worth some expenditure; an old man, again, will concentrate on convenience. It can even be that considerations of time, beauty, convenience, and cost are thrown overboard in favor of security. The counterimage to all these varieties of volition and decisionmaking is provided by what Toennies calls the Streber, meaning a “pusher” or a man dominated by ambition. His intention is entirely directed toward the desired goal, irrespective of the ways and means that are 63

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required to reach it; he merely wants to make sure he gets there. A further refinement of this type is a person who calculates means as costs and who must be satisfied with the probability, rather than the certainty, of achieving his purpose. He must necessarily include “luck” into his calculations, which thereby assume the nature of a “game”; in that case, again, he may stake everything on winning the game, choosing all the means, fair or foul, to that end. These pushing, calculating and gambling types then, to use William James’s telling phrase, are the hunters after “the bitch-goddess of success”. A further area of comparison between Toennies and Weber refers to the reality or unreality of collectivities. Toennies agrees with Weber that only individual human beings can engage in action in the sense of a meaningful orientation of behavior, but that collective entities, such as the unions and associations of men are never the less real (Einfuehrung, p. 8 ff.). According to Weber, collectivities are not merely “convenient and even indispensable” assumptions for cognitive purposes, they also “have a meaning in the minds of individual persons, partly as of something actually existing, partly as something with normative validity” (Roth and Wittich, p. 14; Henderson and Parsons, p. 102). In other words, Max Weber assumes that they are real as a motivating force; he could have added that they are “real in their consequences”. But Toennies goes farther than that when he asserts (Einfuehrung, p. 9) that the validity of social or collective entities is not merely admissible but is “the true and proper object” of “pure” sociology because men relate to these ideal cultural constructs as if they were real. In Toennies’s view, collectivities “exist” (1) in the will and thought of the participating subjects; (2) in the thought of outsiders, individuals as well as associations, who “recognize” collectivities as entities that are capable of willing and acting and (3) in the mind of the spectator, especially the analytical thinker or theoretician (“Zur Soziologie des demokratischen Staates”, SStuKr, vol. 2, pp. 304–353; cf. “Gemeinschaft und Individuum” SStuKr, vol. 2, pp. 200–208). The idea is that associations, municipalities, states (and certainly churches and religious bodies) have a moral as well as a juridical existence, even if one knows that the actors are individual persons (Einfuehrung, p. 10). One can say that in Toennies’s scheme, realism prevails in “pure” sociology while nominalism increases in importance as one proceeds to “applied” and “empirical” sociology. Within “pure” sociology, again, everything depends on whether essential will or arbitrary will prevails; modern individualism necessarily leads to the corrosion of the moral existence of collectivities and to their increasingly frequent conception as nothing but convenient juridical fictions. The difference, then, within the agreement between Weber and Toennies is subtle, but nevertheless significant. Weber attempts to interpret holistic images in nominalistic terms; Toennies considers nominalistic and realistic approaches to social relations and entities as equally “possible” (“Einleitung in die Soziologie,” SStuKr, vol. 1, pp. 65–74). For Toennies, “unity before individuality” and “individuality before unity” are 64

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separate thought constructions that interpenetrate each other in a variety of forms and degrees in actual life situations. A few comments need to be added about Toennies’s position with regard to Max Weber’s thesis on the relation between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Toennies agrees with Weber that modern capitalism, which is based on large-scale industry, has developed nowhere else but in the occident, but he emphasizes the common characteristics of the commercial spirit throughout the ages: the spirit of calculation, which is inherent in trade, according to Toennies, has merely culminated in the modern age. Toennies further emphasizes an approach which, after the publication of the Protestantism and Capitalism essay, became increasingly prevalent in Weber’s own thinking and which found its expression in the chapter on the sociology of religion in Economy and Society and in the pertinent passages in the posthumous Economic History, namely that socioeconomic realities are as important for the derivation of modes of religious expression as are religious ideas for the development of the attitudes that shape economic life. Toennies finds the common denominator of both approaches, as far as modern capitalism is concerned, in “rationalism”, possibly in individualism. His suggestion that Protestantism and modern capitalism have grown alongside each other dovetails with the conclusion reached by Norman Birnbaum in his study on the Zwinglian reformation in Zuerich (in Cahnman and Boskoff, Sociology and History, pp. 328–330) that “the route in any case” led in the direction of capitalism. The emphasis on the rationalistic spirit of calculation as the essential element in modern development is reinforced with regard to Benjamin Franklin’s maxim that “honesty is the best policy”. Rather than to derive the meaning of this sentence, as Weber does, from religious origins, in the sense that it is an emancipation from them, Toennies points out that the spirit of calculation—not of salvation but of economic advantage—that is manifest in that sentence is so diametrically opposed to the spirit of Christianity that it ought to be derived otherwise. He concludes that the development of the commercial and capitalistic society is most adequately explained by the increasing isolation of end and means, which is a consequence of the trend toward individualism.

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8 Toennies and Durkheim It is frequently said about Ferdinand Toennies and Emile Durkheim that their basic concepts, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, on the one hand, and mechanical and organic solidarity on the other are “about the same,” only expressed “the other way round.” Especially Pitirim Sorokin has promoted that idea, others have followed suit. In truth, however, both the point of departure of the two celebrated sociologists and the image of society at which they arrive are fundamentally different. This can be seen clearly from the documents that follow. Durkheim’s review of Toennies’s Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, which appeared in the Revue Philosophique in 1889, is one of the earliest and most competent reviews of that book. Toennies replied to Durkheim’s review in a lengthy note, appended to a review of Tarde’s Les lois de l’imitation, in 1893 and he reviewed on his part Durkheim’s De la division du travail social and Les régles de la methode sociologique. The two men were aware of each other’s work. Both attempted to establish sociology as a separate scholarly discipline, yet, on account of the different intellectual climate prevailing in Germany and France at the time, Toennies found himself primarily opposed to a latter-day idealism, Durkheim to individualism and utilitarianism. Both men emphasized the need of any society for “solidarity” (Durkheim) and “affirmative social relations” (Toennies). Both were concerned about the crisis of Western civilization. Both regretted the corrosion of earlier forms of Gemeinschaft and the weakening of “les forces intermédiaires” within the social structure, leaving only the detached individual and the superstate on the scene. However, they were far from being reactionaries; they had no thought of arguing for a return to what they were convinced was past and gone forever. But there the similarity ends. Sorokin—to mention only one author of many—is wrong when he asserts that Gemeinschaft is identical with “mechanical solidarity” and Gesellschaft with “organic solidarity” and that the terms are merely reversed. Mechanical solidarity refers to the external fact of societal restraint, Gemeinschaft is derived from the internal reality of essential will. The cleavage between organic solidarity and Gesellschaft is even more far-reaching. For the early Durkheim, “organic solidarity” is an evolutionary sequence to “mechanical solidarity,” marking the triumph of liberty over coercion, while for the later Durkheim, as Nisbet correctly observes, society of whatever kind 67

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and description is simply community writ large. The initial conceptual distinction between one solidarity and another is lost in a generalized sociologistic assumption of societal constraint. In Toennies’s scheme, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, as pure concepts, are ever-present ingredients in any society although in “applied” sociology there is a tendency for Gesellschaft-like features to increase with the passage of time. Durkheim’s review, written three years prior to the publication of De la division du travail social, is an early manifestation of his thinking. It reveals the fundamental difference between Durkheim’s and Toennies’s mode of seeing things.

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9 Toennies and Social Change* I A social change theory of considerable distinctiveness emerges from an analysis of the totality of Toennies’s writings, from Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) to his posthumous fragment Geist der Neuzeit (1936), but the pieces were never systematically brought together by Toennies himself. It must be understood that what now goes by the name of social change theory is by Toennies subsumed under the designation of “applied sociology,” meaning the application of the static concepts of “pure sociology” to the dynamic processes of history. In this sense, applied sociology is contained in pure sociology. Consequently, if one intends to clarify Toennies’s ideas on social change, one can start by saying that his entire system of sociology, based as it is on the “pure” concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and their derivation from the interplay of essential will and arbitrary will, ultimately amounts to being an attempt to analyze and explain the tremendous changes that have occurred in the history of European and European-type societies from the beginning of the Middle Ages up to Toennies’s own time and that have gathered even greater momentum in recent decades.1 Essential will and Gemeinschaft are earlier, arbitrary will and Gesellschaft arise from them. Essential will and Gemeinschaft are the “comprehensive theory”2 and the “main movement”,3 signifying the unity of life and thought in personality and culture. Arbitrary will and Gesellschaft are a differentiating or “contradictory” movement, an evolution as well as a dissolution, and—as it befits a dialectic scheme—possibly a link to renovation, a Stirb und Werde in Goethe’s sense. By a dialectic, as against a positivistic, scheme we refer to a view of human relations as a continuing and contradictory process rather than as an assemblage of separately demonstrable facts.4 Toennies was well aware of the dialectic character of his thinking.5 He defines dialectics as “the principle of the transformation of an organism,” adding that “inflexible opposites” are thereby shown to have only “relative validity.”6 To say that Toennies was a dialectitian does not imply, however, that he was a Hegelian. Like Marx and Engels, Toennies adopted Hegel’s methodology, but not his metaphysics. His reference was to the world of reality which, in turn, was to be understood genetically and dialectically, that is, “as being in constant movement, so that 69

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a given configuration of reality was carrying within itself the principle of its negation”.7 Already in the preface of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Toennies had defined the dialectic method as the truly empirical method, because, as he puts it, “being is doing”, “existence is movement”, and “transformation is the essence of reality”.8 However, the dialectic scheme, while perhaps first in motivation, is secondary in conceptualization, as far as Toennies is concerned. Conceptually, that is, in a system of pure sociology, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are ever-present and equivalent elements; as soon as their sequential aspect and especially their historical connotation are considered, they move over to the field of applied sociology. But Toennies’s position is this regard, as Rene Koenig has pointed out, is not immediately clear.9 It is worthy to note that the sub-title of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft in the first edition of 1887 is “A Treatise of Communism and Socialism as Empirical Forms of Culture” while in the second edition of 1912 the subtitle was changed to “Basic Concepts of Pure Sociology.” Indeed, one can read Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft at one time as if it were the analysis of a historical process and at another time as if it were a system of timeless concepts. But one must not forget that an author’s thinking, as anything else, is subject to change. First, there is the point of expediency. The terms communism and socialism as used by Toennies, lend themselves to multiple and potentially damaging interpretation and it seemed wise to place the emphasis differently. These terms could be misconstrued as ideological commitments rather than as cultural forms.10 Further, by 1912 Toennies’s thinking had developed to the point where he had come to discern between pure, applied, and empirical sociology. In retrospect, he saw the work of his youth in the light of this scheme and he decided that it belonged to pure sociology. Thus, from a psychological as well as from a tactical viewpoint, the shift in the subtitle is nothing to be amazed about. The creative writer, in the fire of creation, cannot be sure what it is that he creates. He needs somebody else—in this case Toennies himself at a later, more detached stage—to tell him what his work means in terms of scientific categories.11 Actually however, scientific categories per se cannot exhaust the wealth of associations that are contained in a creative piece of work, and Toennies has always been aware of that. At the very end of part 3 of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft and referring to its main concepts, he draws attention to the fact that “the artificial, even forced, character of these abstractions must always be kept in mind, as must be the close and continuing interrelationship between all those forces of Gesellschaft and their basis in Gemeinschaft, that is, the original and natural, the truly ‘historical’ forms of common life and will.”12 And he concludes by saying that this interpenetration of concept and reality provides the key to the solution of the most important problems of the growth and decay of cultures. For, he continues, “their very existence means change and as such development as well as dissolution of existing forms and 70

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configurations.” And finally: “All change can be comprehended only, if one grasps the need for the flexible application of concepts to the transitional nature of reality”. (My translation.) In the German text, Toennies uses the expression fluessige Begriffe, which sounds like a contradiction in terms. Reality is fluid, but a concept stands firm: yet, it is in the application of concepts that the scholar must be cognizant of the mixed and evasive nature of reality. The conclusion here is that the theory of social change belongs to applied sociology in Toennies’s understanding of the term and has to be treated in that context—but in the light of the concepts of pure sociology.13 Another way of putting it would be to say that the separation between pure and applied sociology, as the related separation between formal sociology and a culture case study, can be maintained only in the isolation and abstraction of thought, not in descriptive analysis. Concepts are not realities, and applied concepts (fluessige Begriffe) must adapt themselves to the changing realities to which they refer. Accordingly, as Toennies puts it, pure sociology “thinks” of social entities (Wesenheiten) as being static, that is, in a state of equilibrium, while applied sociology has to do with their “actuality,” that is, their dynamics, or development; and “the consideration of social structures or institutions (Bezugsgebilde), although belonging to pure sociology, already includes elements of that dynamics.”14 An even more pronounced line of separation, I believe, runs between those who use the data of history to confirm a conceptual system and those who use type concepts to analyze the processes of history. In terms of this dichotomy, Toennies’s position is as complex as it is seminal. He belongs to the latter category in intention, but to the former as far as overt expression is concerned. Toennies’s main work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, is meant to be the conceptual foundation for a culture case study, but the diagnosis of the developmental trends in our civilization, which it contains, is based on an understanding of the lasting mainsprings of human nature and on an analysis of the “normal” concepts and the “ideal” types of social structure.15 Toennies speaks of the “concrete, yet constructed” image of a type which in one way is more, in another less, perfect than reality.16 The type construct is more perfect than reality because it is pure and unalloyed, but less so because it lacks the color of life. Elsewhere, Toennies says that what is “sharply etched in concepts, is never found complete and pure in reality”, but that “we will have to understand reality in a first approximation and with the greatest clarity through ideally conceived schemata.”17 Transitions, constraints, and complications will have to be considered afterwards. This position anticipates the substantially more extended and conceptually more incisively formulated, but less synthetically oriented work of Max Weber. Toennies differs from Weber in his more equitable emphasis on both the historical and the rationalistic aspects of culture and society. His aim, in the 71

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midst of the Methodenstreit, is to arrive at “a new analysis of the basic problems of social life, so as to combine the opposing views”—not in a “synthesis”, but as equally “possible” elements in a logical and historical continuum.18 What Toennies has in common with Weber is that the culture case study, and thereby the theory of social change and development, is encompassed in the ideal-typical analysis.19 Of course, what changes and develops, as Toennies has emphasized in his polemics against Durkheim, is an actual civilization, not the type concepts.20 The point that I am trying to make is that the intricate interrelationship between concept and reality, which to trace is the task of analysis in applied sociology, must be kept in mind, if one attempts to tie together Toennies’s scattered thoughts on social change, from his early statement in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft to his last comment in Geist der Neuzeit. II The key to the understanding of Toennies’s theory of social change is the recognition that the principle of change is inherent in the contradictory nature of human nature, or what Kant would have called the asocial sociability of man: his innermost being wants concord, but the nature of his societal involvement produces discord, and out of discord arises progress.21 According to Toennies, both the Aristotelian statement that man is a social being and the Hobbesian thesis that man is by nature asocial, are correct.22 Man’s initial outlook and attitude, or his essential will, is based on communal, or shared, feelings, such as liking, habituation and memory.23 He is spontaneously creative, and the outcome is Gemeinschaft. In kinship and friendship, ideally speaking, man’s attachment is total and means and end are undifferentiated. But the initial togetherness, as it were, is disturbed by arbitrary or reflective will, that is, by thought that leads to single-mindedly purpose-oriented action, irrespective of the means employed. The cleavage of means and end is the decisive initial factor in the child’s mental development and in man’s ever more distant strivings until the machine age, into which we have entered since the waning of the Middle Ages, the enormously increased power of the isolated means over the thoughts and actions of men completes the process of separation. The alienation of man from himself, not only from the means of production, is inherent in the story of civilization. All that is required of arbitrary will is that it is unhesitatingly directed toward the desired end. In other words, the individual’s free choice of suitable means in the pursuit of his goals—especially commercial, political, and scientific goals—dominates his actions in Gesellschaft. Man, the possessive individual, is on his own, pursuing his separate happiness. What is depicted here, however, is not the world of the utilitarian economists where private vices, providentially, as it were, turn into public benefits. Rather it is Thomas Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes, the thought construct of a perfect nonsociety, out of which association through contract, ensured by enforceable 72

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laws, necessarily arises, if Gesellschaft is to be established.24 Initially, then, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are “normal” concepts, or “ideal” types, that must be kept apart in thought, as are their psychic correlates, essential will and arbitrary will. But in empirical view, these conceptually isolated forms of action and organization are to be considered as coexisting and co-effective as well as contradictory and opposing tendencies. The formal aspect of the terms used and their historical connotation are inseparable. According to Toennies, human societies—and specifically European-type societies—have developed and are continuing to develop, from Gemeinschaft, that is, from primitive agrarian communism, or communal village organization, through “individualism”, to Gesellschaft, that is, an associational and ultimately a planned society. Thus, we are led to comprehend what seemed confusing to René Koenig, namely that Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are “basic concepts of pure sociology” while, at the same time, village communism and ecumenical socialism are “empirical forms of culture”. They are one and the same thing, viewed differently. In the context of Toennies’s conception of society, individualism, or the state of being an individual, provides the lever for social change because individualism is derived from the nature of thought itself, which forever questions the world of facts and thereby dissolves it. As he puts it, “it is the factor of thought and hence of reason that provides the dynamic element in the development of culture, as it does in the intellectual development of every human being.”25 As soon as man begins to think, he loses his paradisiac innocence. He changes not only the objects of thought, he also transforms his own nature. He becomes detached from the unity of life and thought that is his original nature and enters into an ever-deepening state of dissociation; he remains in that state as long as thought, as one might say, has not become his “second nature.”26 On the last page of his essay on “Custom,” Toennies puts it as follows: “The more we free ourselves from custom and the freer we become in our patterns of behavior, the more we stand in need of a consciously conceived ethic . . . a self-identification of reason” (own translation).27 At another point, Toennies refers to Rousseau’s (in comparison to Hegel) “deeper trichotomy” of overcoming the ill effects of culture by a further development of culture and ultimately by a return to nature on a higher level.28 In other words, against the ravages of reason there is only one remedy: the perfection of reason. For thought represents the dialectic principle of negation and transformation, the antithesis that contradicts the thesis and carries it forward to a synthetic unity of antagonistic components. But thought, while an agent of change, is only a fleeting moment in time and space. Consequently, in the history of the Western world—which may well serve as a model for history in a wider sense—individualism does not mark a fixed period; it is rather the “ideal limiting point” in the process that 73

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leads from communal village organization to a contractual and eventually to a planned, that is, an associational society. This is how Toennies puts the matter in retrospect, in his autobiographical account in Thurnwald’s symposium.29 But he assures the reader that he had the same process in mind with his comment at the conclusion of the preface to the first edition of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, namely, that “there is no individualism in history and culture, except as it emanates from Gemeinschaft and remains conditioned by it, or as it brings about and sustains Gesellschaft. Such contradictory relation of individual man to the whole of mankind constitutes the pure problem.”30 In terms of applied sociology, as in social change theory, we would have to formulate conversely. We would have to say that contradiction and transformation are immanent in the human condition, both on the level of the person and on the level of society and/or culture. However, in establishing consciousness, calculation, and attention to purpose as the elements making for change, we have not yet confronted the question that is crucial in social change theory, namely, how do these elements become operative? How do they become an effective force in history? We must remember at this point that Toennies both accepted and complemented the Hobbesian view of the origin of society. Hobbes took his point of departure from what he considered a “natural” condition of unmitigated anarchy in which “free” individuals, each seeking his advantage, were pitted against each other; out of this competitive condition, he deduced, arose the need for contract, law, and dominion, that is, for societal order. Toennies objected that this was the rationale of Gesellschaft, or associational society, but not of all society, that another and earlier state of societal cohesion must be logically assumed, and that it can be delineated historically. This is the state of Gemeinschaft, which Henry Sumner Maine, to whom Toennies refers, had designated as status, as contrasted to contract.31 It is a state of belonging and natural cohesion, where means and end, life and thought—Wille and Vorstellung in Schopenhauer’s philosophy—are dwelling together in unison.32 If this is so, society can be based on the Gemeinschaft as well as on the Gesellschaft principle, and it is actually based on both.33 In a given situation, the question is not to be put in terms of either-or, but in terms of prevalence, both genetically and structurally. Gemeinschaft is unity prior to the rise of individuality, Gesellschaft is individuality prior to establishment of unity.34 In Gemeinschaft, unity is a point of departure, an existential fact, in Gesellschaft unity is deliberately constructed. If Gemeinschaft weakens, to the extent that it weakens, Gesellschaft must take its place. Viewed in this way, Toennies maintains, Hobbes is entirely right in assuming a rationalistic and calculating spirit as the core element in modern society. From this statement in pure sociology derives the question in applied sociology: how has this prevalence been established? How has it come about that the strength of Gemeinschaft has been corroded and that the values of Gesellschaft have 74

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become dominant? The question is addressed to the history of the last few centuries, which Toennies calls Neuzeit but, as Robert Nisbet has observed, mutatis mutandis is applicable to all social change wherever and whenever it occurs.35 At this point, a theory of immanent social change is to be complemented by an external theory. III Toennies has specified his position in this regard in a variety of passages throughout his writings. Several layers can be discerned in the total argument. The initial position has been indicated above, namely that essential will and arbitrary will and their manifestations in Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are essences in pure sociology, but processes in applied sociology. Psychologically, the process of change is set in motion by the quest for knowledge, as in the story of Adam’s and Eve’s being expelled from Paradise, but sociologically the culprit is trade.36 This statement follows from the premises: among kinsmen, neighbors, and friends, no weighing of advantages and disadvantages is permissible. They act, as Toennies has emphasized against Tarde, under the impact of “a common will, or spirit, which surrounds the individual like a living substance” (ein Lebenselement) and this common will, in turn, rests on the similarity of the conditions in which it originates and develops in the individuals concerned.” 37 Consequently, kinsmen (I consider the concepts of neighbor and friend as initially included in the concept of kinsman) are agreed upon their mutual rights and obligations. As the validity of these rights and obligations is not questioned, they are considered inviolable and “sacred.”38 But the trader and the native are united by no such bond. The trader is a stranger, a man who enters the magic circle from the outside; in the context of the society where he plies his trade, he is a detached individual.39 Even where the trader is not an actual stranger, says Toennies, anticipating Simmel, he is regarded as one.40 In the larger society, he stands outside the confines of Gemeinschaft. As an outsider, he is a force for transformation, dissolution, and isolation,41 “the first thinking and free human being to appear in the normal development of human life.”42 The trader introduces into societal relations the revolutionary element of reflection and calculation which leads from contact to contract, and in the course of time to a far-reaching transformation of human relations, as a result of which, in the words of Adam Smith, whom Toennies quotes, “everyman becomes a merchant.”43 To the merchant, typologically conceived, all those with whom he trades, or potentially trades, are means to ends,44 until the point is reached where the exchange relation has become so pervasive that ever so often, even when we believe to have gained a friend, we are made to realize that we have merely struck a bargain. It is not entirely clear whether for Toennies the fall of man from communality through reflection to contract reverberates through time or whether it 75

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is a process specifically inherent in “the spirit of the modern age.” The former would seem to be the case, if one considers such passages as the footnote about Durkheim45 and the first footnote to the paper on “Zweck und Mittel im sozialen Leben” (End and Means in Social Life)46 where both trade and war as singularly goal-oriented activities are held responsible for revolutionary transformations. Toennies recognizes that construction and destruction are children of the same spirit. At this point, we touch upon one of the linkages between pure and applied sociology. But from other and more numerous passages, it appears that the author’s intention primarily was to do a culture case study of capitalistic society, as it developed in Europe since the High Middle Ages, and to contrast it not only to the society of the village, the manor house, and the country town of the early Middle Ages, out of which it grew, but also to the culturally remote, yet related phenomenon of the polis of antiquity.47 Toennies rejects the conventional division of modern history into antiquity, the Middle Ages and the modern age. Mediterranean antiquity for him represents a closed circle of cultural development, with its own specific antiquity, middle ages, and “modern” period, while the European Middle Ages and the newer centuries up to the present time (including the expansion of Europe to other continents) are two sequential chapters in a new and unified development which has yet to run its course. To be sure, the high cultures of antiquity and of Europe are not as rigidly separated as they would be with Oswald Spengler; there is a variety of connections and continuations, but the main point is that the Middle Ages, and the modern age be understood as merely two phases of one and the same development in history. Indeed, in sociological terms, the line of division between the European world and the world of antiquity is sharp and clear. The city of antiquity, as Fustel de Coulanges (who was well known to Toennies) has shown, although overarching clans and phratries, was centered around the temple compound, not to speak of the Chinese city that remained an agglomeration of clans; the city of the Middle Ages was centered around the marketplace and its guilds were primarily economic institutions. In this respect, the “modern age” is adumbrated in the Middle Ages. However, there is an internal dialectic to be discerned. The Middle Ages, at least up to the High Middle Ages, were predominantly, if by no means exclusively, Gemeinschaftlike, the modern centuries are increasingly Gesellschaft-like oriented. In this sense, the Middle Ages and the modern age are seen in the analogy of youth and maturity, as a continuity that harbors its own contradiction and fulfills its destiny in time. We will return to this theme later. As the emergence of Gesellschaft at all times is marked by the phenomenon of exchange and trade, so its remarkable growth in the Middle Ages and beyond is marked by the development of capitalism. According to Toennies, the capitalistic spirit of “modernity” is nothing but the mercantile spirit writ large.48 In this context, Toennies appears to be more in agreement with Sombart and Brentano—and also with Pirenne—than with Max Weber, although the 76

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point is debatable. All these authors agree that the transforming agent in medieval society is the wholesale and overseas merchant, first in upper Italy, Flanders, and the cities of the Hanseatic League, and later in the Netherlands, France and England. Max Weber adds to this the continuing enterprise, which he differentiates sharply from “occasional” trade and from “loot” capitalism. For Toennies, the “spirit of trade,” as one might call it, is a manifestation of rationalism and as such universal, but has attained particular virulence in recent centuries because of its connection with technological development and the large-scale exploitation of free labor. The manufacturer, in his view, essentially is a wholesale merchant, possibly a guild master turned merchant, who becomes an employer of men, first in the putting-out system, then in the factory system. In this regard, as in the related and derived point of alienation, Toennies follows closely Marx.49 In the paper “Prelude to Sociology” (Einleitung in die Soziologie) Toennies acknowledges not only that “in the treatment of the process of Gesellschaft he had “modern society” in mind, but he also testifies to his indebtedness to Karl Marx’s exposure of the “economic law of development” as the law of Gesellschaft. However, with Toennies the emphasis is on individualism as the principle of Gesellschaft, which creates the drive for profit, hence exploitation, not the other way round. The industrialist is the profit-seeking merchant who appropriates the means of production, separating means from ends, alienating the laboring man from his works, transforming into commodities what in a communal relationship were goods, and rendering quality into quantity. In Toennies’s system, applied sociology is the attempt to “utilize the concepts of pure sociology in order to gain an understanding of present conditions and large-scale historical change, ultimately of the evolution of mankind as a whole.”50 But in applied sociology, in contradistinction to pure sociology, mixed and transitory situations create a subtle difficulty. Toennies recognizes the methodological problem, when he points out that the individualism of the recent centuries, which approaches a high point at the present moment, develops in medieval and postmedieval Europe in a variety of ways, namely “in”, “from”, and “besides” the antecedent communal forms of life.51 As an example of the first kind of development, he refers to the transformation of the lord-vassal relationship (Grundherrschaft) into a master-servant relationship (Gutsherrschaft), which he considers equivalent to the transformation of a “calling” into a “business.” Under the second subheading, Toennies refers to the liberation of the individual from economic, political, and spiritual bonds, resulting in freedom of trade and in the emergence of the concepts of citizenship and freedom of conscience. Finally, under the third subheading, the reference is to the development of the factory besides the workshop of the craftsman, of the emergence of political parties besides estates, of supralocal and supranational institutions besides ethnicity, and finally to the growth of free thought and scientific inquiry besides religion and popular belief. Toennies 77

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sees the most pronounced manifestation of modernity in the United States of America, which he calls a “superstate” based on the principle of individual liberty and an advanced prototype of what is in store for Western humanity in its entirety.52 If anywhere, one can recognize in this kind of analysis “the flexible application of concepts to the transitional nature of reality.” Since Toennies never got around to developing the field of applied sociology systematically, it can be taken in stride that he mentions population increase, besides trade, as the foremost condition for the development of modern society or, as he prefers to call it, the culture of modernity. For instance, in Geist der Neuzeit he sees modern development primarily conditioned by “the increase and expansion of populations,” their differentiation, and the division of labor that is entailed in it; secondarily, he mentions that “the dominating factor” in this situation is trade, which he identifies with “capitalism”; he adds that under the influence of trade and capitalism city life, and especially a metropolitan mode of life, has become a universal phenomenon.53 In placing primary emphasis on the increase of population, Toennies would seem to move near to the position taken by Durkheim in De la division du travail social, where the division of labor is traced to the increase in “material” density and the ensuing increase in the number of contact situations or, as Durkheim prefers to call it, in “dynamic” or “moral” density; the concentration of population and the formation of cities are then symptoms of the same phenomenon.54 Actually, it makes little difference whether one says that the production of surplus and the development of commercial relations are required, if population is to increase and cities to grow or if one says that the increase of population implies the expansion of trade and the concomitant division of labor and that these in turn lead to concentration and urbanization. Toennies would have agreed with the statement that population and trade are functions of each other.55 In the paper, “Soziologie und Geschichte,” Toennies speaks expressis verbis of the “reciprocal relation” between the increase of trade and communication, on the one hand, and the increased density of populations, on the other; from this relation, he adds, derives the irresistible tendency toward rationalization, that is, toward Gesellschaft.56 According to Toennies, as populations expand, neighbors move away and kin relations grow dim until the imperceptible borderline is reached where “kinsman” stops and “stranger” starts57—another case of “the flexible application of concepts to the transitional nature of reality”. Although there are numerous comments on the role of the city and of urbanization scattered in Toennies’s writings, it is only in Geist der Neuzeit, Toennies’s last publication, that the related phenomena of population increase, commercialization, and urbanization are closely connected within a common framework and that they are said to lead to increased contacts.58 An external (contact) in addition to an internal (dialectic) theory of social change could have been developed from these scattered comments, but elaboration and systematization are lacking. Especially, Toennies’s conceptualization of the role 78

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of cities in the process of social change is merely indicated and, at any rate, somewhat uneven.59 There are striking flashes of insight. In the last paragraph of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft Toennies observes that cohesion in time, as in kinship, is older than the subsequently added cohesion in space, which develops with the rise of villages and towns, but that it is only in large cities that the territorial principle becomes so disproportionately emphasized as to become separated from the sequential principle and thereby to cause severe disintegration.60 There is no reason to assume, as a number of writers on both sides of the rural-urban and the folk-urban controversy have done,61 that Toennies meant to equate the village and the “Little Society” with Gemeinschaft, and the city and the “Great Society” with Gesellschaft. In his reply to Durkheim, Toennies explicitly stated that the difference between the two basic categories cannot be reduced to a simple function of size or scale.62 However, while even a single intimate relationship can, and often does, contain a strong element of reflection and calculation, the assumption is not unjustified that this element tends to proliferate in an ambience of multiple relationships, as in urban areas. Indeed, Toennies distinguishes between a “town” (Eutin, Husum) and a “metropolis” (Berlin, Hamburg) as, respectively, more Gemeinschaft—or more Gesellschaft-oriented, but without clearly defining these categories. Historically speaking, to be sure, mixed and transitional stages may be in evidence and they may be seen as ultimately culminating in a widely disseminated, possibly an anomic urbanism, but there are inconsistencies on the conceptual level. Especially, the assumption of a “communal” form of town life sounds like a contradiction in terms.63 If the city, as I have argued in my paper on “The Rise of Civilization as a Paradigm of Social Change”,64 is a place where proximity in the marketplace supersedes the intimacy that prevails in kinship, then the city as a type-construct is the prototype of a trade-dominated Gesellschaft and ascertainable survivals of Gemeinschaft in cities are merely residual or transitional phenomena. Toennies calls these transitional phenomena “associations of Gemeinschaft” and counts, for instance, “corporations or fellowships of the arts and crafts” among them. It is certainly possible to put the matter that way. But the mixture of terms (association and Gemeinschaft) would seem to indicate that we have here a composite reality before us, and not a “pure problem.” Toennies develops a number of typologies to describe and analyze the rise of individualism out of more communally defined social entities. It would be incorrect, he says, to assume that individualism was an entirely “modern” phenomenon. Man is by nature an individual and cannot help but relate his experience, his needs, his desires, his total strivings to his own ego. He is ready to do battle for what he thinks is his due and to enter into alliances to gain his ends.65 But the process by which the more and more noncommunal and more and more associational individual develops has been most pronounced 79

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in recent centuries, partly within communal relations, collectives, and corporations, partly out of these, liberating the individual from them, and partly beside them, initiating associational relations, collectives, and associations; and all this in an economic, political and moral-spiritual context. With this sixfold differentiation in mind, which permits numerous combinations, Toennies develops the types and role performances of the “lord,” the “subject,” the “layman,” the “stranger” and the “upstart”. In another context, the “scientist” is mentioned as an additional type.66 All of these are what one may call “real” or historical types; the “normal” concept or “ideal” type behind them is the “individualist.” Two things are remarkable in this typology. First, numerous conflict situations are either assumed or outlined: secular versus ecclesiastical rulers, subjects versus overlords, laymen versus churchmen, scientists versus believers, strangers versus natives, upstarts versus traditionalists, but also the conflict of generations that is inherent in social change. Second, if individualism is the general denominator, it turns out that trade is not the only carrier of change. Homo oeconomicus, homo politicus and homo scientificus are all alike in that they weigh means against ends.67 They are all innovators and individualists. The trader, the merchant, the agricultural and industrial entrepreneur, the prince, the statesman, the conqueror, the philosopher, and the scientist, especially the natural scientist—all of these are prone to subject what in a given context are extraneous considerations to the purpose of making a profit, gaining and maintaining power, and advancing useful knowledge. Ultimately, Toennies might have added, they are all after power, employing a variety of means to that end. However, he shifts his ground and, concentrating on forms of authority, he prefers to discern between Herrschaft and Genossenschaft.68 By Herrschaft, he means authoritarian domination, by Genossenschaft egalitarian fellowship. Herrschaft and Genossenschaft are possible subtypes of Gemeinschaft, but a communal kind of authoritarian domination is based on the mutuality of rights and obligations, as in vassalage, while in the context of Gesellschaft domination tends to be couched in terms of a more or less rigidly defined system of superordination and subordination, thereby turning an intrinsically antagonistic confrontation into a positive, that is, a social relationship. In addition, one can discern in domination and fellowship a developmental sequence that is dialectic in character. Fellowship is dissolved and suppressed in the factory system, but revived—within the factory system—in the unions and cooperatives of the labor movement. Toennies expects a continuation of these contradictory trends in the future, but with the chances for a new growth of fellowship enhanced: fellowship must assert itself against powerful bureaucratic trends that are essentially Herrschaft-like in connotation, but its reemergence seems to correspond to human needs in an advanced industrial society.69 Indeed, the recent worldwide revolt of youth might be seen as inspired by a desire for Gemeinschaft, as was the German Youth Movement in Toennies’s days. Now as then, however, Toennies would have cautioned that 80

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reason must not be thrown overboard. Rather, it must enter into a societal equation on a higher level of articulation than ever before, if human progress is not to be jeopardized. IV In conclusion, I wish to contrast Toennies’s views on social change with the related, yet different positions of Durkheim and Weber. Toennies and Durkheim, numerous affinities, especially in the range of their interests, notwithstanding, are fundamentally different as far as their theoretical approach to the problem of social change is concerned.70 At first glance, Toennies appears to be mistaken when he considers Durkheim’s sociology as a modification of the one of Spencer although he does not overlook Durkheim’s critique of Spencer as a utilitarian; Durkheim, indeed, resembles Spencer as an evolutionist and progressivist, as one who, as I would call it, indulges in “premature harmonization.”71 Durkheim, on the other hand, correctly observes that Toennies is a “dialectician”; all the more amazing is that he fails to understand that Gesellschaft is a type concept which can hardly be confirmed inductivement in the evolution of society from a solidarity based on collective likeness to a solidarity based on the division of labor. Gesellschaft is not a “variable”; in pure sociology it is an “element,” in applied sociology it is an “emergent.” From the recognition that Toennies is a dialectician, even if the recognition that he is a typologist was lacking, Durkheim could have proceeded to seeing that in applied sociology Toennies considers the possibility that “unions of Gesellschaft” might grow from “associations of Gesellschaft. Similarly to Durkheim, Toennies found in new corporative forms, such as consumer cooperatives, indications of such a possible development. Toennies resembles Durkheim in his normative emphasis, although he sees hope for the realization of his ethical socialism only in a society of the future, which would be a negation of the society of his days, while Durkheim, as a positivist, looks upon “organic solidarity” as an accomplished or nearly accomplished “fact.” On closer inspection, though, it turns out that what Durkheim calls a “fact,” more often than not is a system requirement rather than an actuality. It remains to be said that Toennies, as an ethical socialist, along with Durkheim, differs sharply from Max Weber who radically severs ethics from politics.72 Weber resorts to the principle of fortiter peccare in politics because, being neither a progressivist nor a dialectician, he lacks hope. For Weber, socialism primarily means an enlarged and enhanced bureaucracy because he considers the “disenchantment of the world”, that is, increasing rationality in societal relations, an inescapable fate within the framework of the industrial society. In Weber’s view, rationality can hardly be rejected, certainly not avoided, even if individuality is thereby seriously challenged. For Toennies, the radical separation of means and ends—in his diagnosis the hallmark of modernity—is normatively deleterious; it marks the attrition of immediacy 81

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and intimacy in human relations. But concerning the label, which has been attached to him, of a “cultural pessimist,” Toennies retorts that he is a pessimist only as far as the existing society or culture is concerned, not regarding human society in general.73 Again, one must distinguish between pure and applied sociology. As an applied sociologist, Toennies considers society, as he finds it, as doomed as Weber does. Weber looks upon the heyday of capitalism in the nineteenth century as “the dawn of the iron age,”74 Toennies characterizes the inexorable advance of rationalization that occurs in Gesellschaft as a process of “aging.” To be sure, he asserts that old age, as against youth, has its advantages as well as its disadvantages—maturity, lucidity, the grasp of scientific comprehension—but the end is in sight and dissolution a certainty.75 However, the decline of one particular civilization does not imply the end of all civilization. A rejuvenation is possible, especially if the ability of the laboring classes to cope with exploitation and the influence of women on the conduct of public life increases.76 Contrary to Durkheim, who regards the division of labor as a principle of cohesion, Toennies rates it as a necessary evil, but foresees that the continued mechanization of production processes will do away with the need for deadening specialization and along with higher wages and shorter hours increase both the responsibility at work and the chances for diversification after the working hours are over.77 In this context, Toennies considers it likely that a universal civilization will eventually arise. As a pure sociologist, he looks beyond the limits of the present society to a society in which the intimate forces in life that are now largely recessive potentialities might be able to reassert themselves in a cooperative rather than a competitive context of social organization.78 For Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are eternal social entities, not subject to change. Notes *

1.

2. 3. 4.

82

Cahnman’s Note: The essay is a revision and enlargement of a paper presented at the 62d Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 1967 and published in Social Forces 47 (December 1968): 136–144. In Toennies, “Zur Einleitung in die Soziologie,” Soziologische Studien und Kritiken [SStuKr], vol. 1 (Jena: G. Fischer, 1922), p, 71, to mention only one passage, Toennies says that in analyzing the “process” of Gesellschaft he has had in mind “modern history” and that in doing so he has utilized Marx’s economic interpretation of history. Cf. Cahnman and Heberle, eds. Toennies on Sociology, p. 82. Toennies, Fortschritt und soziale Entwicklung [FuSE] (Karlsruhe: G. Braun, 1926), p. 5; cf. “Individual and World in the Modern Age”, in Cahnman and Heberle, Toennies on Sociology, pp. 288–317. Toennies, “Zur Einleitung in die Soziologie”, op. cit. The principle of dialectics as a dynamic principle of negation, and as such opposed to positivism, has been analyzed in Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950).

Toennies and Social Change

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

Cf. Toennies’s comments on p. xxi of the preface of the first ed. of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963; first ed. 1887), also, GuG, p.162; Charles P. Loomis, Ferdinand Toennies—Community and Society (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), p. 164; “Zur Einleitung in die Soziologie”, p. 67; Cahnman and Heberle, Toennies on Sociology, p. 77; Toennies, “Entwicklung der Soziologie in Deutschland im neunzehnten Jahrhundert”, SStuKr, vol. 2, pp. 74–5, 77; “Historismus und Rationalismus”, SStuKr, vol. 1, pp. 111, 114, 125; cf. Toennies on Sociology, pp. 266–287; Marx, Leben und Lehre (Jena: E. Lichtenstein, 1921), pp. 104, 109–10, 118, 124–5; “Soziale Bezugsgebilde in ihren Wechselwirkungen,” Forum Philosophicum, 1, no. 1, pp. 142–169; and passim. Toennies, Marx. Leben und Lehre, p. 118. Ibid., p. 110. Preface to first edition of GuG; trans. in Cahnman and Heberle eds., Toennies on Sociology, pp. 12–23. Cf. the intriguing comment in Toennies, Hobbes, Leben und Lehre 3rd ed., (Stuttgart: Fromman, 1925), p. 276, that the dialectic principle was contained even in a positivistic scheme, like the one of Spencer, the fact that he was not aware of it notwithstanding. René Koenig, “Die Begriffe Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft bei Ferdinand Toennies,” Koelner Zeitschrift fuer Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (1955), pp. 12–84. Koenig’s critical analysis is penetrating, but it would seem to have validity only from a strictly positivistic standpoint. Sharp definitions, indeed, are not Toennies’s strength, but that is because he looks upon man and his world as a coincidentia oppositorum. Similarly, E. G. Jacoby, “Ferdinand Toennies, Sociologist—A Centennial Tribute”, Kyklos, 8 (1955): 144–161. René Koenig, “Die Begriffe,” correctly points to this process of clarification, especially with reference to two important papers of Toennies, namely, “Zur Einleitung in die Soziologie”, SStuKr., pp. 65–74, and “Das Wesen der Soziologie”, SStuKr, pp. 350–68, esp. p. 354; cf. Toennies on Sociology, pp. 75–86 and 87–107. Loomis, Ferdinand Toennies, p. 222; Toennies, Gug, P. 238. Cf. the term “fluid concept in Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 3–4. This shows the common dialectical base in Toennies and Marx. For a further comment on Lukacs, see the Introduction to this volume. Toennies, Einfuehrung in die Soziologie, new ed. (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1965; first ed. 1931), p. 316. The term “normal concepts” (Normalbegriffe) occurs only once in GuG, namely on p. 133 (in Loomis, Toennies, p. 141), but Toennies emphasizes repeatedly, e.g., in “Mein Verhaeltnis zur Soziologie”, in Richard Thurnwald, Soziologie von Heute (Leipzig: L. Hirschfeld, 1932), that the terms “ideal types” (ideelle Typen) and “things of thought” (Gedankendinge), which he uses frequently, have equivalent meaning. Cf. Toennies on Sociology, pp. 3–11 (abridged). Toennies, GuG, p. 173/4; Loomis, p. 173. Toennies, Thomas Hobbes, p. 89. Toennies, “Zur Einleitung in die Soziologie”, op. cit. 83

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19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

Toennies, referring to Max Weber in Einfuehrung in die Soziologie, p. 6, insists that arbitrary will refers to Weber’s purposive-rational action while value-rational, affectual or emotional, and traditional action, all of them, although in a variety of ways, correspond to essential will. As to Weber’s as well as Toennies’s intention being directed toward a culture case study of western civilization, cf. my paper entitled “Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences,” in Werner J. Cahnman and Alvin Boskoff, Sociology and History (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 103–127. SStuKr vol. 3, pp. 193–94; cf. “Toennies and Durkheim—An Exchange of Reviews,” in this volume. Quoted according to Howard Becker and Harry Elmer Barnes, Social Thought from Lore to Science, vol. 2 (New York: Dover Publications 1960), p. 483–4. Toennies, “Das Wesen der Soziologie” (“The Nature of Sociology”), SStuKr. I, op. cit., pp. 350–368; cf. Toennies on Sociology, pp. 57–107. This is how Toennies puts the matter in Loomis, pp. 108–17. However, in Einfuehrung in die Soziologie, p. 7, the scheme is enlarged to include liking, habituation, sentiment, conviction and conscience. Thomas Hobbes, op. cit., passim. Koelner Zeitschrift fuer Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 7 (1955): 127–131. The disturbing nature of reflection and the need to overcome the disturbance through the perfection of reflection is beautifully symbolized in Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “The Marionette Theater.” Ferdinand Toennies, Die Sitte (Frankfurt a.M.: Ruetten und Loening, 1909), p. 94; Toennies, Custom, trans. by A. F. Borenstein (New York: Free Press, 1961), p. 146. Toennies, “Neuere Philosophie der Geschichte”, Archiv fuer Geschichte der Philosophie 7 (1894): 486–515. Toennies, “Mein Verhaeltnis zur Soziologie”, op. cit. Preface to the first edition of GuG, p. xxiv; FuSE, op. cit., p. 10, for a modification of that sentence. On the impetus which Toennies received from Henry Maine, compare especially GuG, pp. 35, 167, 185, 208; Loomis, Ferdinand Toennies, pp. 61, 169, 182, 199; Toennies, “Mein Verhaeltnis zur Soziologie”, op. cit., Toennies on Sociology, pp. 3–11. Toennies adopted from Schopenhauer the differentiation between organic will and reflected will, but rejected Schopenhauer’s contention that organic will is drive without thought. However, Toennies follows Schopenhauer in that he comprehends causality and intentionality as functions of each other. Schopenhauer’s small volume, Ueber den Willen in der Natur (Frankfurt a.M., 1836), with marginal comments by Toennies, is in the possession of Professor Rudolf Heberle. Compare, e.g., “Zur Einleitung in die Soziologie”, op. cit., p. 72, where Toennies puts the matter as follows: The lasting importance, the general scientific value of the position of natural law, lies in its opposition to all supernatural explanations and its recognition of the own thought and will of men as the ratio essendi of the social structures (Gebilde) within which they are operating; natural law fails, however, in that it presents rational (arbitrary) will, which sharply separates means and ends, as the only type

84

Toennies and Social Change of human will, hence comprehends all social relations but as means to individual ends that coincide merely accidentally. The contradictory and complementary type is essential will.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

Cf. Toennies on Sociology, p. 83. Toennies, “Zur Einleitung in die Soziologie”, op. cit. Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 73. Typical for Toennies’s view on trade and traders is the sentence from Einfuehrung, op. cit., p. 267: “The merchant is the carrier of Gesellschaft, the transforming, dissolving, isolating force.” Numerous passages in the same vein could be quoted here, esp. GuG pp. 55f., 63f., 68f., 162, 166f., 244, 252, 255; Loomis, Ferdinand Toennis, pp. 79–80, 85f., 90f., 165, 168., 225, 232, 234; Geist der Neuzeit (Leipzig: Hans Buske, 1935), pp. 8, 15, 24, 63; Thomas Hobbes, op. cit., pp. 87–89; FuSE., op. cit., pp. 49–50, 59; “Zur Einleitung in die Soziologie”, op. cit., p. 67; “Historismus und Rationalismus”, op. cit., p. 112; “Soziologie und Geschichte”, SStuKr II, pp. 190-199; “Mein Verhaeltnis zur Soziologie”. op. cit.; cf. Toennies on Sociology, pp. 78, 273, 299, 305–310, 324. SStuKr, vol. 3, p. 195. For the derivation of sacred-secular theory from the concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, cf. Robert E. Park, The Problem of Cultural Differences (New York: American Council, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1931), p. 14. Toennies, GuG, p. 167; Loomis, p. 169; Toennies, GdN, pp. 31ff; FuSE, pp. 23–24, 59; Einfuehrung, p. 267; of Toennies on Sociology, p. 309. At this point, Georg Simmel’s famous essay “The Stranger” comes to mind, but also Werner Sombart’s emphasis on the role of the Jews in capitalistic development; cf. Kurt H. Wolff, ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1950), pp. 402–408. Max Weber, on the other hand, because of his stress on the continuing “enterprise” rather than on the spirit of rational calculation, minimized the role of the Jews in what he calls the emergence of “modern” capitalism. Toennies, following Marx, generally stresses “alienation”. Toennies, GuG, p. 167; Loomis, p. 169. Simmel’s essay “The Stranger” dates from 1908, GuG from 1887. Toennies, Einfuehrung, p. 267. Toennies, GuG, p. 57; Loomis, p. 80. Toennies, GuG, p. 52; Loomis, p. 76. Toennies, GuG, p. 163; Loomis, p. 165. Toennies, SStuKr, vol.3, pp. 193–94 SStuKr, Ibid., p. 1–39. Cf. above n. 36. Concerning the relative importance for social change theory of the interpretation of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern era, compare Toennies, GdN, op.cit., pp. 4–8 and the lucid analysis of J. Leif, “Die Soziologie der Geschichte nach Ferdinand Toennies,” Koelner Zeitschrift, op.cit., pp. 85–89. For a contrary position, which uses technological rather than sociological criteria for periodization, compare Gideon Sjoberg, The Preindustrial City: Past and Present (New York: Free Press, 1960). Toennies,GuG, pp. 61, 65, 243; Loomis, pp. 84, 87, 225; Toennies, FuSE, pp. 22, 91; GdN, pp. 40ff., 55, 87ff., 102. 85

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49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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Toennies, GuG, pp. 57, 67, 42, 43, 165; Loomis, pp. 80, 89, 101, 102, 167 and Toennies, Marx, Leben und Lehre, op.cit., passim; cf. Fritz Pappenheim, The Alienation of Modern Man (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959). Toennies, Einfuehrung, p. 315. Toennies, FuSE, pp. 20ff.; GdN, op.cit., pp. 21 ff. Toennies, FuSE, P. 24; GuG, p. 237; Loomis, p. 221; Toennies, Einfuehrung, p. 158. Toennies, GdN, pp. 161, 167ff.; FuSE. op.cit., p. 49 Emile Durkheim, De la division du travail social (Paris: Alcan, 1902, first ed. 1893), p. 237ff.; English trans. by George Simpson, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 256ff.; Les régles de la methode sociologique (Paris: Alcan, 1912, first ed. 1896), p. 139ff.; English trans. by George E.G. Catlin, The Rules of the Sociological Method (New York: The Free Press, 1938), pp. 113ff. Toennies commented about the anticipation of the mathematical concept of function in the Ninth Book of Thomas Hobbes’s DeCorpore, emphasizing that it meant “a significant expansion in depth of the conventional concept of causality.” Cf. Juerg Johannesson, “Toennies’ Verhaeltnis zur Hobbes Gesellschaft,” Koelner Zeitschrift, op.cit., p. 485. Toennies, SStuKr, vol. 3, pp. 190–99. In Einfuehrung, p. 141, Toennies comments—in a context of “pure” sociology—on change caused by the natural increase of the population, whereby a transition occurs from “close and near relationships to distant and remote ones.” Toennies, GdN, pp. 8–9. Compare Toennis, GuG pp. 40, 244–45, 251–52; Loomis, pp. 65, 227–28, 231–32; Toennies, FuSE, p. 50ff.; GdN, pp. 8–9, 95ff. and passim. Toennies, GuG, p. 253; Loomis, p. 233. I have in mind such authors as Robert Redfield, Louis Wirth, Horace Miner, and Sol Tax on the one hand, and Oscar Lewis, Philipp G. Hauser, Gideon Sjoberg and Julian Steward on the other; cf. Gideon Sjoberg, “Cities in Developing and in Industrial Societies: A Crosscultural Analysis,” Oscar Lewis, “The Folk—Urban Ideal Types” and Philipp M. Hauser, “Observations on the Folk—Urban and Urban-Rural Dichotomies as Forms of Western Ethnocentrism,” in Philipp M. Hauser and Leo F. Schnore, eds. The Study of Urbanization (New York: John Wiley, 1965) and the literature mentioned there. Toennies, SStuKr III, p. 193–194. Toennies, GuG, pp. 36–39; Loomis, pp. 62–64. Werner J. Cahnman, “The Rise of Civilization as a Paradigm of Social Change” in Cahnman and Boskoff, Sociology, pp. 537–559. Toennies, GdN, P. 24. Toennies, FuSE, p. 25. The varieties of rational man are best delineated in “Individual and World in the Modern Age,” FuSE, pp. 5–35; a translation of this paper is found in Toennies on Sociology, pp. 288–317. The concepts of Herrschaft and Genossenschaft in its varied manifestations are systematically discussed in the Second Book of Toennies, Einfuehrung, under the sub-heading of “social relationships”, pp. 34–73.

Toennies and Social Change

69. 70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78.

Cf. esp. “Historismus und Rationalismus”, op.cit. The bulk of this paper is translated in Toennies on Sociology, pp. 266–257 under the title “Historism, Rationalism and the Industrial System.” Durkheim reviewed GuG in Revue Philosophique, 27: 416–22 as early as 1889, prior to the publication of De la division du travail social (1893). Toennies replied to Durkheim’s review in a lengthy note to a review of Gabriel Tarde’s Les lois de l’imitation (1890) which is now reprinted in SStuKr, vol. 3, pp. 193–194. He also reviewed De la division du travail social, ibid., p. 215 and Les régles de la methode sociologique, ibid., p. 274. Durkheim’s review of GuG is written with considerable clarity and a great deal of appreciation, but fails to come to grips with the concept of Gesellschaft; Toennies’s reviews, written in his involved style, are not entirely detached emotionally, but do point to a number of important differences between himself and Durkheim although, perhaps, not to the decisive difference in philosophical background and point of departure. Compare “Toennies and Durkheim—An Exchange of Reviews”, in this volume. I have developed the concept of “premature harmonization” in my book Der Oekonomische Pessimismus und das Ricardo’sche System (Halberstadt: H. Meyer, 1929). Cf. esp. Max Weber’s speech on “Politik als Beruf” in: Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1921), pp. 396–450; trans. in Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 77–128, especially the passage where Macchiavelli is quoted praising those citizens of Florence to whom “the greatness of their city meant more than the salvation of their souls.” Toennies, “Zur Einleitung in die Soziologie”, op.cit. p. 74; cf. Toennies on Sociology, p. 86. Max Weber, Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker Humblot, 1923), p. 15. The sentence is found in the opening chapter, dealing with “basic terms,” which remained untranslated in Frank H. Knight’s translation. Toennies returns to the thought of age and decline, and a possible rejuvenation, at many places in his writings, starting with passages in GuG, 159, 164, Loomis, pp. 162, 166, and ending with “Mein Verhaeltnis zur Soziologie”, op.cit. and FuSE, pp. 35, 44, 99; indeed, the three principal papers that are assembled in this collection of essays (“Individual and World in Modern Age,” “Concept and Law of Human Progress,” and “Guidelines for the Study of Progress and social Development”), conclude with some thought of this kind. Toennies, GuG, P. 164; Loomis, p. 166. Toennies, “Historismus und Rationalismus”, op.cit. (concluding sentences). It emerges that Toennies is more of a “pure” theorist than Weber, whose argument clearly belongs to “applied” sociology. In Toennies’s argument, “pure” and “applied” theory are intertwined.

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10 Toennies, Durkheim, and Weber It is generally acknowledged that Toennies is one of the classical authors in sociology, but that does not mean that he is wellknown or properly understood. Much better known are a host of misconceptions, which are quoted and requoted from one author to the next, about his basic concepts and their application, for instance that Gemeinschaft is “good” and Gesellschaft “bad,” that no concrete phenomena could be designated as either Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft, and the like. One of the misconceptions is that Toennies is thought to be similar to authors from whom he differs greatly, like Durkheim, and different from others with whom he disagrees in particulars but not in fundamentals, such as Max Weber. Quite a few sociologists echo Sorokin’s erroneous reading of the sources, that “it is easy to see that Toennies’ Gemeinschaft is identical with what Durkheim later styled a group with mechanical solidarity” (Sorokin, 1928, 491–493). On the other hand, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich in their three-volume English edition of Economy and Society, maintain that Weber’s work was “in part conceived in opposition to Toennies’s concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft” (vol. 1, pp. xcvi–xcvii). The truth of the matter can be ascertained because Durkheim and Weber have commented on Toennies’s works and Toennies has commented on theirs although Toennies’s comments are less wellknown, if known at all. A review of Toennies’s system of thought in comparison with those of Durkheim and Weber, in addition to a review of the mutual comments of these authors, will reveal similarities and dissimilarities. The three authors will appear in a sequence of thematic variations, but Toennies will play the first violin. Toennies, Durkheim, and Weber have in common that they are placed in the same period in history. They are aware of one overriding problem, which is still our problem today, namely, that traditional society is breaking down, that a new society is painfully ushered in and that social science is needed as our aide in that situation of uncertainty. But the three authors differ in approach and conclusion. Max Weber’s argument is clearly historical. There never was a society, he maintains, that can be compared to the society of the Occident. Ever since 89

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the call of the Hebrew prophets for an ethical society, ever since the enunciation of the Ora et labora principle of the Benedictine Order, ever since the nominalistic turn of thought of Petrus Abaelardus and William of Occam, and especially since the identification in Calvinistic Protestantism of worldly success and justification in faith, there grew apace a “disenchantment” of the world in the wake of an ever-increasing rationalization of all aspects of life, in the course of which the individual was pitted against the power of large-scale organizations. Although that development was unique, Weber thought that a comparative and to that extent generalizing approach was applicable. His rule of conduct was the rule of sincerity, in facing up to the inevitable.1 In contrast to Weber, Durkheim’s argument, from beginning to end, is sociologistic rather than sociological in the sense that there is no other reality but “Society” and no morality that is not societal in nature, although there are as many moralities as there are historical societies. Morality is not in the individual’s mind but imposed on it by societal constraint and embraced by the individual as an obligation. The emphasis may be more on constraint, as in mechanical solidarity, or more on obligation, as in organic solidarity, but it remains universally true that everything the individual does is not merely social, but essentially social, that is, nothing but social. Where the social bond is loosened, we have anomie, discontent and disintegration. The bond that once was provided by the Church and by a system of interlocking corporations, must now be provided by a rationally constructed, all-encompassing “society.” How the cohesive forces, once disturbed, are to reassert themselves is not entirely clear.2 It is the distinguishing feature of Toennies’s system that it is both transhistorical and historical in nature. In Toennies’s special sociology, the transhistorical, that is, the philosophical or static aspect is dealt with in “pure” sociology, the historical or dynamic aspect in “applied” sociology. “Applied,” that is, historical sociology differs from Max Weber’s approach in that it is concerned not so much with Western society in comparison with other societies, but with the transformation that occurred within European society after the High Middle Ages. Gemeinschaft to a large extent has been replaced by Gesellschaft, spontaneous volition with reflective volition, and means and end increasingly have cleaved apart. Like Weber, Toennies sees an end to our civilization, but like Durkheim, he sees also the chance of a new beginning although a beginning that is no more than a potentiality and not immediately in sight. II We are now to analyze and explain the Toenniesian system, in order to return to comparative deliberations later. The initial point to make is that “pure” and “applied” sociology are complementary and explanatory aspects of one and the same societal reality. What is firmly stated as pure sociology is fluidly interpreted in applied sociology.3 There is a dialectical tension between 90

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the two, as there is a dialectical tension within each of these between the fundamental concepts Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and their correlates essential will and arbitrary will and again, within applied sociology, between the varied historical manifestations of the interplay of social forces to which these concepts are referring. By a dialectic, as against a positivistic, scheme, then, we refer to a view of human relations as a continuing and contradictory process rather than as an assemblage of separately demonstrable facts. This marks an important difference between Toennies and Durkheim, but it must also be admitted that it makes the reading of Toennies’s book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft a complex task. “Pure” concepts must be illustrated by concrete examples, but the examples, in turn, are only approximations to the clarity of the conceptual formulation. For instance, relations within a family are more likely to be based on “essential will” and hence more readily leading to Gemeinschaft than relations within a joint stock company or a government office, but to what extent this is the case is a question of research. Even a seemingly thoroughly integrated family merely approximates the “pure” concept, in the way an actual line approximates a mathematical line.4 For, as Toennies puts it in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, concepts are “nothing but artifacts of thought, tools devised to facilitate the comprehension of reality” (1970, 133; cf. Loomis, 1963, 141; Cahnman and Heberle, 1971, 44). These “things of thought” are common denominators or normal (norm) concepts and their objects are ideal types; “they are never found complete and pure in reality.” In order to comprehend reality “the transitions, constraints and complications” must be entered. These are quotations from Thomas Hobbes: Leben und Lehre (1971, 89–90; Cahnman and Heberle, 1971, 39–40), but in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Toennies continues: As free and arbitrary products of thought, normal concepts are mutually exclusive; in a purely formal way nothing pertaining to arbitrary will must be thought into essential will, nothing in essential will into arbitrary will. It is entirely different, if these concepts are considered empirically. In this case they are nothing else but names comprising and denoting a multiplicity of observations or ideas; their content will decrease with the range of the phenomena covered. In this case, observation and deliberation will show that no essential will can ever occur without the arbitrary will by means of which it is expressed and no arbitrary will without the essential will on which it is based. (1970) In other words, what Toennies says is that essential will and arbitrary will as well as Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are not distinguished in the same way the botanist distinguishes trees and grasses or the zoologist vertebrates and invertebrates. Toennies does not employ the descriptive naturalist method of distinction, but the chemist’s method of isolation (Scheidung not Unterscheidung).5 He speaks not of concretely distinguishable categories but of 91

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intellectually distillable elements. Going a step further, one might say that while the fundamental concepts are formulated in an either-or context in pure sociology, they are considered in a more-or-less context in applied sociology. Consequently, that the “pure” theorist isolates, the “applied” analyst carries back in the stream of life—a procedure that goes beyond the abstracting procedure employed in classical economics without reverting to the piecemeal methods of the historical school. Both operations are complementary, not contradictory, both operate within the same universe of discourse because both pure and applied theory deal with social relations as positive relations. The fundamental concepts are based on positive social norms and attain positive social values; negative constellations, such as wars, riots, lockouts, strikes, crime, delinquency, marital discord, and even more so, the radical negation of social bonds that occurs in suicide, are in Toennies’s parlance asocial in character. They are pathologies. Pathology is the third category in Toennies’s theme, besides Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft.6 There are pathologies of Gemeinschaft, like crimes of passion, and pathologies of Gesellschaft, like crimes of calculation, crimes that arise sooner in the Gemeinschaft-like context of rural hamlet and crimes that arise sooner in the Gesellschaft-like context of a metropolitan area—they are negations of their positive counterparts.7 But contrary to Durkheim (1951), for whom crime waves or suicidogenic tendencies reside in the nature of a society and choose its victims, as it were, from among the participating individuals, Toennies considers a stable neighborhood and a mobile neighborhood as composed of individuals whose volition tends to be either more “essential” or more “arbitrary” in character and whose aberration from the positive norm corresponds to the same line of division. The social structure is composed of varied volitions, not aloof from these. One can gain an understanding of the contrasting as well as complementary nature of the tension between Gemeinschaft and essential will on the one hand and Gesellschaft and arbitrary will on the other by starting either with one or the other tendency.8 To start with essential will is genetically justified because essential will denotes an intentionality that is not separated from vital processes. Essential will is based on communal, on shared, feelings, such as liking, habituation and memory, and the outcome is Gemeinschaft (Toennies, 1965, 7, 1970, 93–100; Loomis, 1963, 108–117). In kinship and friendship, ideally speaking, man’s attachment is total and means and end are not differentiated. A mother’s love of her child is not irrational, as Wundt, following Schopenhauer, assumed when he identified essential will with “drive” without thought, but it is true that love arises from an intentionality that is not reflective. However, the initial togetherness is disturbed by arbitrary will, that is, by thought that leads to single-mindedly purpose-oriented action, irrespective of the means employed. The cleavage of means and end is the initial factor in the child’s mental development and it becomes decisive in man’s ever more distant strivings until, in the machine age, the enormously increased power 92

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of the isolated means over the thoughts and actions of men completes the process of separation. We will return to the means-end cleavage later. At this point, it may suffice to say that the alienation of man from himself, not only from the means of production, is inherent in the story of civilization. One can arrive at the same end somewhat differently. Man is by nature a social being in Gemeinschaft and an initially asocial being in Gesellschaft; but Gesellschaft makes for social relations through convention and law. In his paper, “The Nature of Sociology” (Das Wesen der Soziologie), Toennies says that both theses, that man is a social being and that he is an asocial being, are valid and applicable and that they complement each other. Yet, in his paper, “A Prelude to Sociology” (Einleitung in die Soziologie), he adds that it would be inaccurate to say that the organic, or historical, and the mechanical, or rationalistic view are both “right” and that they are to be combined in a synthesis; the organic view, he means to say, precedes the rationalistic view logically and historically. Gesellschaft is derived from Gemeinschaft in the same sense in which arbitrary will is derived from essential will, reflection from emotion.9 But this statement, seemingly the starting point, actually is the conclusion; in Toennis’s mind, the argument was running the other way round, following his interpretation of the philosophy of Hobbes, which starts from the analysis of Gesellschaft. Toennies considered the philosophy of Hobbes under the aspect of sociology of knowledge. In the midst of the civil war in England, Hobbes observed a world in motion; belief and custom were eroded; contentious opinion, lust for power, and greed for gain were taking their place; everybody was for himself and peace and security an ardent desire, but not a reality. The experience of the civil war, then, suggested to Hobbes the ideal construct of a “state of nature,” that is, a condition of unmitigated anarchy in which free individuals, each seeking his or her advantage, were pitted against each other; out of their competitive condition, he deduced, arose the need for contract, law, and dominion, that is, for societal order. In other words, as Toennies explains it in “A Prelude to Sociology,” wherever organic unity exists, thought, rational deliberation, arbitrary will are likely to corrode it; but the self-same arbitrary, or reflective, will must strive to establish unity, where unity has been abandoned. Thus, multiplicity either arises from unity which exists prior to the parts or multiplicity is the starting point and unity, or union, is its creation or, at any rate, its desired goal. The latter is the problem of industrial society which Hobbes observed in its beginnings. From where we stand now, we can see that the individual has been freed, first from feudal bonds, then from customs and usages, finally from each and every obligation that goes beyond the satisfaction of individual needs. Arbitrary will, that is, the striving for isolated goals, rules supreme and a vast emptiness occupies the minds. Consequently, unrest is spreading in ever widening circles and the time has come for the rational reconstruction of Gesellschaft or, as Durkheim may have put it, for the establishment of corporate entities to replace 93

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“les forces intermédiaires” that have been destroyed by the French Revolution. (Actually, the Revolution merely confirmed their destruction.) But, thus far, the remedy has escaped our grip. Professional organizations, labor unions and the like, have by no means curbed individual appetites and removed anomie. On closer investigation, it might turn out that what Durkheim called “organic solidarity,” or even “societal restraint,” is more a system requirement than an accomplished fact. Toennies shares with Durkheim the normative emphasis. But for Toennies, an “organic commonwealth” based on “human reason and conscious will,” whose products never the less should not be “mere instruments serving the interests and objects of private individuals” was a hope for the future.10 The goal was socialism of a communal kind, but for the present, he thought, we had entered a process of “aging.” By comparison, Max Weber, as is well known, saw in socialism a mere enlargement and enhancement of bureaucracy. Being neither a progressivist, like Durkheim, nor a dialectitian like Toennies, he lacks hope. His advice was to fight one’s way through “the icy polar night” with a determination that combines “passion and patience alike.”11 III The foregoing completes a rapid survey of the Toenniesian system. At the same time, a comparison with Durkheim and Weber has been implicit. A more intensive comparison is facilitated by the exchange of reviews between Toennies and Durkheim, by the sparse but telling comments of Weber on Toennies and by the intensive comments of Toennies on Weber. In as much as these reviews and comments are available in Ferdinand Toennies—A New Evaluation, I restrict myself to a summary, without quoting the pertinent passages in extenso.12 Concerning Durkheim: it is perhaps important to know that Toennies’s book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft appeared in 1887, Durkheim’s review in Revue philosophique in 1889 and Durkheim’s De la division du travail social in 1893, but that Toennies is nowhere quoted in Durkheim’s book.13 The interpretation is not clear at this point. Sorokin thought that Durkheim “intentionally gave to his social types names which were opposite to those given by Toennies,” but that statement rests on Sorokin’s further assertion that “it is easy to see that Toennies’s Gemeinschaft is identical with what Durkheim later styled a group with mechanical solidarity” (Sorokin 1928). Sorokin’s assertion is erroneous as far as Toennies’s notion of Gemeinschaft is concerned, although it does conform with Durkheim’s misinterpretation of the nature of Gemeinschaft. In this regard, I am inclined to go farther than I did in A New Evaluation, where I assumed that Durkheim finds himself in agreement with the analysis of Gemeinschaft, as stated by Toennies, simply because Durkheim says so. Actually, the matter is as follows:14 when Durkheim describes Gemeinschaft as “un masse indistincte et compacte qui n’est capable que de mouvements d’ensemble” and as “un aggregat des consciences si fortement agglutinées 94

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qu’aucune ne peut se mouvoir indépendamment des autres,” he has in mind his own concept of mechanical solidarity, which rests on the external fact of societal constraint and not on what Toennies meant by Gemeinschaft, namely, a societal cohesion derived from the internal fact of essential will. Durkheim’s expressed agreement with Toennies on Gemeinschaft, then, is more apparent than real. Toennies’s agreement with Durkheim, on the other hand, is more partial than total. Comparing Durkheim with Tarde, Durkheim’s antagonist in French sociology, Toennies came to the conclusion that each one of them had taken a partially valid position. Toennies compared Durkheim and Tarde at two places, in his review of Les régles de la methode sociologique (1895) and in the review of Edouard Abramowsky’s Le matérialisme historique et le principle du phenoméne social (1898),15 Toennies agreed with Durkheim in the assumption that social phenomena are real (“comme des choses”) and hence that social facts transcend psychological facts, but also with Tarde’s contention that “only individual consciousness ought to be accepted as sufficient reasons for social phenomena.” In Toennies’s view, Durkheim restricted the definition of a social fact exclusively to what he had called the “forms” of social volition. Tarde, on the other hand, mistook social facts as mere aggregates of individual wills without comprehending that the formation of concepts is a rational act “which, in this case, serves the purpose of grasping the essence of social phenomena.” Toennies and Durkheim, then, agreed that social phenomena are real. What is meant by “real,” however, may be in contention, as we shall see later. It appears that Toennies has more affinity to Tarde than to Durkheim. He considers Tarde’s treatment of imitation intriguing, but one-sided.16 Toennies points out that Tarde himself introduces innovation as a complement to imitation, and that he admits, almost against himself, the existence of a common will, leading to common ideas and social action. He concludes that imitation and innovation could be represented as two comparable yet contradictory movements of wills and ideas, proceeding from the general to the specific and from the specific to the general and that their complementarity may be conceived as equivalent to the concepts of essential will and arbitrary will.17 No dialectic tension of this kind is inherent in the Durkheimian system. It might be instructive in this context to compare Toennies’s and Durkheim’s thought styles in the light of each author’s relation to Spencer. Durkheim observed that Toennies’s concept of Gesellschaft had much in common with Spencer’s concept of industrial society while Toennies observed that the sociology of Durkheim seemed to be “a modification of the sociology of Spencer.” Actually, Toennies’s main argument against Spencer and the one from which his major theorems of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft were developed, is directed against the assumption, underlying the concept of military society, of an original coercion and the false antagonism of coercion versus contract which still reverberates in the first part of Durkheim’s De la division du travail social (1893, 1964). Toennies maintains that community in any society, 95

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tribal or civilizational, is not based on coercion but on natural cohesion; not on despotism and punitive law, but on sympathy. Although Durkheim installs society in the place of political power, he nevertheless assumes that individuals in a state of mechanical solidarity are engaged in “no action of their own, as the molecules of inorganic bodies” (1964, 130); in this regard, he offered, indeed, a “modification of Spencer.” But Durkheim opposed Spencer’s utilitarian assumption, which Spencer shared with classical economics, that solidarity was “nothing else than the spontaneous accord of individual interests” (1964, 203). The contrast to Toennies who, following Hobbes, conceived of the social contract as a rational construct, not as a historical occurrence, is striking. The fundamental difference between Durkheim and Toennies bursts into the open when we consider Durkheim’s objection against Toennies’s concept of Gesellschaft. To be sure, Durkheim is in accord with Toennies when he comments that in Gesellschaft where “ce sont les parties qui sont données avant le tout,” in contrast with Gemeinschaft where “le tout est donné avant les parties.” There is further accord when Durkheim implies that Gesellschaft indicates the capitalistic society of the socialists and the need for a strong state to curb individual appetites; Durkheim also observes correctly that in such a society the rupture of social bonds will proceed apace, the temporary effect of rescue operations notwithstanding. But he cannot understand that Gesellschaft is based on the rational (arbitrary) will of individuals to form an effective society, is therefore separated from the spontaneity of essential will, but by no means originates in ‘l’impulsion toute extérieure de l’Etat.” Durkheim further cannot understand that one society, Gesellschaft, can follow from its counterpart, Gemeinschaft, in “the same development.” At this point, Durkheim mistakes social entities which are concepts and “only exist in theory,” with actual societies or civilizations. Here is the major point of dissension. Actual societies, as Toennies emphasizes in his note to the review of Tarde’s Les lois de l’imitation and elsewhere, are always mixed and therefore do proceed from more to less and from less to more of one ingredient or another “in the same development”; concepts do not. As a positivist, Durkheim is not attuned to confronting the dialectical nature of reality nor is he aware of the constructional nature of ideal types. The type constructs, by their very nature, cannot be demonstrated or verified inductivement, as Durkheim thinks they should; they illuminate reality, but never describe it. They do not exhaust the variety of occurrences, but they organize the phenomena and thus make reality an intellectual experience. IV As concerning the relation Toennies-Durkheim, so concerning the relation Toennies-Weber, we come across loose statements in literature that are designed to disparage Toennies’s contribution, but do not hold up under close scrutiny. For instance, Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, in their English 96

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edition of Economy and Society maintain regarding Toennies’ book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft that “there is no indication that the work was a major influence on his (Weber’s) intellectual development and Economy and Society appears partly conceived in opposition to it” (Roth and Wittich, 1964, Vol. 1, xcvi). The precise opposite is the case. In the older part 2 of Economy and Society, written chiefly in the years 1911–13 as well as in the 1913 essay “Ueber einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie” (1918, 427–474), Weber used the term Gemeinschaft in the pre-Toenniesian general sense of “social group”; he considers Gemeinschaftshandeln as the equivalent of what he later called “social action,” and Gesellschaftshandeln as any rationally conceived or organized social action.18 But in the first paragraph of Economy and Society, written around 1920, Weber mentions Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft as “a beautiful work,” to which the reader is referred as background material; and in a note to the discussion of “communal and associative relationships,” likewise in Economy and Society, he explains that “this terminology is similar to the distinction made by Ferdinand Toennies in his basic work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft.”19 When Weber speaks in the immediately preceding passage of Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung (the process of becoming a community or an association) rather than of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as social entities, the meaning is that he refers to historical processes in “applied” sociology rather than to basic concepts in “pure” sociology.20 It is apparent from these quotations that Weber’s main intent was not, like Durkheim’s and Toennies’s directed toward sociological theory, but toward a comparative, that is, a sociologically conceived history. Toennies’s objections to Weber are pronounced and yet, contrary to the sharp Toennies-Durkheim controversy, they must be understood as objections within a general agreement (Toennies, 1965, 6–10).21 Toennies wishes to go beyond Weber’s definition of action inasmuch as action involves volition and volition involves thought and thought, in turn, refers to the relation of means and end; if means and end are unified, we are in the presence of essential will, if they cleave apart, arbitrary will is exercised. Consequently, for Toennies, Weber’s purposerational social action relates to arbitrary will while value-rational as well as affectually and traditionally oriented social action are related to the concept of essential will. There are three levels in that differentiation, which are distinct in “pure” sociology but fluid in “applied” sociology: volition derived from liking and feeling is the starting point; it is followed by volition derived from habit, leading to action based on attitudes, chiefly those of conviction and faithfulness; finally, we arrive at volition derived from thinking, leading to action based on conscious deliberation. At this point, essential will is likely to merge into arbitrary will, which is volition derived from thinking, insofar as thinking becomes separated from such motivations as conviction, faithfulness, conscience and the like and turns out to be directed exclusively toward a desired end. Toennies anchors the process of rationalization in the minds of men and women. 97

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For Toennies, the process of rationalization, as manifested in the cleavage of means and end, is the independent variable and both the Marxian separation of the worker from the means of production and Weber’s emphasis on religious motivations as a major component of the rational way of life that culminates in “modern” capitalism are seen as dependent variables.22 Toennies objects further to Weber’s distinction between the rational—capitalistic—exploitation of free labor and all kinds of speculative, colonial, financial, war-oriented, promoter, adventurer, and pariah capitalism. In Toennies’s view, something new, the large-scale enterprise and the technology that made it possible, has been entered into the equation, but important as that entrance may be, it does not blur the common characteristics of commercialism. Toennies’s principal objection is directed not so much against Weber as against those who have interpreted Weber exclusively on the basis of the initial paper entitled “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus” (1905), without taking into consideration the views expressed in the later paper “Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen” (1911) as well as in Economy and Society (1921) and the posthumous Economic History (1923). Toennies maintains that Weber did not deny that socioeconomic realities are as important for the derivation of modes of religious expression as are religious ideas for the development of the attitudes that shape economic life. Weber, he points out, states clearly already in the last sentence of the “Protestant Ethik” that an exclusively “spiritualistic” and an exclusively “materialistic” causal nexus in history are equally demonstrable and equally useless for the establishment of historical truth.23 However, materialist that he is, Toennies insists on more than the principle of reciprocity between the spiritual and material spheres. He upholds “the relative independence of the economic series, not from the spiritual series in general, but from religious and moral manifestations of it.” At any rate, he thinks that Weber was aware of the fact that Protestantism and capitalism grew alongside each other and even conditioned each other. But in an elaborate argument Toennies doubts that Benjamin Franklin’s rules of conduct for the businessman who wants to get ahead and particularly his oft-quoted sentence, “honesty is the best policy,” are proof of their derivation from the Puritan work ethic of early Massachusetts. He asks whether piety or the spirit of capitalistic business is the logical Prius for the formulation of that sentence by Franklin. He concludes that “the spirit of calculation, not of eternal bliss, but of an entirely temporal economic advantage, obviously is positively opposed to the spirit of Christianity” and that it therefore ought to be derived otherwise.24 Toennies argues that the unfolding of the spirit of capitalism might be understood most conveniently as a partial phenomenon in the total development of rationalism. Weber considers that view as too comprehensive, but in the final analysis the difference is one of emphasis (Weber, 1922, 60–62; cf. Parsons, 1958, 75–79). Weber holds that the religious incentive is the decisive ingredient in the rise of the specifically 98

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“modern” kind of capitalism. Toennies maintains that rationalism is merely “rounded to a perfect ring,” if the religious approbation, formerly withheld, is joined to other forces that pull in the same direction, namely, the increasing separation of means and end which is inherent in the rise of individualism.25 A further comparison between Toennies and Weber as well as between Toennies and Durkheim refers to the realism-nominalism controversy that accompanies European thought through the centuries. Weber is the nominalist, Durkheim is the sociologistic realist, and Toennies’s position is more complex. In question is the reality or unreality of collectivities. Toennies agrees with Weber that only individual human beings can engage in action in the sense of a meaningful orientation of behavior, but he adds that collective entities, such as the unions and associations of men, are never the less real. According to Weber, collectivities are not merely “convenient and even indispensable” assumptions for cognitive purposes, they also “have a meaning in the minds of individual persons, partly as something actually existing, partly as something with normative validity” (Roth and Wittich, 1964, vol. 1, 14). In other words, Max Weber assumes that they are real as a motivating force; he could have added that they are “real in their consequences.” But Toennies goes farther than that when he asserts that the validity of social and collective entities is not merely admissible, but is the “true and proper object” of “pure” sociology because men relate to these ideal cultural constructs as if they were real (1965, 9). In Toennies’s view, collectivities “exist” (1) in the will and thought of the participating subjects; (2) in the thought of outsiders, individuals as well as associations, who “recognize” collectivities as entities that are capable of willing and acting and (3) in the mind of the spectator, especially the analytical thinker or theoretician. The idea is that associations, municipalities, states (and certainly churches and religious bodies) have a moral as well as a juridical existence, even if one knows that the actors are individual persons. Even collectivities that have no juridical existence, such as some ethnic groups and social movements, may nevertheless have a moral existence. One can say that in Toennies’s scheme, realism prevails in “pure” sociology and becomes predominant in “empirical” sociology. Within “pure” sociology, again, everything depends on whether essential will or arbitrary will prevails; in “applied” sociology, the area of arbitrary will has a tendency to enlarge. Modern individualism necessarily leads to the corrosion of the moral existence of collectivities and corporations and to their increasingly frequent conception as nothing but convenient juridical fictions. The fact that collectivities and corporations become the instruments of personal desire and specific interests is likely to be the root cause of the present anomie. Toennies does not use the Durkheimian term, because Gesellschaft is not devoid of rules and norms; his approach to the malaise of contemporary civilization rests with the assumption that structure and intentionality are functions of each other. Durkheim, on the other 99

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hand, attributes anomie to the fact that the division of labor fails to produce solidarity because the relations of the (societal) organs are not regulated (Durkheim, 1964, 9 and 368ff.).26 What he means is that the ties of solidarity are weakened, but the question remains open whether the debilitating factor is the corrosion of social constraint per se or the reluctance of individuals to continue to be bound by it.27 The realism that is inherent in the Durkheimian system is not consciously formulated. Weber and Toennies are facing the problem more explicitly. The difference within the agreement between Weber and Toennies is subtle, but nevertheless significant. Weber attempts to interpret holistic images in nominalistic terms; an assembly does not “act,” only its participant members are actors. Toennies considers nominalistic and realistic approaches to social relations and entities as equally “possible.” Individual members act in a deliberating assembly; once the vote is taken, the assembly acts. A tribal community may act without previous dissensions.28 For Toennies, “individuality before unity” and “unity before individuality” are separate thought constructions that interpenetrate each other in a variety of forms and degrees in actual life situations. The comprehension of that interpretation and of the shift within it is the unfulfilled task of sociology. Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

100

Max Weber, “Politik als Beruf,” in Weber, 1921, pp. 396–450; English translation: “Politics as a Vocation,” in Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. From Max Weber (London: Kegan Paul, 1946), pp. 77–128. I have the entire range of Durkheim’s work in mind, but I am going to refer chiefly to De la division du travail social because the comparison ToenniesDurkheim rests specifically on that book, as far as Durkheim is concerned. Durkheim did not pursue the dichotomy of mechanical and organic solidarity in later publications and assumed the general pervasiveness of the social factor instead. I have analyzed the contradistinction of firmness in pure sociology and fluidity in applied sociology in the paper, “Toennies and Social Change,” in Werner J. Cahnman ed. Ferdinand Toennies. A New Evaluation (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973), pp. 103–124. Consequently, following Toennies, “peasant societies are not wholly Gemeinschaft entities,” as Morris Janowitz seems to assume. See Janowitz, “Sociological Theory and Social Control,” American Journal of Sociology, 81, no. 1 (1975): 82–108. Gemeinschaft is a “pure” concept and any given peasant society is an empirical approximation to it. “The Nature of Sociology,” in Cahnman and Heberle, 1971, p. 91. Cahnman and Heberle, 1971, Introduction, p. 14. It should be noted at this point that Weber’s trichotomy of Vergemeinschaftung, Vergesellschaftung and Kampf (conflict) is a dynamic application of Toennies’s concepts of Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft and Pathologie. However, pathology is not a “basic” concept of positive relationships in Toennies’s scheme. Talcott Parsons, in the opening paragraph of his “Note on Gemeinschaft and

Toennies, Durkheim, and Weber

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Gesellschaft” in Structure of Social Action (1937), correctly observes that Weber “modeled” his formulations on those of Toennies, yet “turns from direct consideration of action to that of social relationships,” but he confounds statistics and dynamics when he considers Weber’s concept of Kampf (conflict) a “third basic relationship element,” in line with Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Cf. Cahnman, Ferdinand Toennies, pp. 140–150. A. Oberschall, “The empirical sociology of Toennies,” in Cahnman, Ferdinand Toennies, pp. 160–179. Cf. Introduction, pp. 15–17. Essential will and arbitrary will must not be considered as concretely separate kinds of will. The human will or intentionality is a unity, with essential will and arbitrary will as its limiting points. As Toennies puts it in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 87, and repeats in his autobiographical account “My relation to sociology” (translated in Cahnman and Heberle, p. 6): “I am discerning will inasmuch as it contains thinking and thinking inasmuch as it contains will.” Cahnman and Heberle, 1971, p. 82 and 91. Both papers were published in German in Soziologische Studien und Kritiken Vol. 1 (June 1925): 350–368 and 65–74. “The present problems of social structure,” in Cahnman and Heberle, 1971, p. 127. Cf. “Politik als Beruf,” pp. 396–450, in Weber, 1921. “Toennies and Durkheim—An Exchange of Reviews,” in Cahnman (ed.), 1973, pp. 239–256. See also in this volume “Toennies and Durkheim.” It does not seem that Durkheim mentioned Toennies on later occasion. Toennies reviewed Durkheim’s Les Régles de la methode sociologique, and he briefly referred to Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse in an unpublished letter to the Danish philosopher Harald Hoeffding (personal communication, E.G. Jacoby). It is possible that the realistic interpretation of religious forms by Durkheim appealed to Toennies. Durkheim, Review Philosophique, 27 (1889): 416–422. Soziologische Studien und Kritiken, 3, pp. 274–276 and pp. 300–301. English translation and paraphrase are to be found in Cahnman, Ferdinand Toennies, p. 255 and 293. In Soziologische Studien und Kritiken, 3 (June 1929: 187–196, Toennies discusses Gabriel Tarde’s Les lois de l’imitation (Paris: 1890). At this point in his deliberations Toennies attached his lengthy footnote which is the reply to Durkheim’s review in the Revue philosophique. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, Vol. I, p. 340 and 342. (See Weber, 1964). In Note 1, p. 354, Roth and Wittich state that Weber uses the older equivalent Gemeinschaftshandeln for what he later termed soziales Handeln. Roth and Wittich, Vol. I, p. 4 and 41. They translate “schoen” with “fine” (not with “beautiful”) and “grundlegend” with “pioneering” (not with “basic”), which attenuates the meaning. Roth and Wittich’s translation, “Communal and associative relationships” obscures the dynamic character of Weber’s concept of Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung. Yet, in note 24 to this section, Roth maintains that Weber uses Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung in a continuous rather than a dichotomous sense, that is, dynamically. Further, Roth reads into Weber’s terminology a “critical distance from Toennies’ paired contrast 101

Weber and Toennies

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft,” when, indeed, Weber’s historical approach belongs to “applied sociology” in Toennies’ sense. As Toennies puts it (in Gemeinschaft . . . , p. 238): “Alle Veraenderung kann nur aus dem Uebergange fluessiger Begriffe ineinander begriffen werden.” My translation in Cahnman, 1973, p. 106: “All change can be comprehended only if one grasps the need for the flexible application of concepts to the transitional nature of reality.” See also “Toennies and Weber,” in Cahnman, 1973, pp. 275–283, especially, pp. 259–261 and 272–276. Essay reprinted in this volume. Cahnman, 1973, pp. 263–272 (referring to Soziologische Studien und Kritiken, 2), pp. 366–378. “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” in Weber, 1922. pp. 205–206. Cahnman, Ferdinand Toennies, p. 269. Ibid., p. 272. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, p. 9 and 368ff. The regulation of the relation between capital and labor was foremost in Durkheim’s mind/ However, as he comments in a note on p. 367, industrial legislation has meanwhile “filled the gap.” If anomie persists, it would seem to follow either that the societal organs were not sufficiently regulated or that anomie has other causes. In De la division du travail social, Durkheim stresses functional anomie, while normative anomie is emphasized in Suicide, pp. 246–258. Ferdinand Toennies, “Power and Value of Public Opinion,” in Cahnman and Heberle, 1971, p. 258; a parallel passage is found in Toennies’s Kritik der oeffentlichen Meinung, p. 132.

References Cahnman, W.J., and Heberle, R., eds. Ferdinand Toennies on Sociology. Pure, Applied and Empirical. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Durkheim, E. Suicide. A Study in Sociology, trans. J. A. Spaulding and G. Simpson. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1951. ———. The Division of Labor in Society, trans. G. Simpson (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1964. Parsons, T. “Note on Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft,” in Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press, 1937. Sorokin, P.A. Contemporary Sociological Theories. New York-London: Harper and Row, 1928. Tarde, G. Les lois de’imitation. Etude sociologique. Paris: Alcan, 1890. Toennies, F. Einfuehrung in die Soziologie. Stuttgart: Enke Verlag, 1965; first edition, 1931. ———. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970; first edition 1887. ———. Kritik der oeffentlichen Meinung. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1922. ———. Soziologische Studien und Kritiken, 3 vols. Jena: Fischer Verlag, 1925 and 1929. ———. Thomas Hobbes: Leben und Lehre. Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: F. Frommann, 1971; first edition 1896. Weber, M. Economy and Society, 3 vols., edited by G. Roth and K. Wittich. CologneBerlin: Kiepenhauer & Witsch, 1964. 102

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———. Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1918. ———. Gesammelte Politische Schriften. Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1921. ———. Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Religionssoziologie, 3 vols. Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1922. ———. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. and edited by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958.

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11 Toennies in America One cannot speak about the reception of Toennies in America without referring to Toennies’s contacts with America. Toennies reported critically in a German periodical about the first two numbers of the very first volume of the American Journal of Sociology.1 Subsequently, he reviewed in various journals the work of American authors, among whom Morgan, Small, Ward, Fairbanks, Giddings, Walter Lippman, and Mark Baldwin are most important.2 In 1904, Toennies was invited to participate in the Congress of Arts and Science of the Universal Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, where he delivered a lecture called “The Present Problems of Social Structure.”3 The paper was published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1905 and is now republished in “The Heritage of Sociology Series” volume on Toennies.4 The invitation to the Congress was extended by Hugo Muensterberg, the German-American psychologist at Harvard University, apparently in concert with Albion Small, the founder of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago: both men were vice presidents of the Universal Exposition. On Small’s initiative, Toennies became one of the editors of the American Journal of Sociology. In his St. Louis lecture, Toennies made a point of referring to Spencer and Morgan, in an effort to appeal to American listeners; but from the lack of quotation in American sociological literature of “The Present Problems of Social Structure,” one must conclude that his audience was not overly impressed. In retrospect, one can understand the reasons. To be sure, Toennies was aware of the fact that the principles of natural law, which took their departure from the nature of man and arrived at the formation of institutions as a consequence, had remained more alive in America than in Europe. He further realized that we live in an individualistic age where nominalistic thinking prevails and where corporations, such as the state, serve as mere instruments of selfish desire. But he considered the corporation as the object of sociological theory. Corporations, he explained, are fictitious persons, but are nevertheless real because they are thought to be so in human volition and recognized as such in human action. In a dialectical turn, he expressed the hope that corporations could be reconstructed as independent agents by the Gesellschaft-like means of “human reason and conscious will.” By way of contrast, Toennies’s listeners were humanitarian reformers, opposed to the evils of exploitation, 105

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but bending every effort toward the improvement of human relations on a person-to-person basis. They were hard put to comprehend society in terms of an effective entity. The following observations do not aim at providing a complete listing of the numerous references to Toennies in American sociological and anthropological literature. Rather, they delineate the major avenues by which Toennies’s concepts have been disseminated among social scientists in America, especially through Edward A. Ross, Charles P. Loomis, and a number of rural sociologists; Rudolf Heberle and his discussants; Sorokin, MacIver, and Wirth; and, most importantly, Park, the Parkians and their critics, and Talcott Parsons. Fruitful conclusions as well as misunderstandings of a minor or major nature are evidenced in these writings. It will be obvious that Toennies’s influence has been pervasive in the two major approaches in American sociology, the Parkian and Parsonian schools, and thereby has entered into the mainstream of American thought in the social sciences.5 Rural Community Studies A varied picture emerges if one takes the St. Louis lecture as a point of departure in considering the reception of Toennies in America. An early reference to Toennies, even prior to the Congress in St. Louis, is found in Edward A. Ross’s book.6 Ross claims that his concepts of “community” and “society” were conceived “long before” he became acquainted with Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft.7 To be sure, Ross is in agreement with Toennies when he says that “in the community, the secret of order is not so much control as concord.” Referring to kinship ties and marriage as a sacrament being replaced by a touch-and-go relationship and “the power of money,” Ross has in mind the rapid transformation of rural America which he and others of his generation observed. However, a qualifying comment is in order. On the one hand, the urbanization process, the proliferating competitiveness of human relations, and the heightened social mobility of the population compelled sociologists, whose background was in the small town and the countryside, to reflect upon the sharpened contrast and to organize their data around it. But, on the other hand, they failed to realize that the midwestern country town was far from being a Gemeinschaft. Personalized relationships between farmers, hired hands, repairmen, traders, bankers, medical men, jurists, ministers, and others may have been “face-to-face” relationships (that was the expression used) in contradistinction to the impersonality of the big city, but they were clearly interest-accented, that is, based on “arbitrary will,” not on “essential will.” Cooley’s concept of the “primary group” was more intimately related to Gemeinschaft and “essential will”; but one must not forget that Cooley had chiefly in mind a temporal sequence, anchored in early childhood, and hence with him the distinction between a category and an ingredient was somewhat blurred. With Toennies, Gemeinschaft and essential will are more clearly in 106

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the nature of ingredients. One can read Toennies into Cooley only if one is aware of that important difference. To make Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft empirically exclusive categories rather than ever-present dichotomic elements in a society—that is, real types rather than ideal types—was a mistake that was frequently made. Rudolf Heberle drew attention to it in his classic paper “The Application of Fundamental Concepts in rural Community Studies”.8 But the mistake was hard to avoid. Particularly, rural structures and Gemeinschaft-like textures of social life were often confounded. Middle America, unlike Europe, was not an area of compact villages, but was, rather, made up of isolated farmsteads centered around country towns. Administrative units and the boundaries of school-church-trade and other “service areas” frequently overlapped. Obviously, when Galpin, Kolb, Sanderson, Hiller, and other rural sociologists noted the lessening of isolation and the growth of a denser and more variegated associational network due to improved communication, they referred to the recognition of common interests and consequently to the rise of Gesellschaft.9 Likewise, in contrasting the newer “interest or intentional groups” to older, more loosely tied locality groups, Kolb obscured the fact that the older formations, although “face-to-face,” were hardly less interestaccentuated than the associations that replaced them. Carle C. Zimmerman, his sophisticated knowledge of typological procedure notwithstanding, underscored the fallacy when he identified “localistic” and “cosmopolitan” trade centers respectively with Gemeinschaft-like and Gesellschaft-like textures of social life.10 To be sure, there are points of comparison: kinship and neighborliness are more pronounced in the localistic type, while mobility and competition as well as institutionalization increase in the cosmopolitan type. Zimmerman adds that “the sheer mass of ever-changing contacts produces what Toennies called strangeness”. That statement cannot be gainsaid, yet it is also true that the localism-cosmopolitanism polarity substitutes an either-or statement for what had been a more-or-less proposition. Again, the ideal type is transformed into a real type. Also, Charles P. Loomis draws attention to a “confusion of terms among rural sociologists.”11 Utilitarian attitudes and impersonal relationships prevail in larger communities and trading areas, as against family and friendship cliques in smaller neighborhoods, but neither utilitarian attitudes nor “close-knit” personal ties depend on community size. Toennies had already emphasized in his argument against Durkheim that the difference between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft “is not a simple function of the relative size” of population agglomerations.12 Nevertheless, there are differences between communities, if they are placed on a Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft continuum. These differences cannot be stated categorically but must be ascertained through research. The Gemeinschaft element is never absent, but it appears in varying strength. For instance, in a comparison between the Komensky and South Brockway neighborhoods in Wisconsin it was found that mutual 107

Weber and Toennies

aid and interfamily visiting were frequent in the former, infrequent in the latter place.13 It was further found that Komensky was settled almost entirely by Czechs, both native-born and immigrants, while South Brockway had a mixed American-born, English, and Scandinavian population. It takes a long time, to say the least, until a new kinship and friendship nexus can supersede ethnic differentiation and rivalry. Similarly, when human relations in El Cerrito, New Mexico, and in an Old Order Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, on the one hand, and in a division of a government bureau in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, on the other hand, were compared, the differences in the ratings between “familistic” and “contractual” social structures were glaring.14 Again, it ought to be noted that El Cerrito and the Old Order Amish community were ethnically homogeneous settlements. However, when Loomis suggests that “future studies should be more specific than is possible with sponge types,” he disregards his own admonition that “abstract types” should not be mistaken for “concrete types”, certainly not considered as cases.15 A “sponge” absorbs differentiations and makes them disappear; but a “normal type,” according to Toennies, organizes phenomena “in a first approximation” and makes it possible to analyze them in subsequent research.16 The distinction is important because it will be noted again in considering Parsonian theory. Heberle and Discussants The momentum created by the rural sociologists and related writers was carried forward by Rudolf Heberle, in conjunction with Charles P. Loomis and Albert Salomon. As Toennies’s son-in-law, Heberle was particularly suited to interpret Toennies’s thought to Americans. Heberle’s contributions are chiefly from the 1950s; they are capped by his paper on “The Sociological System of Ferdinand Toennies.”17 Heberle’s papers are distinguished by their clarity of comprehension. His paper “Ferdinand Toennies’s Contribution to the Sociology of Political Parties” deserves to be mentioned especially because it summarizes some of the major ideas of his book on social movements.18 According to Heberle, Toennies defines a party primarily in the liberal sense as a collective formed by arbitrary, or rational, will; the organized mass party and, even more so, the totalitarian party are corporations and mark a further development. Advancing beyond Toennies, Heberle differentiates between formally defined structure types and sociopsychological texture types. The latter include fellowships, followings, and utilitarian associations. In addition, in his paper “The Application of Fundamental Concepts in Rural Community Studies” (1941), Heberle taught the empiricists the lesson that fact finding was not enough. In an application of Toenniesian principles to rural sociology studies, he distinguished between statistically ascertainable spatial phenomena, like school attendance or newspaper readership, and the socio-psychological quality of special groupings. Both kinds of phenomena may interpenetrate each other. For instance, it is likely that strong kinship ties 108

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or intimate neighborliness lessen the need for intentional and formal associations, but they may nevertheless be found side by side. Two replies to Heberle’s paper appeared in Rural Sociology. Edmund De S. Brunner, of Columbia University, grew nationalistic, asserting that neither the terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft nor even the concept of “community” ought to have been introduced from abroad.19 He mentioned early American rural sociologists, such as Warren H. Wilson, as having been attentive to community-like situations, but the authors he referred to had engaged in description, not conceptualization. Brunner believed he could “legitimately criticize” Toennies for disregarding the possibility of conflict in Gemeinschaft situations when, in fact, Toennies considered conflict a force inimical to all affirmative relationships, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft alike. Very different is Robert Redfield’s note on “Rural Sociology and the Folk Society”.20 Contrary to Brunner, Redfield realized that Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are contrasting concepts, or ideal constructions; and that it was therefore meaningless to imply, as Brunner did, that self-interest and Gemeinschaft could go together. If a communal woodlot in some small New England town, says Redfield, “arose out of consideration of the need to resolve conflicting individual interests and was deliberately agreed upon as a measure contributing toward the good of all, then to that extent that New England town represents Gesellschaft and not Gemeinschaft.” Redfield emphasized that anthropological studies of literate rural communities were far ahead of studies undertaken by rural sociologists in presenting a penetrating and balanced view of fundamental relationships. Redfield realized that the ideal-typical approach illuminates major differentiations, but is not verified by them. He introduced the concept of the “folk society” as a sacred society where activities are ends in themselves, and where human relations are personal and expressed “not so much in the exchange of useful functions as in common understandings as to the ends given”. Charles P. Loomis is important in this context as the translator of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1940). The translation is meritorious,21 even if acceptance has suffered from the fact that, owing to the different quality of German and English sentence construction, a certain clumsy complexity has crept into the text, whereas the German text moves on poetic wings. However, Sorokin’s foreword, Heberle’s preface, and the extensive introduction by Loomis and John C. McKinney are helpful, although one has the impression that they have not had a wide impact. Other translations, especially A. J. Borenstein’s translation of Toennies’s essay on “Custom” (1961), have hardly been read and are infrequently quoted.22 Also often overlooked is Albert Salomon’s thoughtful obituary article on Toennies in Social Research, an article that has remained unsurpassed in philosophical breadth and in sympathetic comprehension of Toennies’s personal equation.23 Salomon has been superseded only insofar as the recognition of the dialectical character of Toennies’s thought is concerned. 109

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Sorokin, MacIver, Wirth Generally, European-born American social scientists have been instrumental in transmitting Toennies to America, but some of them have transferred mistaken notions along with adequate analysis and application. This is especially true of three otherwise eminent sociologists, Pitirim A. Sorokin, Robert M. MacIver, and Louis Wirth, coming from Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago, respectively.24 These men have the merit of having introduced Toennies to American sociologists (Wirth in 1927; Sorokin 1928; MacIver 1937), but in doing so they have fixed many a mistaken image in the minds of those who relied on their statements. Innumerable textbook writers have copied comments on Toennies from each other, all the way up to the author who copied directly from the “source”, that is, not from Toennies himself, but from Sorokin, Wirth, and MacIver. Sorokin thought that “it is easy to see that Toennies’s Gemeinschaft is identical with what Durkheim later styled a group with mechanical solidarity.” Actually, “mechanical solidarity” refers to the objective structure of society, while Gemeinschaft is based on volition. Further, “mechanical solidarity” denotes a developmental state, Gemeinschaft an aspect of every society, even if it is more pronounced in earlier cultures than in late civilizations.25 Another dictum of Sorokin’s—that the process from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft is irreversible—is only conditionally true. Turning to MacIver, we encounter the statement that “the broad truth underlying Durkheim’s formulation is substantiated by the findings of Spencer, Simmel, Toennies, Baldwin, Cooley and MacIver.” While it is true that these authors are concerned about the same thing, namely, social structure, they deal with it very differently. Sorokin may not have been far off the mark, however, when he thought that “Durkheim intentionally gave to his social types names which were opposite to those given by Toennies.”26 Durkheim had reviewed Toennies’s book four years before the publication of De la Division du travail social, and the concept of Gemeinschaft had been very clear to him at that time. Sorokin, again, was mistaken in classifying Toennies, along with Simmel, as a formal sociologist.27 This statement, too, has proliferated in textbooks. Louis Wirth, a student of Robert E. Park’s, was the first American author to devote a paper in the American Journal of Sociology exclusively to the sociology of Toennies.28 This paper is remarkable for its mixture of shrewd analysis and distorted conclusions. Wirth is on the right track when he states that Toennies was influenced by Hobbes, Spencer, and Maine, but he omits Marx. This is remarkable in view of Wirth’s strongly leftist political leanings. Wirth observes correctly that Toennies “is verging on the phenomenalistic point of view.” The reference is to the anchorage of “essential will” and “arbitrary will” in human intentions. But to say that Gemeinschaft “has much in common” with Cooley’s “primary group” is a rather superficial statement, as has been pointed out above; however, superficiality has not prevented its being elevated 110

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into another textbook standby. “Applied sociology”, which in Toennies’s system refers to the application of static concepts to dynamic situations, is misconstrued by Wirth as a mixtum compositum of “economics, politics and mental life, which includes art, morals and science.” On the other hand, it is much to Wirth’s credit that he has not transferred to America the common accusation that Toennies valued Gemeinschaft more than Gesellschaft; he refers to the first preface of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft to show that Toennies intended to “examine social realities with the same attitude of factual objectivity with which the naturalist observes the life of a plant or an animal”. But, again, in the conclusion of Wirth’s treatise one finds a statement that has become a common distortion in American sociology. Wirth characterizes Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft, essential will, and arbitrary will as “a limited number of basic concepts,” when in fact they are meant to be all-inclusive. He styles it “sterile philosophizing,” when concepts are “used as perennial frames into which the many-sided, complex and elusive facts of reality are to be squeezed” and a “perversion,” when “the conceptual approach” comes to dominate “the concrete empirical procedure.” Here, we have more than empiricism with a vengeance. We are confronted with the attempt of an ambitious young immigrant to prove his down-to-earth Americanism by disparaging a “philosophical orientation.” Robert E. Park The most far-reaching influence of Toennies on American sociology was mediated by Robert E. Park and his students at the University of Chicago. Although Park’s thinking was largely Darwinian in derivation, it was at the same time oriented to German antecedents. As a young man, Park had heard lectures by Knapp, Windelband, Simmel, and Paulsen in Strasbourg, Heidelberg, and Berlin and through them, especially through Paulsen, he must have become aware of Toennies. Paulsen was a teacher, compatriot, and an intimate friend of Toennies until his death in 1908. Toennies is not quoted in Park’s Heidelberg dissertation “Masse und Publikum”,29 but Park sent a complimentary copy to Toennies (according to Rudolf Heberle), and Toennies quotes Park’s dissertation in his paper “Die grosse Menge und das Volk.”30 This paper by Toennies, in turn, along with his magnum opus, Die Kritik der oeffentlichen Meinung, is quoted in the selected bibliography to the chapter “Collective Behavior” in the famous text Introduction to the Science of Society, by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess (1921).31 The only “reading” taken from Toennies that is found in the Park and Burgess text, “Habit and Custom—the Individual and the General Will,” reprinted from Die Sitte, is also social-psychological in connotation. However, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft is not quoted. This selective borrowing from Toennies by Park is remarkable because the approach to the problems of collective behavior by the Chicago school, as suggested by Park and developed by Herbert Blumer and Blumer’s students, is clearly adumbrated, although not systematically elaborated, in Toennies’s theory of 111

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public opinion. The affinities are striking. Toennies distinguished between a people as an organically and lastingly united collectivity and a nation as a political corporation, on the one hand, and, on the other, ephemeral formations, such as a dispersed mass, a physically assembled crowd, and a public at times debating, at times assertive. Blumer’s theory of collective behavior employs the same categories. Certainly we have in the field of public opinion and collective behavior a marked instance of the subtle influence that Toennies exerted in wide areas of sociological thought and that, in Hans Freyer’s words, “worked anonymously and almost subterraneously.”32 Park did not escape the common misunderstanding of the terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as stereotyped categories rather than as constructional types. However, in referring to the similarity of Toennies’s typology to the typologies employed by Maine, Durkheim, Simmel, Vinogradoff, Ross, Cooley, and others, Park was aware of the differences among them, even if he thought that these differences were not significant.33 He used their varied terminologies as “rough equivalents.”34 “What is important,” Park wrote to Howard Becker, “is that these different men, looking at the phenomena from quite different points of view, have all fallen upon the same distinction. That indicates at least that the distinction is a fundamental one.”35 In this latter regard, Park must be properly comprehended. He wanted to gain a vantage point by which to understand modern urbanized and industrialized societies and the vast transformations in human relations that occurred when uprooted ruralities migrated to metropolitan centers. In order to mark the distinction, Park took his departure from some such contrast as Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. In analogy to Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, he spoke of “sacred” and “secular” society and defined sacred society as one characterized by immobility, secular society as one characterized by mobility.36 Sacred society was conceived as isolated, family-oriented, and as a society with obligations of a personal nature. Secular society was thought of as based on temporary interests and the recognition that association is mutually useful to the participants. Accordingly, secular society is focused on the marketplace, where people come together “not because they are alike but because they are different.” The typical virtue associated with the marketplace is efficiency, with a view to expected success, not piety and adherence to tradition, as in the context of the cohesive family, the guardian of sacred society. Moreover, Park realized that the contrasted types of society are not mutually exclusive. As an example, he adduced—like Toennies—the Jews, where “a vigorous family life” is combined with “an extraordinary degree of mobility.” Parkians: Becker, Hughes, Wirth, Redfield Following Park, Howard Becker developed the sacred-secular theory as a major approach in sociology. He contrasted the “isolated sacred structure” with the “accessible secular structure.”37 Drawing conceptual lines more 112

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sharply than Park, he emphasized that sacred and secular structures nowhere exist as empirical cases—they are, as he put it, conscious fictions, heuristic concepts, arbitrary constructs that are used as such in culture case studies, as for instance in Becker’s own Ionia and Athens—Studies in Secularization.38 The culture case study is the end; and ideal-typical construction is the means to that end. Consequently, Becker argued in Systematic Sociology, the conventional “criticism directed against the use of the ideal-typical method is beside the mark: instead of appraising the instrumental, pragmatic value of particular ideal types, an effort is frequently made to find ‘exceptions’”. Becker is right: surely, there must be exceptions, because reality is not a concept. Becker credits Hughes with having been the first to use the concepts “sacred” and “secular” in the tradition of Robert E. Park. Becker took over from there.39 Certainly, Hughes has offered one of the best culture case studies in his treatise, French Canada in Transition.40 Louis Wirth, on the other hand, in his presidential address, “Consensus and Mass Communication,” harks back to Toennies’s public opinion theory.41 But in emphasizing “discussion, debate, negotiation and compromise”, Wirth refers only to public opinions in the plural, not to Toennies’s “The Public Opinion”, the arbiter of the social scene. The latter, that is, the coercive aspect of public opinion, is Toennies’s main point, but it would not have fitted into Wirth’s philosophy of consensus in terms of mutual agreement. Wirth’s paper “Urbanism as a Way of Life” and Robert Redfield’s Mexican community studies belong to the most conspicuously Toenniesian products of the Parkian school. They complement each other in that they analyze Gesellschaft-like and Gemeinschaft-like situations, respectively, although they are methodologically very different. Redfield deals with single communities. Wirth speaks about a way of life “that has drawn the most remote places of the world into its orbit”; but he locates urbanism in metropolitan areas, that is, in “the forms of social action and organization that typically emerge in relatively permanent, compact settlements of large numbers of heterogeneous individuals.”42 The emphasis in this sentence ought to be on individuals, not only on size, density, and heterogeneity, as is commonly assumed. A historical dimension is thereby indicated that has been disregarded by Wirth. His definition refers not to all cities, especially not to cities of federated partners, but only to what I have called the “anomic city,” that is, a city of fused—and confused—individuals.43 However, if applied only to the anomic city, Wirth’s statement becomes ideal-typical in nature, because the anomic city is indeed “a focal point of fluidity and tenuous social relationships.” Sjoberg’s objection, that the American city is more highly organized than the early Chicago group assumed, is factually justified, but conceptually misdirected.44 Kinship relations are maintained, village-derived contacts are redefined, gangs are formed, and even crime is organized in metropolitan areas, but these attempts are partly resistances of a residual nature, partly reactions to the prevailing normlessness. 113

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They do not deny the typical “anomic” case—namely, that physical proximity is associated with social distance. Wirth’s statement must be understood as a “first approximation,” not as a research finding. Robert Redfield’s Tepotztlan. A Mexican Village and Folk Culture of Yucatan presents a more complex case.45 The Tepotztlan study contains the first statement on the nature of a folk society. The term folk society is applied to a culture that is isolated, traditional, verbal, collective—that is, a culture as Gemeinschaft-like as Wirth’s “urbanism” is Gesellschaft-like. The Yucatan study elaborates the theme of the folk-urban continuum. According to Redfield’s own statement both the Tepotztlan and Yucatan studies are social-anthropological rather than ethnological in nature: they are meant to aim at scientific generalization rather than at presenting a historical analysis. But generalization is not identical with the ideal-typical procedure that Toennies applied. Generalization derives laws from observed facts and rests on the presumed repetitiveness of cause and effect sequences. Ideal-typical procedure descends from concept to reality and allows for deviation from a guiding principle. In this sense, the Yucatan study is clearly generalizing in nature. It not only traces the shift in status and prestige criteria from a small, isolated Indian hamlet in the interior of Yucatan, through two less isolated communities, to the relatively large city of Merida, but it implies that one may find the same sequence from more to less, to lesser, to least “folk culture” along an arbitrary line drawn from Cameroon via Algiers and Provence to Paris.46 The Yucatan study presents itself as a “natural history”, with “inevitable” stages- that is, as a postscript to evolutionary theory. The Tepotztlan study is less pretentiously conceived. The image of Tepotztlan that it unfolds is an enhancement of reality, like a piece of art; but the picture becomes blurred when ideal-typical imagery is used to refer to what is actually a mixed case. For instance, it is pointed out, on the one hand, that members of a Tepotztlan barrio “think and act alike” while, on the other hand, it is asserted that festivals tend to become “generalized saturnalia without symbolism.” Contrary to what has been read into it, the Tepotztlan study does not describe a Gemeinschaft pure and simple. The culture of Tepotztlan is said to be peasant-like, meaning that it is an “intermediate” stage between primitive tribe and modern city.47 In his critical review of Redfield’s study,48 Oscar Lewis maintains that the folk-urban dichotomy is inadequate. He is supported in a succinct summation of the same argument by Philip M. Hauser.49 It is, indeed, likely that Lewis is correct in his claims that Tepotztlanecos are individualistic familists; that friendships across family lines and even within a family are generally avoided; that manifestations of hostility, such as malicious gossip and secret destruction of property, are frequent; and that there is as much evidence of violence, disruption, cruelty, disease, suffering, and maladjustment in Tepotztlan as in any large city. Lewis’s particularized emphasis adds historical color to Redfield’s generalized picture, but does not 114

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necessarily invalidate it. Nobody denies the presence of disease and suffering in a Gemeinschaft. However, Lewis is on firm ground in pointing out that some of the criteria used by Redfield in the definition of the folk society refer to independent rather than interdependent phenomena. Lewis points to the studies of Sol Tax, a student of Redfield’s, who has shown that Guatemalan societies can be small, culturally well-organized, and homogeneous, and, at the same time, highly secular, individualistic, and capitalistic.50 Assuredly, problems in applied and empirical sociology are problems of degree, not problems of kind. Redfield himself admitted that in Tepotztlan a disposition “to make symbolic rather than causal connections coexists with a tendency for relations between man and man to be impersonal, commercial and secular.”51 The impression remains that Lewis, the ethnographer, is more attentive to detail and differentiation than Redfield, the social anthropologist. Even so, Lewis has formulated his own type concept, the “culture of poverty,” that is of mixed character similar to the concept of “folk society,” even if it appears, like “folk society,” in ideal-typical disguise. While there is an unexpected amount of cohesion in the “culture of poverty,” there is also disintegration. If Toennies could have commented on the controversy, he would have observed that the folk-urban dichotomy refers to real, not to ideal, types—that is, to “applied” situations rather than to “pure” constructs. Consequently, the objections to the term folk society are not directed against Toennies’s fundamental concepts. Toennies used terms like country and city, young and old, woman and man merely as paradigms. He would have agreed that there may be, indeed, as much Gemeinschaft in Gesellschaft in Mexico City and San Juan as there is Gesellschaft in Gemeinchaft in Chichicastenengo and Tepotztlan. He would have denied that the difference between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and their pathologies is “a simple function of the relative size” of a community. Park’s position remains crucial for the understanding of the writing of his students. Park was familiar with such dichotomies of European sociologists as status and contract or Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, but he preferred his own dichotomy of symbiosis and consensus. The term symbiosis was borrowed from plant and animal ecology, as well as from post-Darwinian notions of the struggle for survival. The term consensus stands for society, that is, for the human factor. The key concept in the biotic-societal nexus is competition, out of which arises conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. The GemeinschaftGesellschaft dichotomy asserts itself here because the initial homogeneity of isolated communities that had been disturbed by migration and corroded by competition was supposed to be superseded by a new “moral order”, arrived at by means of consensus. Park’s ecological approach isolated the element of competition, but did not assume that competition exists in isolation. In the controversy with William L. Kolb, Everett C. Hughes pointed out in defense of Park that one may first investigate a situation “as if there were perfect competition”, then “keep as many orders of things before one as possible.”52 115

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In another view, the biotic-societal nexus stands for the Gesellschaft situation. “Every society,” says Park, “represents an organization of elements more or less antagonistic to each other, but united for the moment, at least, by an arrangement that defines the reciprocal relations and respective spheres of action of each.”53 There is a Hobbesian flavor in Park’s argument, even if the political factor is diluted into a consensual arrangement. Kolb is in agreement, not in contest, with Park, when he assumes that modification of the competitive model by means of consensus must be consciously achieved. However, Kolb sounds a discordant note by introducing a Parsonian equilibrium terminology. He transmutes competitive striving and uneasy accommodation into a “value,” in terms of the effective neutrality orientation of action. For Park, competition was a fact of life, to be contained by social control. To Talcott Parsons belongs the merit of keeping Toennies alive in the awareness of American sociologists, through his extended note in the second volume of The Structure of Social Action.54 Parsons’s contribution is not analytically superior to the contributions of Heberle, Loomis, Howard Becker, and Albert Salomon; but it turned out to be historically more effective. Many sociologists have read Parsons’s note and retained at least an approximate notion of what it contains.55 One must, however, keep in mind the difference between the Toenniesian and the Parsonian systems. Toennies established transhistorical (“ideal type” or “normal”) concepts and then applied these “things of thought” to historical situations. Parsons defines the logical requisites for arriving at an equilibrium model of the social system and the complementary cultural, personality, and behavioral organism subsystems, but it is not clear whether ultimately he wishes to present a general theoretical system of the social sciences or merely a program for the construction of such a system.56 If the latter, Parsons’s aim is not identical with the aim of Toennies. However, according to Parsons, the Toenniesian dichotomy of affirmative relationships—a double dichotomy, if pathologies are confronted with affirmative relationships- is the most important reference point in the theoretical construction that eventually came to be called the pattern variables.57 As has been repeatedly observed, the pathologies are disregarded by Parsons, but within the modalities, or functions, of the social system—namely, integration, pattern maintenance, goal attainment, and adaptation—actors have a choice, or “dilemma,” which subdivides the Toenniesian dichotomy initially into five, later into four pairs of pattern variables: (1) affectivity versus affective neutrality; (2) universalism versus particularism; (3) performance versus quality; (4) specificity versus diffuseness. Another pair, self-orientation versus collectivity-orientation, was dropped as denoting the internal-external axis rather than belonging to the internal constitution of a system.58 Parsons is in agreement with Toennies when he emphasizes that the pattern variables are “dichotomies,” not “continua,” that is, that they denote concepts rather than concrete actions;59 he is likewise in agreement when he 116

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adds that “theories of equilibrium and theories of change are applications of generalized analytical theory.”60 The pattern variables are a useful commentary on the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft dichotomy, but hardly a theoretical advance. On account of the dynamic element of choice that is inherent in them, they would seem to belong to “applied” rather than to “pure” sociology. They are an extension of the Toenniesian fundamental concepts to the various levels of the social structure. In the essay “Afterthoughts,” as on previous occasions, Parsons derives the need for the pattern variables from the apparent divergence of the “collegial” aspects of professional and age-level associations from their businesslike or bureaucratic connotations.61 Parsons attaches considerable importance to this objection. He assigns the “collegial” aspect to a “third mode” that is neither Gemeinschaft nor Gesellschaft, and effectively neutral relations within a family to a “fourth mode.” The latter relations are clearly of a Gesellschaftlike character. In the professional area, one might not go amiss in assuming that experienced academicians will doubt that relations among colleagues on campus, as a rule, transcend a businesslike relationship. Neither is the teacher-student nor the doctor-patient relationship a total relationship that would make it a Gemeinschaft in the analytical sense. On the other hand, as Toennies already observed regarding Schmalenbach’s “third” concept of Bund, associations of youth, “to the extent to which they rest on immediate and mutual affirmation,” are “a spiritual and specifically moral association of Gemeinschaft-like character”.62 Conceptually, then, there is no need for a third or fourth category. The principle of parsimony may be invoked here. The Parsonian pattern variables that are in the left column can be subsumed under Gemeinschaft and their counterparts under Gesellschaft. It is, of course, possible to subdivide these columns into numerous additional subdivisions until, at the extreme limiting point, analysis merges with description; but conceptual clarity is better served by a dichotomous formulation, such as “affirmative” versus “negative” relations or—within affirmative relations— Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft. A Variety of Approaches There are numerous further instances of Toennies’s influence in American sociological writing. Almost always the theories of Spencer, Maine, Toennies, Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Cooley, MacIver, Redfield, and others are lumped together under such general headings as “dichotomies,” “ideal constructs,” or “polar types.” In other words, formal similarity is emphasized, while divergence in content or meaning is disregarded—a common sociologistic procedure. This kind of thing is found in a wide variety of college texts and journal articles, but also in scholarly summaries like those of John C. McKinney63 and Theodore Abel;64 the indication is that Toennies is more often ritualistically invoked than actually known. Occasionally, contradictory statements are juxtaposed. 117

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For instance, Abel suggests within a few pages that of all dichotomies only that of Toennies has been “generally accepted and extensively used,” and yet that it is but “an accidental part” of his scholarly work. Toennies’s main emphasis, Abel maintains, is on an “evolutionary thesis,” which he supposedly shares with Spencer. Actually, the “dichotomy” as a statement is “pure” sociology, while the “evolutionary thesis” is a historical application. Spencer’s and Toennies’s analyses of the military versus the industrial society and of Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft are diametrically opposed.65 Toennies did not derive Gemeinschaft from coercion, as he might have done if he had followed Spencer. By way of contrast, Werner Stark based the fifth volume of The Sociology of Religion most aptly on the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft dichotomy.66 His translation of Wesenwille as “existential will”—Heberle and I have translated it “essential will”—should be noted. Most perceptive also is Gladys Bryson’s observation of the close approximation of the views of the Scottish moralists on Toennies’s fundamental concepts; and Rupert B. Vance’s reference to Toennies in his splendid paper “Security and Adjustment: The Return to the Larger Community.”67 Paul F. Lazarsfeld has become attentive to Toennies in pursuing his interest in the history of empirical social research. But Lazarsfeld’s understanding of the terminology of Toennies does not agree with Toennies’s own notions. Toennies has a term, “practical sociology”, for what Lazarsfeld means by “applied sociology”. Lazarsfeld thinks of Toennies’s meaning of “applied sociology,” which is largely equivalent with social change theory, as if it were only a catchall for “role conflict,” “anomie,” “reference group behavior,” (this last in relation to public opinion), and the like.68 Another kind of extension of Toennies that is empirical and quantitative in character has been the testing of pairs of polar ideal types, such as Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, with the help of scalogram analysis and related devices, to see whether or not they are empirically based. An example is a paper on societal complexity by Linton C. Freeman and Robert F. Winch. Their procedure involved scoring data on forty-eight societies drawn from the Human Relations Area Files. Six out of eight variables tested varied items systematically and constituted an acceptable scale. The conclusion is that “Redfield, Toennies et al. have indeed been describing a unidimensional phenomenon—societal complexity.”69 Apart from the question whether a type-construct can be meaningfully tested, it might be noted that the test applies less to Toennies than to Redfield because two of the characteristics of social complexity in the presented scalogram analysis, incest taboos and crimes, are not indicative of affirmative relationships. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a recent paper by Reinhard Bendix is a good example of the “anonymous, almost subterranean” influence on sociological thought in America of Toennies’s way of viewing societal dichotomies.70 What Bendix calls “modernity” and “tradition” as shorthand for the separation as against the fusion of class, status, and authority; what he further says 118

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about the contradistinction of the “whole house” (oikos) and individualistic (chrematistic) economics; and what he adds about personal intimacy as against impersonal formalism in situations of super- and subordination is nothing but the contrast of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft forms in affirmative relationships. Yet while Tocqueville, Marx, and Weber are abundantly quoted, the name of Toennies is never mentioned although, surely, Bendix knows Toennies’s work. The recognition of the affinity of Toennies to Marx, as well as to Weber, would have led to a modification of Bendix’s argument, because, for Toennies, both family and economy are materially (biologically or economically) based. By way of contrast, Morris Janowitz refers to Toennies rather prominently, but his understanding is blurred.71 He joins those who think that the dichotomous categories of Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft are “oversimplified,” although it is obvious that reality cannot have more than two limiting points, while the phenomena between these limiting points may be of infinite variety. There is no contradiction between these statements. Janowitz is correct in assuming that W. I. Thomas was “fully aware of the writings of Toennies”; he was among those who met Toennies in St. Louis. Indeed, Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, with its comparative analysis of old-time rural life and the metropolitan environment, could be read as an application of the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft scheme. However, there is no evidence, as Janowitz asserts, in any of W. I. Thomas’s writings that Toennies’s formulation was “rejected” by Thomas—and none is quoted in Janowitz’s footnotes or in his bibliography. More specifically, Thomas could not have rejected Toennies’s formulation for “its implied hostility to individual freedom and creativity” because, being aware of Toennies, Thomas knew that “arbitrary will,” and hence Gesellschaft, is based on rational calculation and conscious decision, and therefore on individuality. Individualism, in the Toenniesian system, is either the outcome of Gemeinschaft or the precondition for Gesellschaft. A most telling characterization of Toennies’s place in the development of sociological thought is contained in Robert Nisbet’s magisterial book, The Sociological Tradition, especially in the passage where it is pointed out that through the differentiation of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft “we are provided with a sociological explanation of the rise of capitalism, the modern state and the whole modernist temper of mind.”72 While Marx dealt with the loss of community as the consequence of capitalism, Toennies treated capitalism as a consequence of the loss of community. On the other hand, as Nisbet states, Weber’s concepts of “traditional” and “rational” types of authority and society have “almost perfect correspondence with Toennies’s terms.” The word “almost” points to the remaining difference: Weber uses the terms in historical application exclusively, while Toennies takes his departure from a transhistorical type construct and proceeds to historical application as a consequence.73 It is along this line that future comparative research ought to 119

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be pursued. It would be equally desirable for a Marxist sociologist to compare Toennies and Marx.74 A New Evaluation The influence that Toennies exerted on American sociology has been treated, if only cursorily, in Toennies on Sociology and in Toennis. A New Evaluation.75 These two publications have become part of the evidence. A further contribution has been made by E. G. Jacoby, in a book containing translations of some of Toennies’s papers on the history of ideas.76 It remains to be seen in what way American sociologists may be stimulated by the new evaluation presented in these three volumes. American sociology, thus far, has been largely a sociology of interpersonal relations within a consideration of social structure. The present interest among American sociologists in Marx and Weber, and likewise in Toennies, may be understood as indicative of an attempt to gain access to macrosociological approaches. The crucial point will be whether the present generation of sociologists, as distinct from those who listened to the St. Louis lecture, will be ready to conceive of collectives and corporations as effective entities. This is the yardstick by which Toennies’s influence on scholarly opinion in the social sciences will have to be measured. Notes 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

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Ferdinand Toennies’s reports on the AJS, Vol. 1, nos. 1 and 2 (July-September 1895) were published in Archiv fuer soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik 8 (1895), 723–726. Ferdinand Toennies, Soziologische Studien und Kritiken, vol. 3 (Jena, 1929), passim. The other speakers in the section “Social Structure” where Toennies delivered his paper, were Gustav Ratzenhofer and Lester F. Ward. Among the American social scientists whom Toennies met at St. Louis, apart from Small and Ward, were Charles A. Ellwood, William I. Thomas, and Edward A. Ross. Charles H. Cooley was absent. Ellwood referred to Toennies in his book, The Psychology of Human Society (New York and London, 1925), 117–143. He absorbs Toennies in a kind of reasoning that is Cooleyan in nature. There is no indication that Cooley and Toennies knew of each other’s work. Toennies, “The Present Problems of Social Structure, American Journal of Sociology 10 (1905): 560–588; cf. Werner J. Cahnman and Rudolf Heberle, Ferdinand Toennies on Sociology. Pure, Applied and Empirical (Chicago,IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1971). 108–127 and the comments on xvi–xviii. A few more authors and their works will be mentioned, including my own volume, Werner J. Cahnman, Ferdinand Toennies. A New Evaluation (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973). Edward A. Ross, Social Control (New York, 1918; first ed. 1901), 432. Ferdinand Toennies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963; first ed. 1887).

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

Heberle’s article appeared in Rural Sociology 6 (1941): 203–215. The publications of Galpin, Hiller, Kolb, Landis, Loomis, Sanderson, T.L. Smith, and other early sociologists are listed in the notes of Heberle’s paper in Rural Sociology, op.cit.; Cf. P.A. Sorokin, C. C. Zimmermann, and C.H. Galpin, Systematic Sourcebook in Rural Sociology (Minneapolis, 1930–32). Carle C. Zimmermann, The Changing Community (New York and London, 1938), chap. 4 and 5. Zimmerman’s notes refer to numerous rural community studies. Charles P. Loomis and J. Allan Beegle, Rural Social Systems. A Textbook in Rural Sociology and Anthropology (New York, 1950), esp. 189. I am obliged to Professor Loomis for advice on the older literature. Cahnman, “Toennies and Durkheim: An Exchange of Reviews” in Cahnman, Toennies. A New Evaluation, 239–256. Reprinted in this volume. Loomis and Beegle, Rural Social Systems,181f; cf. Charles P. Loomis, Studies in Rural Social Organization (East Lansing: 1945), 340–341. Loomis and Beegle, Rural Social Systems, 789–824; cf. Olen Leonard and Charles P. Loomis, Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community. El Cerrito, New Mexico (East Lansing: 1945); Walter Kallmorgen, Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community. The Old Order Amish of Lancaster, Pa. (Washington, D.C.: 1942) Loomis and Beegle, op.cit., 30. Toennies, Thomas Hobbes. Leben und Lehre (Stuttgart/Bad Canstatt: F. Frommann, 1971; first ed. 1896), 89–90; trans. in Cahnman and Heberle, Toennies on Sociology, 40. Rudolf Heberle, “The Sociological System of Ferdinand Toennies,” reprinted in Cahnman, Ferdinand Toennies. A New Evaluation. Rudolf Heberle, “Ferdinand Toennies’s Contribution to the Sociology of Political Parties,” in American Journal of Sociology, 61 (1955). Cf. Heberle, Social Movements. An Introduction to Political Sociology (New York, 1951). Edmund De S. Brunner, “Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in Rural Community Studies,” in Rural Sociology, 7 (1942): 75–77. Robert Redfield, “Rural Sociology and the Folk Society,” in Rural Sociology, 8 (1943): 68–71. According to Robert A. Park during a personal conversation, Redfield owed the concept of “folk society” to his suggestion. Toennies, Fundamental Concepts of Sociology, trans. and ed. Charles P. Loomis (New York, 1940); Toennies, Community and Society (New York, 1963). Toennies, Custom. An Essay on Social Codes, trans. A. F. Borenstein (Glencoe, IL, 1961). Also: Karl J. Arndt and C. L. Folse, “The Concept of Law and Human Progress,” Social Forces 20 (1940): 23–29, and “Estates and Classes” in Class, Status and Power. A Reader in Social Stratification, ed. Reinhold Bendix and Seymour M. Lipset (Glencoe, IL, 1953), 63–74. Albert Salomon, “In Memoriam Ferdinand Toennies,” reprinted from Social Research 3 (1936); now in Cahnman, Toennies. A New Evaluation, 33–46. Pitirim A. Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories (London, 1928), 491–493; Robert M. MacIver and Charles H. Page, Society. An Introductory Analysis (New York, 1937), 52 et passim; Louis Wirth, “The Sociology of Ferdinand Toennies,” American Journal of Sociology 32 (1926): 412–422. One might mention here also Howard Becker and Harry Elmer Barnes’s comment 121

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25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

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on Toennies in the first edition of Social Thought from Lore to Science, vol. 3, 3d ed. (New York, 1961; first ed. 1937), 188–189 et passim. The passage on p. 188 seems to have been penned rather hastily, as demonstrated by the erroneous statement that Toennies was inattentive to the methodological controversies of his time. For a Sorokin-based misunderstanding of Durkheim’s two forms of social organization as “somewhat similar to the types sketched by Maine and Toennies,” see Leo F. Schnore, “Social Morphology and Human Ecology,” American Journal of Sociology 63 (1958): 621–634. Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories, 493. Ibid., 489; cf. K. Peter Etzkorn, “Ferdinand Toennies as a Formal Sociologist,” in Cahnman, Toennies. A New Evaluation, 125–139. Louis Wirth, American Journal of Sociology, 32, 412–432. Robert E. Park, Masse und Publikum (Bern, 1904). Cf. Robert E. Park, The Crowd and the Public, trans. and ed. Henry and Charlotte Elsner (Chicago, 1972). Toennies, “Die grosse Menge und das Volk, in” Schmollers Jahrbuch 43 (1919): 1–29; reprinted in Toennies, Soziologische Studien und Kritiken, vol.2 (Jena, 1926), pp. 277–303. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago, 1974; first ed. 1921), 103–105, 857, 940. Hans Freyer, Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft. Logische Grundlegung des Systems der Soziologie (Leipzig and Berlin, 1930), 187. Howard Becker, Systematic Sociology. On the Basis of the Beziehungslehre and Gebildelehre of Leopold von Wiese (New York, 1932), 225. Charles P. Loomis and Zona K. Loomis, Modern Social Theories. Select American Writers (Princeton, N.J., 1961), 95, 107. Becker, Systematic Sociology, 225–226. Robert E. Park, “The Problem of Cultural Differences,” American Council, Institute of Pacific Relations (1931), esp. 14ff.; reprinted in Robert E. Park, Race and Culture, ed. Everett C. Hughes (New York, 1950), 12ff. Park acknowledges that he derived the sacred-secular dichotomy from Toennies. Becker, Systematic Sociology, 222ff., 319f. According to Through Values to Social Interpretation (Durban, 1950), 258, Becker originally preferred to translate Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft by “isolated sacred structure” and “accessible secular structure,” respectively, then changed to “communal” and “associational.” He thought that many translations were possible, if only one were aware of the constructional character of the terms used. Cf. Howard Becker, “Constructive Typology in the Social Sciences,” American Sociological Review 5 (1940): 40–55. Howard Becker, Ionia and Athens. Studies in Secularization (Chicago, 1930), 4–10. Howard Becker, “Current Sacred-Secular Theory and Its Development,” in Modern Sociological Theory in Continuity and Change, ed. Howard Becker and Alvin Boskoff (New York, 1957), 180. Hughes used the sacred-secular approach in the paper “Personality Types and the Division.” Everett C. Hughes, French Canada in Transition (Chicago, 1943). Comparable, but more anthropologically conceived, is Horace Miner, St. Denis, A French-Canadian Village (Chicago, 1939).

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

American Sociological Review 13 (1948), 1–15; reprinted in Louis Wirth. Cities and Social Life, ed. Albert J. Reiss, Jr. (Chicago, 1964), 18–43. Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44 (1938): 1–24; reprinted in Louis Wirth, 60–83. Werner J. Cahnman, “The Rise of Civilization as a Paradigm of Social Change” in Sociology and History. Theory and Research, ed. W.J. Cahnman and Alvin Boskoff (New York, 1964), 537–559. Gideon Sjoberg, “Theory and Research in Urban Sociology” in The Study of Urbanization, ed. Philip M. Hauser and Leo F. Schnore (New York, 1965), 157–190. Robert Redfield, Tepotztlan. A Mexican Village. A Study of Folk Life (Chicago, 1930). The Folk Culture of Yucatan (Chicago, 1941). Personal communication. Redfield, Tepotztlan, 79, 95, 217. Oscar Lewis, Life in a Mexican Village. Tepotztlan Restudied (Urbana,IL: University of Illinois Press, 1970), esp. chap. 12 and 21. Cf. Oscar Lewis, “Further Observations on the Folk-urban Continuum and Urbanization with Special Reference to Mexico City,” in Hauser and Schnore, Study of Urbanization, 491–502. Philip M. Hauser, “Observations on the Urban-Folk and Urban-Rural Dichotomies as Forms of Western Ethnocentrism,” in Hauser and Schnore, Study of Urbanization, 503–518. Sol Tax, “Culture and Civilization in Guatemalan Societies,” Scientific Monthly 48 (1939): 463–467; and “World View and Social Relations in Guatemala, American Anthropologist 43 (1941): 27–42. Robert Redfield, “The Folk Society,” American Journal of Sociology 52 (1947): 293–308. Toennies is quoted on 295. William L. Kolb, “The Social Structure and Function of Cities” in Economic Development and Cultural Change 3 (1954): 30–46. Everett C. Hughes, “Robert E. Park’s Views on Urban Society. A Comment on William L. Kolb’s Paper,” Economic Development 3 (1954): 47–49. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Society (Chicago, 1972; first ed. 1921), 65. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, vol. 2 (New York: McGrawHill, 1968; first ed.1937), 686–694. Reprinted as “A Note on Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft,” together with Parsons’s “Some Afterthoughts on Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft,” in Cahnman, Toennies. A New Evaluation, 140–159. Compare Max Black, “Some Questions about Parsons’ Theories” in Talcott Parsons, A Critical Examination, ed. Max Black (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1961), 268–288. Talcott Parsons, “An Approach to Psychological Theory in Terms of the Theory of Action” in Psychology. A Study of a Science, ed. Sigmund Koch, vol. 3 (New York, 1959), 691; the same thought is repeated in Cahnman, Toennies. A New Evaluation, “Afterthoughts,” 151, with reference to “Professions and Social Structure.” It is difficult to keep track of the variations in the pattern variables scheme. The first mention occurs in Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1951) and especially in Toward a General Theory of Action, 123

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59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

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ed. Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), where the five pattern scheme was worked out. In Talcott Parsons, Robert F. Bales, and Edward Shils, Working Papers in the Theory of Action (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1953), one of the pattern variables was dropped, or rather changed its status. The most important single reference to the pattern variables is contained in the paper “Pattern Variables Revisited,” American Sociological Review 25 (1960): 467–482, in response to Robert Dubin’s paper, “Parsons’ Actor: Continuities in Social Theory,” ibid., 457–466. Compare Parsons’s paper in Sigmund Koch, Psychology and, as far as the classification of societies is concerned, Talcott Parsons, Societies. Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), where structural differentiation is handled with reference to the four function scheme. I am grateful to Professor Harry Johnson for valuable advice regarding the proper reading of this literature. Parsons and Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action, 91. Koch, Psychology, 688. Cf. Cahnman, “Some Afterthoughts . . . ,” Toennies. A New Evaluation. Ibid., intro., 11–15, with reference to Toennies’s comment in the preface to the sixth and seventh editions of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1925). John C. McKinney, Constructive Typology and Social Theory, vol. 1 (New York, 1966), 55, 102ff., 115ff., 176ff. Theodore Abel, The Foundation of Sociological Theory (New York, 1970), 134–137. Cahnman, Toennies. A New Evaluation, 207ff. Werner Stark, The Fundamental Forms of Social Thought (London, 1962) and The Sociology of Religion (New York, 1972), p. v. Gladys Bryson, Man and Society. The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1968; first ed. 1945), 171; Vance in Cahnman and Boskoff, Sociology and History, 386. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “The Place of Empirical Social Research in the Map of Contemporary Sociology,” in John C. McKinney and Edward A. Tiryakian, Theoretical Sociology. Perspectives and Developments (New York, 1970), 301–318; far more adequate is Lazarsfeld’s characterization of Toennies in Main Trends in Sociology (New York, 1973; first ed. 1970), 11. Linton C. Freeman and Robert Winch, “Societal Complexity. An Empirical Test of a Typology of Societies,” American Journal of Sociology 62 (1957), 461–466. Reinhard Bendix, “Inequality and Social Structure. A Comparison of Marx and Weber,” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): 149–161. Morris Janowitz, “Sociological Theory and Social Control,” American Journal of Sociology 81 (1975): 82–108, esp. 85–90. Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), esp. 78, 79, 209, et passim. I have myself described Toennies’s and Weber’s thought as related, although not identical, expressions of a sociological orientation, both in Cahnman and Boskoff, Sociology and History, 110–111, 117, and in the chapter on Toennies and Weber in Cahnman, Toennies. A New Evaluation, 121ff., 257ff.;cf. my paper, “Toennies, Durkheim and Weber,” Social Science Information, 15, no. 6 (1976): 839–853. (Reprinted in present volume. Eds.)

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74.

75. 76.

Recently, Toennies’s book Karl Marx. His Life and Teachings, trans. Charles P. Loomis and Ingeborg Paulus (Lansing, Mich., 1974) has become available in English; cf. “Toennies and Marx. Evaluation and Excerpts” in Cahnman, Toennies. A New Evaluation, 219–238. (Reprinted in this volume. Eds.) Cahnman and Heberle, Toennies on Sociology, xvii–xviii; Cahnman, Toennies. A New Evaluation, 19–20, 294–295. E. G. Jacoby, ed. Ferdinand Toennies on Social Ideas and Ideologies (New York, 1974).

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12 A Research Note on Phenomenology and Symbolic Interactionism There are affinities in thought that are not directly traceable to “influences,” personal contacts, and the like. Of such a nature are the affinities of some aspects of Toennies’s thought to phenomenology and symbolic interactionism. A comparative evaluation is of interest, as is the comparison of Toennies and Marx; but there is no one-to-one relationship. The following two-pronged research note is offered as an incentive to further investigation, not as a final word. For the scholarly reader, it is an epilogue pointing to the future. Phenomenology The question whether Toennies is or is not a phenomenologist has been answered in the affirmative by some authors, such as Lenk, Buelow, Bernsdorff, Heberle, Koenig, and Salomon, but not always cogently; the assertion has been denied by E. G. Jacoby.1 What Toennies himself had to say about phenomenology as a school of thought is non-committal. In the Selbstdarstellung he says that he has taken notice of the movement “with due respect but without having gained an intimate relation to it”;2 in a note to the sixth and seventh edition of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft he further observes that writers of the phenomenological persuasion, among whom he mentions sociologists Scheler and Vierkandt, “have investigated the relation of the individual and community with predilection and praiseworthy zeal.”3 What can be deduced from these statements is that Toennies was not a camp follower of Husserl; he could not have been, he was too Toenniesian to be a mere adherent of phenomenology or Marxism or voluntarism or any other procrustean mold of thought. But his affinity to phenomenology is nevertheless clear.4 Toennies’s concepts of “essential will” and “arbitrary will,” as Albert Salomon has observed, are not so much psychological but phenomenological in character, if psychology is considered as a positive science, like physics, dealing with a world of objects, and phenomenology as a philosophical discipline, dealing with fundamental problems of knowledge and experience. The sentence from 127

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the second preface of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft that “all social structures are artifacts of psychic substance” must be understood in this sense.”5 In behavioristic psychology, men’s minds are responsive to stimuli; in phenomenology, consciousness is an active agent, defining a situation or an object. It is the medium of access to whatever exists and is valid, according to Gurwitsch. To be sure, will—the decisive term in Toennies’s vocabulary—represent only one aspect of consciousness; but in choosing as a motto for the second book of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, which deals with the forms of will, Spinoza’s “voluntas atque intellectus unum et idem sunt,” Toennies indicates that he envisages will in a larger context: “will inasmuch as it contains thinking and thinking inasmuch as it contains will,” that is, consciousness.6 In order to comprehend essential will, then, one must conceive of the experience of external objects as “a purely subjective reality,” that is, as a “coexistence and succession of sentiments of existence, emotion and activity”; in order to comprehend arbitrary will, one must know that it is a product of emancipated thought.7 Both concepts of will, Toennies emphasizes, “must be thought of as causes of, or dispositions toward action, so that their very existence and nature permits an inference as to whether a certain conduct of the subject is probable or under specific conditions even necessary.”8 Consequently, in Thurnwald’s Symposium, he reiterates that the subjective foundation of all human associations was “the cardinal point” of his theory, that social entities, relations, and associations, “ought to be seen from the inside out” and that “they are immediately present only in the consciousness of the participants.”9 This harks back to the earlier statement in the paper delivered at the Gehe Foundation, namely, that the existence of entities, relations and associations “rest[s] with their perception.”10 Toennies’s position, which is related to but not identical with phenomenology, can perhaps be best characterized, if one refers to his review of Edouard Abramowsky, Le materialisme historique et le principle du phenomene social (Paris, 1898), one of the earliest phenomenological treatises.11 Toennies agrees with the author “that only individual consciousness ought to be accepted as a sufficient reason for social phenomena; he [Abramowsky] calls this principle social phenomenalism which, however, does not put in question the objective reality of phenomena—whereby, then, social facts are somewhat more than psychological facts” (Toennies’s italics). Toennies observes, with apparent approval, that the objective approach of Durkheim and the psychological approach of Tarde are thus combined. He concludes by saying that Abramowsky’s ideas and conclusions are closely related to his own, both with regard to general theory and to psychological interpretation. If one is attentive to every word in these reviewing sentences, Toennies’s position becomes entirely clear. Schuetz, who is regarded as the foremost representative of a phenomenological approach among sociologists, aims at establishing “objective meaning-contexts of subjective meaning-contexts,” so that the investigator 128

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ascends from the specific to the general, from actual experience via “personal types” to “objective ideal types.”12 Toennies, however, descends from the universal to the particular, from objective type constructs (Normalbegriffe) in pure sociology to their application to dynamic processes in applied sociology and from there to a multitude of empirically ascertainable facts. But the type constructs, as “things of thought,” are eidetic in character and the empirical facts are grounded in the “intersubjectivity” of social relations. Toennies was in error when he assumed that his approach was “psychological” in nature; its voluntaristic assumptions were nearer to phenomenology than he was ready to concede. Toennies considered collectivites, “the thought structures of cultural life,” to be the proper object of theoretical sociology because “men communicate with them as realities” and conceive of them as such;13 what he meant to say was that collectivities are real in the consciousness of the onlooker. In such a way, the objective and the subjective approach turn out to be different aspects of one and the same social reality. Symbolic Interactionism The influence that Toennies exerted upon the Chicago School of sociology has been indicated in the introduction to Toennies on Sociology. This influence extended over several generations. Albion Small, along with Hugo Muensterberg, was instrumental in inviting Toennies to the St. Louis Exposition of Arts and Science in 1904 and in associating him with the American Journal of Sociology. Robert E. Park developed the concepts of sacred versus secular societies and of a social organization based on the family versus a social organization based on the marketplace in analogy to the Toenniesian concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Of Park’s students, Howard Becker worked out the sacred-secular theory, Louis Wirth and Robert Redfield the dichotomy of “folk” versus “urban” societies and of customs versus consensus. When Redfield spoke of the “Little Society” he contrasted its intimate and particularistic features to the universal civilization of Graham Wallas’s “Great Society,” a concept which Park had been fond of referring to in his lectures. In all these elaborations the ideal-typical character of the concepts employed was emphasized in principle, but not always maintained in application, as for instance in Redfield’s Tepotztlan—A Mexican Village. What was meant to be an ideal type imperceptibly changed over into a real type, and what had been constructs became categories. This inadvertent deviation enabled Oscar Lewis, Philip M. Hauser, William Kolb and Gideon Sjoberg to launch their ostensibly justified but intrinsically misdirected attacks on Redfield and Wirth and, indeed, on the entire conceptual approach of the Chicago school.14 Limitation of space does not permit rendering a full account of these controversies; however, the close affinity of Toennies’s thought to some aspects of symbolic interactionism deserves to be briefly mentioned. 129

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Toennies reviewed favorably, but without enthusiasm, James Mark Baldwin’s Social and Ethical Interpretation in Mental Development.15 He comments on Baldwin’s quotation of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (p. 486) that the author’s consideration of reciprocal effects between individual and social phenomena did not strike him as being a novel observation. Cooley’s “organic” idea that “heredity” and “communication” are complementary phenomena and that the “suggestion” of the social environment was to be met by the individual actor’s “choice” might have appealed to Toennies somewhat more because of its dialectical and voluntaristic connotation,16 but even more intriguing are the points of comparison between Toennies and George Herbert Mead. This is all the more remarkable as there is no indication that either man was aware of the other. Of course, both were aware of the British philosophical tradition from Hobbes to Mill and the German tradition from Leibniz to Schelling, and especially, of the contributions of Kant and Hegel; there is no indication, however, that Mead was attentive to Schopenhauer.17 In the following, I am going to indicate some of the passages in Mead’s writings that are suggestive of related ideas to be found with Toennies. Mead points out that the physiological organism is essential to the Self, even if the Self is not primarily physiological in nature.18 The “fundamental social process” to which the physiological bases of social behavior give rise, he says, are those between the sexes, between parents and children, and between neighbors. In Toenniesian language, these are relationships based on “essential will,” that is, on thought arising not only from organically anchored emotions but also leading to social relations, collectives, and corporations conforming to such emotions.19 To be sure, Toennies proceeds from there to the analysis of “arbitrary,” or reflective will, leading to various and different kinds of relations, collectives and corporations; this reflective will, although involving emotions, is directed toward specific purposes and thus may become estranged from the organic base. Mead, on the other hand, develops the idea of the “conversation of gestures,” by means of which one responds to oneself as an imagined other might respond, so that reflective thought becomes preparatory of social action. Yet, as the unity and structure of the complete Self reflects the unity and structure of social process, so reflects the interplay of essential and arbitrary will the structural contrast of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. At this juncture the behavioristic point of departure of Mead and the voluntaristic point of departure of Toennies make for a different emphasis. For Mead, it is the “Me,” that is, the “others” which the Self reflects that provides the starting point, with the “I” organizing the received impressions, defining the situation and acting upon it; for Toennies, it is the will which fashions the world of appropriate social relations, collectives, and corporations. However, the difference is more apparent than real because, contrary to a strictly behavioristic position, Mead’s “I” is not merely responsive to impressions but actively engaged in the assessment of the situation. It remains true that Toennies’s position is nearer to the 130

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one of Cooley in this regard; but it is all the more remarkable that Toennies’s statement on essential will and Gemeinschaft coming logically and historically first while arbitrary will and Gesellschaft are derived from it, is paralleled by Mead. What Toennies calls the “organic” and “rationalistic” points of view appears in Mead as the difference between the evolutionary and the contract theories of the state.20 The latter theory, which takes individuals as logically prior to the social process, according to Mead, cannot explain the existence of minds and selfs while the former theory which starts with social process satisfies this requirement. An unexpected “realistic” rather than “nominalistic” note appears here in Mead’s argument; the same “realistic” note, as is well known, is even more pronounced with Toennies. The distinction between “pure” and “applied” sociology and the historical aspect of the latter, which are essential features in Toennies’s thought, are lacking with Mead, but the emphasis on the social matrix of attitudes is common to both. The most striking affinity between Toennies and Mead occurs with regard to affirmative and negative human relations. As will be remembered, Toennies calls only the former “social” relations; the latter, usually subsumed under such designations as “conflict,” “coercion,” “pathology,” and the like, are considered destructive of social relations. Mead, likewise, divides “the fundamental socio-physiological impulses or behavior tendencies which are common to all human individuals” into two main classes: those leading to social cooperation and those leading to social antagonism.21 He adds that, in speaking about “friendly” and “hostile” attitudes, he is using the term social in its broadest and strictest sense; but he also uses it in the quite common narrower sense in which it bears an ethical connotation only the fundamental physiological human impulses or behavior tendencies . . . which make for friendliness and cooperation among the individuals motivated by them are social or lead to social conduct whereas those . . . which are hostile or make for hostility and antagonism are anti-social or lead to anti-social conduct. (In another passage, Mead distinguishes between two anti-social types, namely, the “selfish man” and the “impulsive man,” comparable to Toennies’s criminalistic types of “crooks” and “offenders.”)22 Mead further agrees with the Hobbesian position taken by Toennies that within the modern state or nation the anti-social effects of such essentially “hostile” human impulses or attitudes as self-protection and self-preservation must be “curbed and kept under control by the legal system,” that is, by an overarching authority. But, then, the two authors go different ways again. Mead falls back on the tenets of classical liberalism in assuming that self-protection and selfpreservation in their manifestation as rivalry and competition, although initially “hostile” in connotation, will come to serve definite social ends and help, along with genuinely “friendly” attitudes, in maintaining the organization 131

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of society.23 Toennies asserts that the calculated self-interest of initially isolated individuals will bring about and support the social order and thus be an affirmative force in its own right. In other words, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, as structures based on affirmative attitudes, are both “normal,” that is ideally construed, and normative concepts; social pathologies are considered separately. Mead is not concerned with social structure but with human conduct. In Mead’s terminology, “ethical ideals,” founded upon unification, cooperation, integration, and the idea of equality, are pitted against “ethical problems” that are connected with feelings of individuality, self-superiority, and independence.24 “Ethical problems” are indicative of “wrong, evil or sinful conduct” that runs counter to the pattern of organized social behavior; although existentially social, they are normatively asocial phenomena, precisely as they are in Toennies’s “pure” sociology. Toennies deals with “ethical problems,” such as crime, industrial conflict, and suicide, chiefly in empirical sociology; on a larger scale, they are adumbrated in the historical dynamics of social institutions. Whatever the difference, both Toennies and Mead are aware of the requirements of a good society as well as of the pathologies that corrode its existence.25 In this regard, both are reminiscent of an older Aristotelian tradition in social thought that has been overlaid by a positivistic approach to social phenomena: the normative sociologist has the “good society” in mind, even as he scrutinizes the evil society which is the object of his investigation. It is likely that the present unrest in sociology has something to do with the rigid exclusion of normative considerations. Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

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For Lenk’s assertion, see the article, “Wesensschau,” in Woerterbuch der Soziologie, 2d edition, 1969; for Buelow, see the entry, “Gemeinschaft,” ibid.; for Bernsdorff see the entry, “Toennies,” in Internationales Soziologenlexikon, 1959; for Heberle see article, “Toennies,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 1968; also Rene Koenig, “Die Begriffe Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft bei Ferdinand Toennies,” in Koelner Zeitschrift fuer Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 7, no. 3 (1955): 361; also Albert Salomon, “In Memoriam Ferdinand Toennies,” in Social Research, 3, no. 3 (1936): 353, reprinted in Cahnman, ed., Ferdinand Toennies. New Evaluation. Cf. E. G. Jacoby, “Zur reinen Soziologie,” in Koelner Zeitschrift, 20, no. 3, p. 451. Ferdinand Toennies’s statement in Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Meiner, 1923), pp. 203–244. See Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963 and 1970), p. xlvi. I am referring in this context to Aron Gurwitsch’s basic paper, “The Phenomenological and the Psychological Approach to Consciousness,” in Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston/Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), pp. 89–106; cf. Gurwitsch, “Husserl’s Theory of the Intentionality of Consciousness in Historical Perspective,” in Edward

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

N. Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum, eds., Phenomenology and Existentialism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp. 25–58. Toennies, Gemeinschaft, p. xxxv. The second preface of Gemeinschaft, which has been translated in Cahnman and Heberle, Toennies on Sociology, pp. 24–36, ought to be read carefully in this connection. See Toennies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 87; cf. Charles P. Loomis, Ferdinand Toennies, p. 103. Ibid., p. 88. Cf Loomis, Ferdinand Toennies, p. 104. Ibid., p. 88; Loomis, Ferdinand Toennies, p. 103. See Toennies, “Mein Verhaeltnis zur Soziologie,” in Richard Thurnwald, ed., Soziologie von Heute. Ein Symposium der Zeitschrift fuer Voelkerpsychologie und Soziologie (Leipzig: C.L. Hirschfeld, 1932), pp. 103–122; partially translated as “My Relation to Sociology,” in Toennies on Sociology, pp. 3–11. See Toennies, Soziologische Studien und Kritiken (SStuKr) vol. 1, (Jena, 1924 and 1928), p. 363. [SStuKr is the three-volume collection of Toennies’s major papers which he himself put together late in his career. The papers were published in several volumes—which Cahnman calls “imposing but uneven”.eds.] Cf. “The Nature of Sociology,” in Toennies on Sociology, pp. 57–107. See Toennies, SStuKr, vol. 3, p. 300ff. See Alfred Schuetz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 241. Cf. Maurice Natanson, “Alfred Schuetz on Social Reality and Social Science,” in Social Research, 35, no. 2 (1968): pp. 217–244. Toennies, Einfuehrung in die Soziologie, new edition (Stuttgart: Enke Verlag, 1965), pp. 9–10. Cf. Gideon Sjoberg, “Theory and Research in Urban Sociology,” and Oscar Lewis and P. M. Hauser, “The Folk-Urban Ideal Types,” in P. M. Hauser and Leo Schnore, eds., A Study of Urbanization (New York: Wiley, 1965), pp. 157–190 and 491–518, and the literature mentioned there. See Toennies, SStuKr, vol. 3, p. 320ff. Charles S. Cooley, Human Nature and Social Order (New York: Schocken Books, 1964; first ed. 1902), pp. 3ff and 51ff. The lack of any mention by Mead of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche has been noted before. See, for example, M. H. Moore in the introduction to G. H.Mead in his Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), p. xxiv. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934; 12th repr. 1963), p. 139; A. Strauss, ed., George Herbert Mead on Social Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), p. 203. Other passages are quoted according to the Strauss edition, without further reference to the complete edition. The original passage in Gemeinschaft, p. 87, cf. Loomis, Ferdinand Toennies, p. 3, is as follows: “Essential will is the psychological equivalent of the human body or the principle of the unity of life, insofar as life is conceived under that form of reality to which thinking itself belong.” Mead-Strauss, op.cit., p. 242. Ibid., pp. 264–65. Ibid., p. 239. 133

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23. 24. 25.

134

Ibid., p. 266. Ibid., pp. 274–77. In Toennies’s view, normative considerations inform the sociologist, even if they must not be permitted to interfere with his procedure in a scientific context. For instance, in the address with which he opened the proceedings of the first German “Soziologentag, Toennies took his departure from the statement that theoretical deliberations about the nature of human sociations “have always been closely connected with ideas concerning a moral (gesittet) and good life.” But he continues by saying that in the area of social pathology patients and doctors are never clearly separated, and that it is therefore of the utmost importance to strive for theoretical understanding and value-free investigation. Cf. “Wege und Ziele der Soziologie,” in SStuKr, vol. 2, pp. 125–143. Conversely, one might add that it would seem equally important for rational comprehension in the field of social pathology to show the way to effective action.

Part III Essays in Historical Sociology Pure, Applied, and Empirical

13 Historical Sociology: What It Is and What It Is Not By historical sociology, I mean the study of human relations in vivo, that is, in an authenticated historical context, with human beings as actors in the here and now.1 The aim of historical sociology is to render a conceptualized account of societal processes as they actually occur, meaning that the occurrences are considered as an end in themselves, illuminated by theory. Negatively put, one can say that historical sociology (1) does not aspire to construct a generalized theory of a fictitious “total society” or to assume that particular societies are merely stages in a universal development, and (2) does not intend to isolate aspects of human behavior in contrived experiments, on the assumption that an accumulation of incoherent data will yield a valid theory of societal process. I To construct a generalized “total society” was precisely what historical sociology was all about in evolutionary theory. History understood by historians is concerned with sequences of events, possibly with a number of sequences that combine to effect that broad stream of events we call a process. History is concerned with identifiable and continuing phenomena, whether the object of investigation is the political history of a nation or the case history of a patient. Not so in the “new history”, which has been the hallmark of the social sciences from their inception until recently. The new history, which is no history, intends to be a comparative account of phenomena that have no continuing identity in time and space. Their coherence is constructed, and their sequence has a logical, not a historical, character. Indeed, Australian aborigines are in a different societal category from Navahos, and these again differ from the Minoans on Crete, but it does not follow that the societal structures of Australians, Navahos, and Cretans “must” succeed each other in time. Nor have the “new historians” considered dissolution as the correlate to evolution, so that the Roman Empire may dissolve, rather than evolve, as it is invaded by Goths, Avars, and Saracens. What was being compared by the new historians—that is, the evolutionary sociologists—were gradations of logical relationships. As the observer takes 137

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his stand at the heights of contemporary civilization, he need not trouble himself with what immediately preceded the present moment in time nor must he concern himself with events that happened in the same culture area. To comprehend French civilization, then, it would seem unnecessary to immerse oneself in a variety of data on the Third and Fourth Republics, the French Revolution, the reign of Louis XIV, the Crusades, the life of peasants and nobles in the Middle Ages, or the turmoil of the Carolingian era. To do that, it is believed, would mean that one is being enmeshed in a maze of factual occurrences that blur the vision. The generalizers would not wish to follow Marc Bloch, who in his analysis of feudal society compared an area of full-fledged feudalism between the Loire and the Rhine with outlying regions, like Saxony or Castile, where feudal institutions were only sparsely indicated.2 Nor would they be content to compare European feudalism with Japanese feudalism, as Bloch did. If the researcher follows Bloch, he remains within the confines of a historical configuration. If he enters into comparison, he emphasizes differences rather than parallelism. He might observe the emergence of feudal institutions out of the dissolution of tribal cohesion and the breakdown of the administrative apparatus in the late Roman Empire, but not the growth of a unitary civilization, originating in “savagery” and reaching its pinnacle in Napoleon’s France, or in Victorian England, or in the United States of the Gilded Age and after. As Auguste Comte has put it: “From the wretched inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego to the most advanced nations of western Europe, there is no social grade which is not extant in some point of the globe, and usually in localities which are clearly apart.”3 Neither Comte, nor Spencer, nor their successors troubled themselves with phenomena per se. What they were doing was “history with the hard work left out.” If the starting point (Tierra del Fuego) and the final point (France) are fixed, the intervening stages can be constructed and subsequently “found” because they are system requirements rather than objects of observation. Thus, to move from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, Talcott Parsons has found 32 possible ways in which fundamental choices among the pattern variables may be made and, as Robert Dubin has shown, 160 empty types of social acts that may be derived from them, but fewer than 32 actual societies that fit into the prepared boxes.4 Dubin expressed the hope “that the number of types finally derived will turn out to be manageable.” In the present context it seems more germane to say that history has failed to fill the boxes with content. To continue, Parsons, in one of his later works, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, divides the entire time extension of “total society” into three stages: primitive, intermediate, and modern.5 Of these, only the first stage (the Australian aborigines, replacing Tierra del Fuego) and the last (the United States, replacing Comte’s France) need be analyzed. The entire stretch of recorded history, bearing the significant designation of “intermediate,” is filled in in a catchall way. Consequently, one finds in the “intermediate” 138

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stage such incoherent and contrasting societies as the Chinese and Roman empires, Islamic civilization, and the Indian caste system, recalling Spencer’s combination of the African kingdom of Dahomey and Czarist Russia as well as of ancient Peru, Egypt, and Sparta as examples of “the appropriation of the individual, his life, liberty and property by the state.”6 Spencer’s attempt to prove that war is inherent in despotism and will be abolished as the Victorian realm of liberty expands may be a naive transformation of history into a system requirement; but in a sophisticated work of genuine historical scholarship, such as Neil J. Smelser’s Social Change in the Industrial Revolution, the outcome is similarly marred by the attempt to demonstrate that the structural-functional requirements of complexity and differentiation are the sole factors in change when the data themselves support the presence of multiple causations.7 In all these instances, from Comte to Spencer down to contemporary authors, constructs are reified and history becomes the handmaiden of theory. Structural-functional theory has succeeded evolutionary theory and has even been critical of its “grand sweep”, but it does not differ from evolutionary theory in its inability to come to grips with the nature of historical process. The tertium comparationis remains the assumption of a total society of which particular structural-functional constellations partake. Within a total society, there are variations in complexity, and these can be arranged in such a way as to show a progression from the simplest to the most differentiated forms, but there is nothing in structural-functional theory that permits the analyst to put historical “time” into the equation. Structural-functional theorists take their resort to “strains and stresses”, but a “dysfunction” which is thus revealed can be distinguished from a “function” only post festum, after the change has occurred. For instance, it is possible in historical retrospect to discern strains and stresses in the society of the antebellum South, but not to demonstrate that they were the cause of change. For this purpose, a historical event, such as the Civil War, had to intervene. In other words, social change derives from external contact; “strains and stresses” are a prerequisite. Another escape route is provided by “theories of the middle range.” They are welcome because they enable the reader to know at least what the author is talking about, but even these investigations do not emancipate themselves from the assumption of a total society. They pretend to have wide validity for an entire problem area when, in fact, they are particularizing theories in a generalizing garb. They become “historical theories” as soon as one understands that they are derived from the circumstances surrounding a particular set of data at a particular place and time. One example is provided by the theory of demographic transition, which has been held applicable to all societies in the process of industrialization, but may indeed be more in the nature of an ideal-typical construction, actually referring chiefly to English society between 1850 and 1945. Other historically oriented sociological theories that are presented as universally valid statements either by the authors themselves or 139

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by those who quote them are E. W. Burgess’s theory of the “concentric zones of city growth,” Howard Becker’s “normative reaction to normlessness,” Karl Mannheim’s conception of “ideology and utopia,” and Robert K. Merton’s treatment of “social structure and anomie.” They refer specifically to the growth of a midwestern railroad town, to the ascendancy of Nazism, to the thought styles of nineteenth-century Europe, and to the striving for success goals inherent in contemporary American culture. Similarly, Goffman’s Relations in Public represents the confusion of an episodic style with what he seems to regard as universal in time and place.8 The same holds true with other celebrated theories, of which only the “race relations cycle” might be additionally mentioned. A sequence of conflict, competition, accommodation, and assimilation contains a partial truth for areas of large-scale immigration, such as the United States in the nineteenth century; but it reveals its limitation by failing to refer to the evidence of conflict resulting in oppression, expulsion, and succession, or outright genocide— processes that dominate “race relations” (that is, interethnic relations) in the twentieth century—or to an accommodation that stops short of assimilation, as is the case in Switzerland or Quebec. Surely, there are sociological treatises in existence that acknowledge their historical character unabashedly in their titles, such as Hughes’s French Canada in Transition, Whyte’s Street Corner Society, Johnson’s Shadow of the Plantation, and Thomas’ and Znaniecki’s classic Polish Peasant in Europe and in America, even if the latter is overloaded with discursive methodological deliberations about the nature of values and attitudes. One gains the impression from a survey of sociological literature that a number of authors talk historical “prose,” either without being aware of what they are doing or fearing to reveal it. The potentiality of sociology will be released as soon as it is recognized that sociology is conceptualized history. II In considering what historical sociology is all about, one must beware of make-believe historical reference. It is not enough to quote uncritically from standard works about one historical period or another in order to validate arbitrary generalizations. The search for patterns is legitimate, but there must be a deeper continuity. As one cannot pair insects and reptiles on the grounds that both do not nourish their young with milk, so one cannot pair the Aztecs’ Tenochtitlan and the Medici’s Florence on the grounds that both were lacking mechanical industry.9 Nor is it sufficient to think of historical sociology as an effort to take account of things of the past in the restricted sense in which the term “history” is conventionally employed. History is more than a “grand opening” on a distant stage. Everything that we investigate in the social sciences has occurred in the past, irrespective of whether the past was yesterday or a thousand years ago. The important consideration about a historical approach in sociology is that man is the measure. This statement 140

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implies that a historically conceived sociology cannot be “scientific” in the sense in which a mathematical statement is scientific. The usefulness, even the indispensability, of quantitative data is not negated thereby. Not only do sociologists deal largely with mass phenomena, but the very fact of sociation carries a numerical implication, as Georg Simmel has shown in his essay on the dyad and the triad. But it cannot be gainsaid that the reduction of the varieties of human relations to the precision of mathematical formulae, while indispensable as a means, carries with it the likelihood of dehumanization, if precision is elevated to the dignity of an end. Mathematics operates with thought constructs that are static and without equivalent in actuality, while human relations, if seen in context, cannot abstract from the dynamic and dialectic quality of man. Indeed, the study of human relations, if it is to remain human, must never depart entirely from a vision of its object as a total configuration. This principle applies critically to the mainstays of a positivistic sociology, namely, survey methodology and role theory. Large-scale surveys, as in public opinion polling, have much to recommend themselves if a quick orientation is desired and if the circumstantial conditions are well known. Even so, conventional opinion surveys might not indicate the historically effective public opinion, that is, the opinion that carries the day.10 Representative sampling will not do because decisions are not made by sample populations. Another problem arises with attitude surveys in the narrower sense. A survey of this kind, if not complemented by interviews and participant observation, is likely to falsify the situation under investigation because it is based on a wrong conception of the nature of human nature. The dialectic character of the mind does not permit us to conceive of like and dislike, attraction and repulsion, acceptance and rejection and hence of the “yes” and “no” replies to the contrived questions in a questionnaire as simple alternatives. These seeming opposites are complementary ingredients in a total situation that must be grasped—“understood,” in Max Weber’s sense—on the level of meaning. Friendship turns into abandonment overnight because doubt was underlying friendship in the first place. At its technical best, which is not always achieved, a survey is a snapshot of reality, but as such it does not come to grips with the dynamic nature of social process. The expressed expectation of survey methodologists that many small-scale studies will in the course of time form “building blocks” toward a comprehensive theory of some kind mistakes aggregation for integration. Neither can the accumulation of questions in a questionnaire nor the temporal sequence of a number of surveys dealing with the same topic remedy the situation because, as a rule, the questions are only tactically, not dynamically, related to each other; and surveys applied at different times to different people lack comparability. Both survey methodology and role theory deal with partial aspects of a situation as if they were self-explanatory units. Role theory is comparable to survey methodology insofar as both are indications of the dismemberment of 141

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totalities and the evaporation of meaning that are at the core of the uneasiness in our civilization. To be sure, role theory is scientifically justifiable inasmuch as it splits personality into its component parts. But the comparison with the splitting of the atom is misleading. The atom is actually treated in a reactor, but to analyze a personality in terms of role performance is a mental operation. Role performances are auxiliary analytic constructs; if they are reified, the student is “holding the parts in his hand,” but there is “lacking, alas, the spiritual band” (Goethe, Faust, pt. I). The aggregation of roles does not equal personality and at best serves to analyze, but hardly to explain, performance. To say, as is sometimes done in defense of role theory, that role conflict prevents man from becoming a role-performing automaton does not do justice to the problem either, because roles, conflicting or not, are abstractions that do not exist in the way actors exist. Their uncritical operationalization, therefore, amounts to a mechanical accumulation of categories rather than to an interpretative description of reality. Historical sociology is cognizant of the roles that are played on the stage of history, but either these “roles” are combinations of isolated roles into a Gestalt, and thus transcending the role concept, or they are historical approximations to the type construct of a role. Viewed in this way, role is a limiting concept. Each and every president of the United States acts according to his best judgment about the requirements of the situation in which he is called upon to act, but the conception that each has of his duties and prerogatives is guided by the role specifications that are inherent in the office of the presidency. The interpretation is free, but within bounds, at the penalty of impeachment or, at least, the threat of impeachment. The isolationist fallacy inherent in survey methodology is enhanced in the theory of the social system. While it is conceded by system theorists that the social system is an abstraction, it is assumed that it will attain a semblance of reality if the behavioral-organic, personal, and cultural subsystems are placed by its side. But nobody has ever worked that out. Neither can these four subsystems of the human action system be kept apart experimentally nor can they be incorporated into a whole by mere aggregation. Even the attempt at application is dubious. To present but one example, Parsons maintains that value orientation was stabilized in the system of modern societies, but that the “innumerable conflicts over values” that may be noted “occurred at levels of specification below that of the most general.”11 The reader is left with the notion that undefined “values” were stabilized or not stabilized, depending on their likewise undefined generality or specificity. The impression that concreteness is lacking in system analysis, which by some who felt uneasy about it has been attributed to stylistic deficiencies, clearly is inherent in the approach that has been used. If generality becomes an end in itself, the world rushes by. In the procedure of logical positivism, concrete phenomena are not endowed with intrinsic interest: rats, rabbits, and human beings offer interchangeable “data” that serve to test one or the other behavioral hypothesis. We will return 142

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to this notion later. At this point, it suffices to say that the bearers of the “data” are automata that are assumed to exist in isolation. According to Milgram, humans, like Pavlov’s dog, are passive agents that are constrained in a social system by a network of regulations. In the general systems model, whatever happens is “input” from the external object world, with one significant proviso: the object world, like the world of human guinea pigs, consist also of human beings, so that the human race is sharply divided into the manipulators and those who are manipulated. The psychologistic worldview of the behaviorists, which denies the decision-making quality of human beings as well as the reality of social structure, is thereby revealed as reserving the power of decision making to an expert elite and confirming the efficacy of social structure at the same time. Milgram’s study, Obedience to Authority, with its laboratory contrivances that compel human guinea pigs to acquiesce in the torture of others, in no way reproduces the reality of the concentration camp: there is no fear of death, either by the experimentee or by the experimenter, if the latter should disobey the cruel decree.12 To give another example, in contrast to the “Machiavellian” design of Stanley Schachter, who deceived obese persons into “rating” crackers when he merely intended to show that they ate too many of them, I asked overweight young people to relate freely their experiences in autobiographical accounts.13 I found that the psychological malaise that their appearance fosters is sociogenic in nature, that is, produced and/or aggravated by the discriminatory treatment to which they are exposed. I consider the pilot study that I conducted to be an example of historical microsociology because it deals with human beings in vivo in a time sequence and a life setting rather than through isolation and in an experiment. In a historical context, actors act according to their definition of the situation, which includes the observation that the definition is socially conditioned. But social conditions are never monolithic, and various actors are variably responsive to one or the other aspect of the societal reality to which they are exposed. Further, the statement that actors act under social constraint has a statistical quality because it refers to what a majority of the people, not necessarily all the people, are doing. The question arises whether the minority is acting under a different constraint. Whatever decision is taken, other possibilities are recessively present and may be activated if the opportunity arises. Frequently, the constraint is broken if significant minorities begin to dissent. In a way, social constraint, like “historical inevitability”, exists only in retrospect. If the moment of decision arrives, we assess the situation and act within its limits, but within a wide enough area of choice. The choice is narrowed if we are confronted with force, as in a prison or in a concentration camp, but even in those cases, we can make a choice of last resort in choosing between life and death. To be sure, history makes but one experiment, whether we are concerned with history of a purely personal connotation or with the history of 143

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collectivities. In either case, the outcome subsequently is explained in terms of chains of causes and effects, with implied necessary sequences and supposedly inescapable results. But even in personal affairs, we indicate to ourselves that we have made a “mistake,” which means that we might have decided otherwise. On the larger stage of history, there is no way of saying whether Napoleon could have decided differently at Moscow, Leipzig, or Waterloo. Surely, with other actors on the stage, other definitions of the situation would have prevailed, which historians would be compelled to derive from a different cause and effect constellation. Would the Civil War have turned out to be an “irrepressible conflict” if another man had been in the place of President Buchanan? If Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, wishes to provide “a clear view of the events which have happened and of those which will some day, in all probability, happen again in the same or similar way,” he intends to impress the notion upon the reader that error, inefficiency, and burning passion tend to repeat themselves.14 The “scientific” factor that is thereby entered into the equation is “The Great Unknown.” If inevitability is claimed for the future, as in the deterministic variant of Marxist thought or in some predictive projections of recent date, the very essence of history is negated, because history, at any given moment, is replete with possibilities but devoid of certainty. III Theory has an honored place in historical sociology, but as a guide, not as a master. A theory is not an end in itself that reality must confirm: reality is not that which proves the system right. Nor is theory a mere halo used to sanctify insignificant research findings. A theory is not extracted from measurable data as a function of variables that themselves must be explained in the light of circumstantial knowledge and theoretical considerations. Further, measurable data do not exhaust reality, and even the most complete reality is not the breeding ground of theory. Nevertheless, the ability to go to the sources—all the available sources—must be combined with the skill of the interpreter, which is derived from the mastery of conceptualization. But in applying concepts, the historical scholar ought to avoid the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: as Toennies has emphasized, concepts are “things of thought” and therefore can neither be confounded with historical factuality nor “verified” or disqualified by it.15 Parsons agrees with this position when he says that the pattern variables (which are based on the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft dichotomy) are a “conceptual scheme for clarifying the components of an action system” and that their exposition “in no way purports to be an empirical contribution”, but he then abandons it when he looks forward to “empirical verification.”16 In historical sociology, concepts illuminate reality, but reality can only approach them to a lesser or larger degree. If this principle, which is inherent in ideal-typical procedure, is fully grasped, the positivistic notion that theories are constructed 144

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either by the isolation and abstraction of selected items or through sequences that are mistakenly reified out of the amassment of “facts” taken out of context is superseded by the idea that facts are comprehended by means of the flexible application of static theories to dynamic situations. Many theories are preferable to a single theory, so as to avoid the tyranny of a single explanatory principle. Yet, even a single explanatory principle is serviceable if one remains aware of its ideal-typical nature. Finally, the ideal-typical approach implies comparison because the organizing type concept must apply to a variety of historical situations. Ideal-typical concepts consolidate in notional images what in historical reality is enmeshed in a never-ending process of interpenetration and transformation. This relation between concept and reality must be carefully noted because the idea behind it is essentially different from the conventional procedure of logical positivism: instead of actors and events, positivists introduce interchangeable “data” that serve to test a general hypothesis. But “normal concepts” (Toennies) or “ideal types” (Weber) are always means to an end. They serve a modest auxiliary function in historical research: they do not exist in flesh and bone, but help to comprehend what is of flesh and bone. Historical reality is always and everywhere a deviation from the straight path of theory, as an actual line is not a mathematical line, but theory is needed to assess the nature of the deviation as it occurs and unfolds. Thus, legal-rational authority is shot through with traditional and charismatic ingredients, and the parent-child relationship is Gemeinschaft only to a degree—the degree to be determined by research. The general statement, which is clear and sharp, is the point of departure; the specific statement, with its transitions and modifications, is the goal. Accordingly, the research techniques of the historical sociologist differ from, and transcend, those that have been billed as the exclusively valid scientific techniques for a long time. For instance, in opinion surveys as presently conducted, a man’s or woman’s opinion is of little impact if he or she is not caught in the calculated net of a representative sample which, when the chips are down, turns out not to have been representative of effectively prevailing opinion. Psychological tests do not reveal the nature of the tested person (or a plurality of persons) but do confirm or disprove a preconceived hypothesis. Generally, isolation and abstraction, which the utilitarians have introduced into psychology, sociology, and economics, are a first step in reasoning, not the end of the road. The result of an isolating and abstracting operation must be returned to the flow of reality, so that it can be evaluated in context. An isolating and abstracting operation that is not flexibly applied to a situation remains a mental experiment, proving the necessity, but not the sufficiency, of a causal factor. In historical research, instead, priorities of relevance are established, but a variety of approaches must be considered within the area to which attention is directed. In my essay “The Village and Small-Town Jews 145

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in Germany,” I used demographic data, historical and personal documents, literary narrative, individual interviews, and participant observation, with each source complementing or modifying the other.17 Finally, conceptualization organized the data, culminating in an effective symbol—the Jewish cemetery in the countryside. A topic of this kind may not seem “researchable” to those whom C. Wright Mills has called “abstracted empiricists,” which proves but one thing: that their surefire methods are not hitting the target.18 A few words may be added concerning psychiatric, even psychoanalytic, history and concerning conflict theory. To be sure, in the newer psychiatric literature, particularly Erikson, the original Freudian emphasis on familial— that is, sexual—affects and incentives regarding personality formation in childhood has been complemented to some degree by the notion that the individual is influenced throughout his or her life, but especially in adolescence, by social-structural factors. If this consideration is introduced, psychodynamics is encompassed in the stream of events. But while historically significant individuals such as Luther, Gandhi, and Hitler can be analyzed in this context, no explication is provided thereby for the Reformation, for satyagraha, or for the Third Reich. What we want to see explained is not so much the personality of the leader as the interplay of leader and situation that is the essence of social process. Conflict theory has other limitations. Man, in pursuing his self-interest, is by nature antagonistic to his fellowman, but, on the other hand, conflict draws men together and molds them into a group. The many-sided currents and countercurrents that are implied in a statement of this kind are more factual than theoretical in character, but they assume the shape of a theory when conflict in a wider sense gets contracted into the class struggle and thus becomes a circumlocution for the socioeconomic interpretation of history. This approach, if and when it is clearly formulated, is serviceable, even necessary, for the sociological historian, but on the condition that it is used in ideal-typical fashion and not as an ideological straitjacket that permits no exception. It must be further noted that conflict theory in its classic Marxist shape carries the developmental eggshells with it insofar as it looks upon the class struggle as a historical aberration on the way from primitive communism to the “society of the free and equal” in the future. Again, this is a logical construct, which may be approximated by events to a lesser or larger degree. In trying to formulate the principles of historical sociology, we can leave these stimulating, but unbalanced, attempts aside, yet we need not resort to a creatio ex nihilo. There is a tradition in historical sociology that is relevant to the present situation and that ought to be grasped anew. In macrosociology, the masters are Tocqueville, Maine, Toennies, and Weber—not Comte, Spencer, Durkheim and their epigoni. Further back, much may be learned from Vico’s New Science. In microsociology, the models are found with W. I. Thomas, George H. Mead, and Charles H. Cooley. More recent examples— already classics—are Conrad Arensberg’s Community and Society in Ireland, 146

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Oscar Lewis’s Life in a Mexican Village and The Children of Sanchez, Elliot Liebow’s Tally’s Corner, John K. Dickinson’s German and Jew, Erwin Smigel’s The Wall Street Lawyer, and Erving Goffman’s Stigma. That some of the authors mentioned are social anthropologists rather than sociologists testifies to the fact that anthropology, by and large, has remained nearer to the human condition—that is, to social interaction in vivo—than has the predominant trend in sociology. But anthropology, when applied to modern societies, shares with sociology a tendency to shy away from large civilizational processes. What all these authors have in common is that their focus of attention is man, not the system. In this sense, historical sociology is identical with humanistic sociology. It has much in common with community study, but it extends observation into the past through the imaginative use of documentary evidence. Historical sociology converges with ethnomethodology, the difference being that ethnomethodology remains fixed on “folk-methods” and microsociological situations and hardly ever envisages the larger societal process, while historical sociology is primarily concerned with men and events in a larger context and then applies what has been learned on the stage of history to the intimate world of everyday life. One can proceed the other way around, but an awareness of the historical record is indispensable. In a way, ethnomethodology is phenomenology on a less sophisticated and somewhat pragmatic level. But Cooley’s use of his own children as well as of literary references for an explication of how human nature works within the confines of the social order exemplifies the historical method at its best.19 Cooley’s children are actors who express themselves in their own words and do “their own thing” rather than merely re-act to the stimuli of a questionnaire or a test. The “choice” of the actors is responding to the “suggestion” of the environment—or, in Meadian terms, the “I” is responding to the “Me”—so that the large world of societal process and the small world of individual action are inextricably intertwined. I am aware of the fact that the preceding statements are of considerable generality and that they need to be worked out. Indeed, in historical sociology, the question as to whether a knife cuts a cake is solved by cutting the cake with it. In my paper on religion and nationality, I contrasted allegiance to a family with attachment to a territory; in my paper on the village Jews, I conceived the cemetery as the point where family and territory converged; in my paper on the Mediterranean and Caribbean regions, I proceeded from the notion that religion and race, respectively, were the distinguishing features in the two regions and that the treatment of the mulatto, rather than the Negro, marked the difference between Latin American and Anglo-American race relations.20 The conceptual knives must be chosen so that they cut the subject matter in a meaningful way. In other words, historical sociology proceeds from concern about a topic, but does not lose itself in a thicket of facts. Conversely, historical sociology is aware of general theoretical notions, but does not subscribe 147

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to a tyrannical theory or adhere to an exclusive methodology. Individuality and comparability supplement each other. The concreteness of the case that is investigated does not detract from the search for patterns, while comparability confirms the common humanity of the objects under investigation. In this mutuality is the program encompassed which historical sociology has to offer as a response to the crisis in the social sciences. Notes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

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Conrad M. Arensberg, “The Community Study Method,” American Journal of Sociology 60, no. 2 (September 1954): 109–24. Historical sociology goes far beyond community study, but Arensberg’s definition on p. 110 is relevant. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L.A. Manyon (London and Chicago, 1959). Cf. Werner J. Cahnman and Alvin Boskoff, eds., Sociology and History: Theory and Research (New York, 1964), p. 161. Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, trans. Harriet Martineau (London, 1896), 2: 250. Cf. Robert A. Nisbet’s treatment of the idea of development in Social Change and History (New York, 1969), and Kenneth E. Bock’s paper, “Theories of Progress and Evolution,” in Cahnman and Boskoff, Sociology and History, pp. 21–40. Robert Dubin, “Parsons’s Actor: Continuities in Social Theory,” American Sociological Review 25, no. 4 (August 1960): 457–66. Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966). Herbert Spencer, “Political Institutions”, in Principles of Sociology, vol. 2, pt. 5, quoted by Werner J. Cahnman, Ferdinand Toennies: A New Evaluation (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973), p. 215. Neil G. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Basic Books, 1971). Cf. Herbert Blumer’s review of this book in Society 9, no. 6 (April 1972): 50–53. I am referring to Gideon Sjoberg, The Preindustrial City: Past and Present (New York The Free Press, 1960), and to my review of it, “The Historical Sociology of Cities,” Social Forces 45, no. 2 (December 1966): 155–62. For another example, cf. Lewis A. Coser, “The Alien as a Servant of Power: Court Jews and Christian Renegades”, American Sociological Review 37, no. 5 (October 1972): 574–84, and my review of it, in conjunction with a discussion of Max Weber’s misapplied concept of the “Pariah,” in “Pariahs, Strangers, and Court Jews: A Conceptual Clarification,” Sociological Analysis 35, no. 3 (Fall 1974): 155–66. Ferdinand Toennies has called the one opinion that carries the day the Public Opinion, in contrast to many ephemeral public opinions. Talcott Parsons, The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 123. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). Cf. Stephen Marcus’s review in New York Times, 13 January 1974. Milgram’s mechanical psychologism, as echoed by a

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13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

considerable number of sociologists, raises the question whether sociology is a natural science or a historical discipline. I am quoting Stanley Schachter’s study from Richard F. Spark, “Fat Americans,” New York Times, 6 January 1974. My own studies are “The Stigma of Obesity,” Sociological Quarterly (Summer 1968): 283–99, and “The Stigma of Overweight: Six Autobiographies,” mimeographed (1971). Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, (New York, 1934), I:22. W.J. Cahnman and R. Heberle, Ferdinand Toennies on Sociology, p. 43; W.J. Cahnman, Ferdinand Toennies: A New Evaluation, pp. 8 et passim. Talcott Parsons, “Pattern Variables Revisited: A Response to Robert Dubin,” American Sociological Review 25, no. 4 (August 1960): 482. Cf. my publication “The Village and Small-Town Jews in Germany: A Typological Study,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 14 (1974): 107–30. (Reprinted in the essay collection German Jewry, ed. by the editors of this volume.) C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, paperback ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), chap. 3. Charles H. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Scribner’s,1964; first ed. 1902 Werner J. Cahnman, “Religion and Nationality,” in Cahnman and Boskoff, Sociology and History, pp. 271–80; “The Village and Small-Town Jews in Germany”; “The Mediterranean and Caribbean Regions: A Comparison in Race and Culture Contacts,” Social Forces 22, no. 1 (December 1943): 209–14.

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14 Vico and Historical Sociology In The Gay Science, Nietzsche says: “Lightning and thunder take time, the light of the stars takes time to get to us, deeds take time to be seen and heard.”1 The 250th anniversary of Giambattista Vico’s New Science recalls that statement. To be sure, Italian scholarship was always aware of Vico.2 Outside of Italy, Vico’s reputation existed since Herder, Goethe, Victor Cousin, De Maistre, and earlier, most conspicuously in the wake of Michelet’s book-length evaluation,3 but it has been a reputation more generic than precise, more in the way of obeisance to a faraway name than in terms of an awareness of utilizable knowledge. Especially, it is only now that Vico’s seminal importance for historical sociology clearly comes to the fore. By “historical sociology,” I do not mean the “new history” that was en vogue in the nineteenth century, that is, a comparative account of phenomena that are logically connected but have no continuing identity in time and space. In the paper, “Historical Sociology: What It Is and What It Is Not,” I emphasized that historical sociology, as presently constituted, intends to render a conceptualized account of societal processes as they actually occur, meaning that the occurrences are considered as ends in themselves, though illuminated by theory.4 Speaking methodologically, the implication is that historical sociology cannot be “scientific” in the sense in which a mathematical statement is scientific because it cannot abstract from the dynamic and dialectic quality of man. Yet historical sociology represents valid knowledge, perhaps knowledge of decisive validity in the social sciences. In this regard, Vico will turn out to be a powerful guide.5 Religion and Government Vico was as much in opposition to major trends in the philosophical thinking of his time as historical sociology today is in opposition to major trends in contemporary sociology. However, there are affinities between the various approaches, which are easily overlooked in the din of battle. To be sure, Vico objected to the Cartesian assumption of mathematical certitude as the only permissible certitude in the pursuit of knowledge.6 Vico especially objected to the disregard of history on the ground that it was lacking mathematical certitude. The geometrical method of Descartes appeared to Vico as 151

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tantamount to “disregarding the nature of man, which is uncertain because of man’s freedom.”7 That is the position taken by historical sociology. Yet, as we move from Descartes to Hobbes, the vista widens. Hobbes connected mechanics and geometry with the science of government. In line with Descartes, Hobbes asserted that we have certitude only with regard to objects that we “make ourselves.” Consequently, he continued, as we have knowledge about the geometrical figures whose lines we draw, so we have knowledge about right and wrong, fairness and injury, because we have “made” the laws and agreements on which they are based.8 Vico contrasts his view of a science of man to Hobbes’s materialistic and individualistic (Vico calls it “Epicurean”) approach, but it is doubtful whether he knew Hobbes firsthand or from any more reliable source than the writings of the Kiel professor, Georg Pasch, who was an opponent of Hobbes.9 The intention of Hobbes in analyzing the “state of nature” was not to trace the origin of society in the dim ages of the past, as Vico assumed, but to conduct a Galilean thought experiment. Imagine, Hobbes argued, how men would behave if they were “but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity without all kind of engagement to each other.”10 In these circumstances, which would result in a “war of each against all,” men would have to construct an alternative to the state of nature by subjecting themselves to moral rules and by authorizing, as individuals, some man or group of men to be their sovereign representative and to guarantee the peace. The construction is ingenious, although, as Toennies has observed, it covers only Gesellschaft, where unity arises from individuality and not from what comes earlier, logically as well as historically, namely, Gemeinschaft, where individuality arises from the matrix of unity.11 Viewed in this way, the Hobbesian approach is preliminary to Vico’s argument. Vico provides the historical dimension to the Hobbesian construction, including the complementation by Toennies, although, without being aware of it, Vico shares with Hobbes, at least to a degree, the individualistic departure. Originally, Vico imagines—and the term “imagination” is crucial, as we shall see—wild men, with bestial natures, to have roamed the earth in the pursuit of their desires, until they were tamed, “tied,” as it were, not by the state but by religion. They were subdued by the clap of thunder and the stroke of lightning, terrifying manifestations of the uproar of nature, which they understood to indicate divine displeasure with their bestial conduct. Their bestiality consisted not only in their killing each other, chiefly in competition for women, but also in the raping and the abuse of women, the neglect of their offspring, and the abandonment of the dead. To abolish these horrifying crimes, the family was first constituted in the caves where the thunderstruck fugitives had come to dwell. Thus, custom brought order into chaos and Gemeinschaft was initiated by the compulsion of religious awe, long before a condition of Gesellschaft prompted the establishment of governmental authority. 152

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Thus, Vico’s historical construction of the societal order complements, but does not invalidate, the Hobbesian statement. The authority of the Hobbesian “mortal God” in the place of, but not replacing, the Vichian immortal God remains the centerpiece. Not unlike Hobbes, Vico emphasizes that law first establishes responsibility toward the gods and the community established by the gods and only subsequently responsibility toward one’s fellowman. Surely, following Vico, the sociology of religion and the sociology of the family, which arises from the sociology of religion, take first place in the scheme of historical sociology. But the institution of the burial of the dead, according to Vico, and hence the initiation of permanent settlements in the vicinity of the graveyards of revered ancestors, completes the establishment of society. The next step is the city, that is, the rise of civilization.12 In that sense, Fustel de Coulanges’s La cité antique appears to be the crowning effort in a Vichian historical sociology.13 In the city, clans dwell together and must adhere to a common loyalty, if disintegration is to be avoided. With the emergence of the city, then, the idea of society is fulfilled and, at the same time, it runs up against a dead end. The Methodological Concept of Poetry To the theoretical concept of religion is added the methodological concept of poetry. Poetry in Vico’s sense is not an esoteric form of art; it is the language of ancient man. What elevated speech and song wish to express is mythology and, by means of mythology, vera narratio, that is, history. The poetry of the ancients is not a sophisticated account post festum or an allegory, but the depiction of the world in corporeal images rather than its description in thought. There is no sharp break between mythology and poetry. Mythology, expressed through poetry, records the actions of men whereby, as in the songs of Homer, a person may stand for a collectivity, a clan, a city, a generation. The poetic characters are imaginative genera or symbolic expressions, replacing the mute language of signs and physical objects that guided the entrance of bestial man into the social world. In poetry, peoples speak as in a single voice. Systematic thought, philosophy, and individuality come later, when collectivities are dissolved and a widely used “vulgar” language is practiced, in which the laws of a diversified society are written. Yet language preserves the memory of origins and popular usage retains poetic images. Vico quotes examples that may not always be correct yet illustrate the historical methodology he is using. So logic comes from logos, as he explains in the beginning of the chapter called “Poetic Logic,” and the proper meaning of logos is fabula, which in Greek is mythos, whence is derived the Latin word mutus, mute.14 Vico further points out that the equivalent to logos in Hebrew—davar—means “word” as well as “deed.” Thus, the birth of poetry from sign language is indicated and, further, because poetry is song, the birth of religious imagery, as in Greek tragedy, from “the spirit of music” is indicated in the meaning with which we are familiar from 153

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Nietzsche’s Basel dissertation.15 Or nomos means pasturage because landed estate was allocated by heroic kings to subjected clans, with mutual obligations as a corollary.16 Examples for the corporeal metaphors we use are head for top, mouth for opening, heart for center; we refer to the vein of a rock, the whistling of the wind, the murmuring of the waves.17 The methodology referred to here entails a “philologic” in Franz Rosenzweig’s sense—rather than a plain logic—an approach which is customary in Hebrew scholarship. Also, Buber’s understanding of what he calls “saga” as “the predominant method of preserving the memory of what happens”—in his case the story of Moses and Sinai—is relevant as an extension of the Vichian approach.18 In the language of sociology, one might say: if people define a situation as real, it is real not only in its consequences, as W. I. Thomas maintained; it also is a record of what is remembered as real, that is, as historically effective. Conventional sociology tends to disregard these guideposts; but historical sociology is aware of the continuities in the human condition. Ethnohistory points in the same direction but has not yet led to a closer integration of biblical, classical, and mainstream historical research with anthropological and sociological studies.19 Vico is a guide here, especially because his interest is focused not so much on the past per se, but on a comparative approach. The continuities that are implied in that approach point to the mainsprings of human nature, which are overlaid but not eradicated and which we must become aware of at a moment in history when one epoch comes to an end and another epoch is about to begin. Ideal Eternal History With the preceding statement, we have arrived at the guiding principle of Vichian thought, the concept of the “ideal eternal history,” but a number of provisos must be entered.20 Historical sociology, following Vico, does not envisage identical repetitions, but a sequence with modifications, like Christianity in the Middle Ages. Further, Vico has been compared to Hegel, with whom he shares a dialectical approach, but the Hegelian “synthesis” is lacking in the sequence of corsi and ricorsi. Consequently, the teleological prospect of moving even higher along the spiral of history, which is present in Hegel, is foreign to Vico. For Vico, history is providentially guided, in rise as well as in decline. It should also be noted that the trichotomy of a religious, heroic, and civic age, which is encountered in one or the other variation not only by Vico and Hegel but also by Adam Ferguson, Auguste Comte, Lewis Morgan, and others is modeled after the concept of the Holy Trinity. There are other holy numbers in the traditions of the peoples, so that one is inclined to assume that the threefold cleavage of reality amounts to a cultural compulsion in the civilization of the Occident. One can find five or seven subdivisions with equal assurance. Perhaps a dichotomy, spanning life from birth to death and from evolution to dissolution, hence indicating limiting points rather than subdivisions, is more in line with the structure of reality. Nevertheless, the 154

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scheme of the “ideal eternal history” is acceptable to the sociologist, if only as a working hypothesis. Sociologists do not presume to know what providence has in mind for us, but they look for patterns in events and processes and they use comparison over time and space to ascertain them. Vico is a master in this regard. In order to construct what one may call a culture case study of Greek and Roman antiquity, Vico consults the literary sources that were available to him—not only historians, jurists, and philosophers, but apart from Homer, also individual poets, like Horace, Virgil, Lucretius, and others. From the point of view of the historical sociologist, the conclusion is that art and literature are neither a play of fancy nor a literal description of reality but an enhancement of reality in such a way that its essential features come into view. I shall return to the theme of history as a thing of art. Vico offers a historical theory of stratification that differs from the race relations cycle of Robert E. Park by its very historicity and from the conquest theories of Ibn Khaldun and Gumplowicz because of an ingenious complementation. In the view of Gumplowicz, the strong subdue the weak and put them into service; according to Ibn Khaldun, the tribesmen overwhelm the cities and make them tributary; with Vico, however, the ferocious vagrants of old, embroiled in a “war of each against all,” threw themselves at the mercy of the settlers, who received them as dependents, clients, and serfs.21 Conquest, then, while not excluded, is not a necessary condition of submission. Indeed, following Vico’s axiom 79, there is a sequence: the protected associates in the first stage become the plebeians in the urban stage and the subjected provincials in the imperial stage. What happens is that the fugitives from violence become famuli who attach themselves to the fama (glory, reputation) of the heroes and are accepted as members of their families; they are forerunners of the serfs subdued by conquest.22 Only a family has a god present in the hearth fire and hence enjoys independent status; one can understand, therefore, that the Roman plebeians, in pursuance of the Law of the Twelve Tables, demanded connubia patrum, that is, solemn nuptials, sanctioned by auspicia, with equality before God and man and the rights of citizenship as a consequence.23 Thus, the concept of hierarchy, that is, the gradation of duties and privileges, which was the initial principle of the social order, gave way to an egalitarian system; and stratification according to the economic categories of property, income, and conspicuous consumption became the criterion of the division of classes in society. In the course of time, even property qualifications were, and are, thrown aside. Thus, what Vico calls an “age of men” is ushered in, where solidarity has given way to tolerance and public institutions are used for the satisfaction of private appetites. Individualism rules supreme until breakdown within or conquest from without brings about a reversion to a new barbarism. Such conditions prevailed in the waning centuries of antiquity, and, if indications are not deceptive, confront us today.24 Thus, to confirm the above assumption, the Vichian trichotomy is reduced to a dichotomy, both in 155

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terms of a societal construct and in terms of the sequence of ages.25 The “ideal eternal history” thereby is transformed from a theory of successive stages into a unified theoretical system, without losing its historicity. Methodological Conclusion Returning to methodology, one must recall at this point the Vichian statement that we know history because we “make it ourselves”. But, in actual fact, we do not “make” history in the way we make laws, norms, and rules of conduct, as Hobbes has asserted. We act in history, deliberately or rashly, but to paraphrase Shakespeare, “there’s a divinity that shapes our ends . . . when deep plots do fail.” In other words, there are aborted effects and unintended consequences of our actions that cannot be said to have been made by the actors. Conversely, if we knew the course of the “ideal eternal history,” we might gain a measure of understanding as far as the structure of the past is concerned, but we would still be on our own in making the decisions of the day. With all that, we would not be enabled to “make” and therefore to understand the decisions of bestial man, trying to escape the fears and oppressions of aboriginal existence, or the decisions of the patricians and plebeians in ancient Rome. We cannot even be sure that we understand the thoughts of a professor in Naples. At best, we can make a mental experiment, in a variation of Max Weber’s suggestion, to make us believe that we are in the other fellow’s place and that we know how he felt. It is the contention of this paper that in historical studies science is not enough and that we know little of the thoughts and decisions of the generations, except by the power of a trained imagination. By “being trained,” I mean going to the available sources and considering all possible causes, as Vico has done; by imagination, I mean being able to see sources and causes in combination and to recognize what is essential.26 It follows that historical sociology, as all achievement in historical studies, is an art in addition to being a science. An art requires the free exercise of craftsmanship, beyond the repetitious use of methodological devices. What is further needed is an ounce of luck or, as in the case of Vico, the spark of genius. Notes 1. 2.

3.

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Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, in the series The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 95. Much of the pertinent literature is cited in Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White, eds., Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), and in the bibliography in Leon Pompa, Vico: A Study of the New Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975). On Herder, see Tagliacozzo and White, Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, pp. 93 ff; on Victor Cousin, ibid., p. 104. Goethe’s comment on Vico—with reference to Filangieri—is in Italianische Reise, March 5, 1787; on De Maistre, see Elio Gianturco, Joseph De Maistre and Giambattista Vico: Italian Roots of De Maistre’s Political Culture (Washington, D.C., 1937); Jules Michelet’s extensive treatment is in his Oeuvres completes, edited by

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4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

Paul Viallaneix, vol. 1 (Paris: Flammarion, 1971–75); cf. Alain Pons, “Vico and French Thought,” in Tagliacozzo and White, Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, pp. 165–186. Werner J. Cahnman, “Historical Sociology: What It Is and What It Is Not”, in Baidya N. Varma, ed., The New Social Sciences (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), pp. 107–122. Historical sociology is presented in a comprehensive overview in Werner J. Cahnman and Alvin Boskoff, Sociology and History: Theory and Research (New York: Free Press, 1964), with comments on Vico on pp. 48–50. Michelet, Oeuvres completes, vol. 1: 9, speaks about Vico as the initiator of the “philosophy of history.” I believe that “historical sociology” would be a more adequate designation. On Vico and Descartes, see Yvon Belaval, “Vico and Anti-Cartesianism,” in Tagliacozzo and White, Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, pp. 77–92; cf. the chapter on Vico in Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History: The Great Speculators from Vico to Freud (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 11–58. Giambattista Vico, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (Naples, 1709), quoted in Michelet, Oeuvres completes, vol. 1: 354. The entire sentence is as follows: “The Cartesians investigate the nature of objects on account of the prospect of certainty which they contain: they disregard the nature of man which is uncertain because of man’s freedom” (my translation). Ferdinand Toennies, Thomas Hobbes: Leben und Lehre, edited by Karl-Heinz Ilting (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1971), p. 113. Georg Pasch, De curiosis hujus seculi inventis (1695) and Brevis introductio in rem literariam, pertinentem ad doctrinam moralem (1706). Georg Pasch (1661–1707) was a professor of moral philosophy, logic, and metaphysics, then of practical theology, at the University of Kiel. For the assumption that Vico knew Hobbes chiefly through Pasch, see Giambattista Vico, Die Neue Wissenschaft, trans. Erich Auerbach (Munich: Allgemeine Verlagsanstalt, 1924), p. 89. One must note that the English works of Hobbes in the Molesworth edition comprise 11 volumes, the Opera philosophica quae latine scripsit omnia, likewise in the Molesworth edition, only 5 volumes. Thomas Hobbes, The English Works, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London: Bohn, 1839–45), 2: 108–109. Ferdinand Toennies, “A Prelude to Sociology”, in Ferdinand Toennies on Sociology, ed. Werner J. Cahnman and Rudolf Heberle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 75–86. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (hereinafter NS), trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968); I have also consulted the German translation by Erich Auerbach and the Italian original of Principi di scienza nuova (Naples, 1744). Cf. at this point Pompa, Vico: A Study of the New Science, chap. 3. Concerning the rise of civilization, see Cahnman and Boskoff, Sociology and History, pp. 537–559. N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1956). It is unlikely that Fustel de Coulanges was not aware of Michelet’s volume on Vico and hence the Vichian flavor of his famous book 157

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14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

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is not without substantial foundation. Inasmuch as Emile Durkheim was a student of Fustel de Coulanges, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse can claim at least a remote Vichian ancestry. Vico, NS, par. 85. The Hebrew word davar means: word, speech, thing, matter, deed. The comparison of the terms logos and davar would seem to indicate the comparability of the substantial traditions of the Greeks and the Hebrews—Vico’s theory of the uniqueness of the spiritual history of the Hebrews notwithstanding. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1956). Vico, NS, par. 607. Ibid., par. 405. Martin Buber, Moses (Oxford: Phaidon, 1946), p. 15. Cf. Robert M. Carmack, “Ethnohistory: A Review of Its Development, Definitions, Methods, and Aims,” Annual Review of Anthropology 1 (1972): 227–246, esp. pp. 236, 238. Vico, NS, Book 4, “The Course the Nations Run.” Ibid., par. 258. Ibid., par. 555. Ibid., par. 598. Cf. NS, par. 241: “Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.” I leave it open whether Vico refers here to a fivefold sequence of subdivisions or to a continuum from necessity to waste. Toennies, like Vico, sees the Middle Ages and the newer centuries as a civilizational unit, moving from a prevalence of Gemeinschaft to a preponderance of Gesellschaft; cf. Ferdinand Toennies on Sociology, pp. 288, 318. Vico calls the faculty of uniting what is separated ingenium; cf. De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (Naples, 1710), quoted in Michelet, Oeuvres completes, vol. 1: 411.

15 Starting Points in Sociology: Hobbes, Toennies, Vico Sociology at the present moment offers a confused picture. To be sure, among the 15,000 sociologists in the United States and Canada—not to speak of those in other countries—there are many competent professionals who produce well-conceived pieces of research. But many of these pieces of research lack significance because they take their departure from a method in search of a topic rather than from an attempt to elucidate a topic with whatever methods would seem serviceable. At best we have before us a bewildering array of isolated findings, significant or insignificant as they may be, but without the guidance of a theory. We have no image of mankind and the way it travels. If one listens to theoretical discussions, one hears of conflict theory versus system theory or of Marxism versus functionalism, but on closer investigation these dichotomies appear less than convincing. Conflict is not a theory but a fact and ‘system’ is a formal concept that can be filled in with a variety of contents. Marxism, for example, is indeed a system, but one built upon the notion of conflict, not in opposition to it. And again, functionalism, referring to the relationship of parts to a whole, including a Marxistically conceived interdependence of parts and a whole, is a virtual synonym for system, not an antonym or alternative. In such a fashion, we are moving in circles. In addition, we are worshipping idols. There is hardly a theoretical paper published by sociologists that fails to quote Weber and/or Durkheim, while other equally important authors are ignored. There is nothing wrong about learning from such giants in sociology as Weber and Durkheim except their uncritical acceptance. Weber’s work, if properly understood, is an imposing torso in need of being supplemented, analyzed, and summarized, while Durkheim’s work, on closer look, appears as a brilliant doctrine so much enamored of itself that it more often than not does violence to the facts on which it supposedly rests. Perhaps more important, the work of both men is hardly ever viewed historically, in its time and place and as the end result of earlier work extending over generations.1 Unless we see a broad advance on the front of historical interpretation, we are not likely to arrive at an adequate theory in sociology. In other words, the future usefulness of authors in sociology, 159

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whether contemporary or classic, may well depend on our appreciation of their antecedents. With this consideration in mind, I wish to refer to older sources of thought and to derive from them guidelines that might prove to be helpful in coping with the contemporary predicament in sociology. I take my point of departure from two philosophical writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Thomas Hobbes and Giambattista Vico. These two men are very different. Hobbes is a rationalist and a theoretician of natural law; he stands with Spinoza at the fountainhead of the Enlightenment, without, however, succumbing to the illusion of the Enlightenment about the perfectibility of man. Vico is a Neapolitan Catholic, a man of the baroque period with its comprehensive vistas, a foe of mechanistic and materialistic thinking and a precursor of romantic and historical thought. Vico, in his time, argued against Hobbes, but I intend to show that his philosophy is complementary rather than contradictory to the philosophy of Hobbes. Specifically, I propose to show how the positions of Hobbes and Vico converge on, and are combined in, the work of Ferdinand Toennies. The future of the older classics, then, is implicated in the future of the work of Toennies; but the promise of Toennies for the future of sociology rests in its turn squarely on his implicit combination of the two seemingly opposed older traditions.2 We are going to refer first to Hobbes, then to Toennies and finally to Vico. Man in the Philosophy of Hobbes The world in which Hobbes found himself, and which in increasing measure is our world, was no longer a static Aristotelian world that needs a mover to be moved. The moving force, for Hobbes as for Galileo, whom Hobbes admired, was now the energy that is contained in the world itself.3 Hobbes, in formulating his thoughts, knew about the new discoveries in the physical sciences; in addition, he was thoroughly familiar with Thucydides’s soberly realistic History of the Peloponnesian War, which he had translated from the Greek (1839a, vol. 8). Further, he had before his observing eye the experience of the civil war in England. In this turbulent period, which he described and analyzed in his book Behemoth (a Hebrew word for animals), Hobbes saw the social world, not unlike the physical world, in motion. Loyalties shifted. The parties in the civil war were arraigned against each other; belief and custom were eroded; contentious opinion, hunger for power, and greed for gain were taking their place; everybody was for himself and peace and security were ardent desires, but not realities. Hobbes concluded from that experience that man is driven by a lust for power and that this lust is held in check only by the fear of harm and, ultimately, of death. In order to prove his point, Hobbes conducted a Galilean thought experiment. Imagine, he argued, how men would behave if they were ‘but even now sprung out of the earth and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity 160

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without all kinds of engagement to each other.’4 There would be no bonds, no privileges, no obligations. It would be a state of nature without culture. In these circumstances, which would result in a “war of each against all,” men would have to construct an alternative to the state of nature by subjecting themselves to moral rules and by authorizing, as individuals, some man or group of men to be their sovereign representative and to guarantee the peace. Hobbes comprehends society, then, as if it were a contractual relationship among individuals to ensure the peace. The ideally assumed contract, even if not actually concluded, is the ratio essendi of government without which society could not emerge from a chaos of conflicting interests. To disregard this ideal assumption would be misleading. Hobbes did not intend to derive contemporary societies from an antecedent state of violence among individuals and groups, which he admitted did not exist always and everywhere, although he was aware of the condition of the American Indians whom he called ‘the savage people in many places of America’, and their inability to establish peace among themselves (1968, chap. 13, p. 187, and 1969a, chap. 14, p. 73). Nor did he deny that states may come about by conquest rather than by contract or, at any rate, by conditions that could not “in conscience be justified” (Hobbes, 1968, p. 722). Hobbes argued not historically, but rationally, although he never entirely “ceased to connect his abstraction with the development of human civilization out of savagery and barbarism.”5 What he asserted is that governments cannot be based on the sense of belonging that used to be the principle of the aboriginal family. Hobbes is concerned with human relations outside of familial bonds. In this context, he maintains that the “laws of nature” are immutable and eternal and, considering that human nature is constant in its assertiveness, that it is imperative that it be effectively curbed. Hence, he thought that the establishment of enforceable law and effective government was a prime requirement of civilized life. It follows that Hobbes differs from the Aristotelian notion of man as zoon politikon, that is, as a ‘naturally’ social, even political, kind of being, forming organized communities, as if by destiny, in the manner, as it were, of bees and ants (whom Aristotle numbered among political creatures).6 According to Hobbes, man’s unguided inclinations are destructive, so that society must be shaped by an act of will. Hobbes viewed human society as the work of man, an artifice, not an attribute of nature.7 The Sociology of Toennies—Fundamental Concepts Toennies, who was a Hobbes scholar before he became a sociologist, adopted the constructional procedure that he employed from his understanding of Hobbes.8 Toennies’s theory is constructional in one view, even if it is historical in another view. Toennies used the Hobbesian conception of human conduct as a starting point; his inclusion of Hobbes’s analysis of the workings of human nature into a more complex system of sociological theory is ingenious. 161

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The outlines of the theory, which one must be aware of before the Hobbesian inclusion can be appreciated, are as follows. In the Toenniesian system of special sociology, the transhistorical and static aspect of society is dealt with in what Toennies calls “pure” sociology while the historical and dynamic aspect is dealt with in “applied” sociology. Within this system, fundamental concepts are established in ‘pure’ sociology: they are structural, namely, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft on the one hand, and social-psychological, namely, essential or existential will (Wesenwille) and rational or arbitrary will (Kuerwille), on the other.9 In essential will, means and end are not separated, so that, for instance, we mount a horse not to reach a goal but because we find the ride enjoyable. While in Gesellschaft we associate with others to pursue a single end, like reaching a destination or acquiring an economic goal, we are in total and unquestioned communion in Gemeinschaft. While the prototype of Gesellschaft is exchange, as in contract, the prototype of Gemeinschaft is attachment, as in kinship (Cahnman and Heberle 1971, pp. 76–7). Kinship refers to sexual love, brotherly and sisterly love, and especially to the relation of mother and child. A mother’s love of her child is not irrational as Wundt, following Schopenhauer, assumed when he identified will with ‘drive without thought’, but it is true that a mother’s love arises from an intentionality that is not reflective. Essential will, leading to Gemeinschaft, is based on communal, or shared, feelings and experiences, such as liking, habituation and memory (Toennies 1965, p. 13; 1970, pp. 93–100; Loomis 1963, pp. 108–17). Although these feelings and experiences extend from kinship to friendship, the point is that essential will remains genetically anchored because it denotes an intentionality that is not separated from vital processes. It should be noted that the dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, although by other names, has a long history. For one thing, it is contained in the dichotomy of philia and koinonia in the Nikomachian Ethics of Aristotle, with philia pointing to intimate togetherness and koinonia to association for a purpose. Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are not concretely separate structures, as essential will and arbitrary will are not concretely separate kinds of will. Toennies states that he does “not know of any condition of culture or society in which elements of Gemeinschaft and elements of Gesellschaft are not simultaneously present.”10 As fundamental concepts, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft do not stand for actual societies, as the “state of nature” does not circumscribe a point in history. Conceptually, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are limiting points of a continuum. The totality of social reality hangs between these opposite poles, as physical reality hangs between the poles of inertia and motion.11 Consequently, it donates a profound misunderstanding to say that these fundamental concepts are “oversimplified”12 or “used as perennial frames into which the many-sided, complex and elusive facts of reality are squeezed,” as some authors maintain (Wirth 1926, pp. 412–22). It is likewise 162

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misleading to introduce third categories, like Schmalenbach’s Bund, meaning a league or covenant of agemates, or Parsons’s collegiality, as inherent in the professional role, to complement the Toenniesian fundamental principles (Cahnman 1973, pp. 11–15). Surely, reality contains innumerable subdivisions, modifications, combinations, shades, grades and mixtures, but these variations are qualifying, not fundamental in character. However, what is firmly stated and sharply delineated in pure or constructional sociology (Cahnman 1973, pp. 103–24) is fluidly interpreted and variously combined in applied or historical sociology. There is a dialectical tension between the two sociologies, as there is a dialectical tension within each of them between the fundamental concepts Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and between their correlates essential will and arbitrary will. Again, within applied sociology, there is tension between the variegated historical manifestations of the interplay of social forces to which these concepts refer. By a dialectical, as against a positivistic, scheme, then, we refer to a view of human relations as a continuing and contradictory process rather than as an assemblage of separately demonstrable facts. Admittedly, the task is complex. “Pure” concepts must be illustrated by concrete examples, but the examples, in turn, only approximate the clarity of the conceptual formulation. For instance, relations within a family are more likely to be based on “essential will” and hence more readily lead to Gemeinschaft than relations within a joint stock company or a government office, but to what extent this is the case is a question for research. Even a seemingly thoroughly integrated family merely approximates the ‘pure’ concept of a family as Gemeinschaft, just as an actual line merely approximates a mathematical line. For, as Toennies puts it, in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft concepts are “nothing but artifacts of thought, tools devised to facilitate the comprehension of reality” (1970, p. 133; Loomis 1963, p. 14; Cahnman and Heberle 1971, p. 44). These “things of thought” are common denominators or normal (norm) concepts and their objects are ideal types; “they are never found complete and pure in reality”. In order to comprehend reality, “the transitions, constraints and complications” must be introduced, as Toennies observes in Thomas Hobbes: Leben und Lehre (1971, pp. 89–90; Cahnman and Heberle 1971, pp. 39–40). In Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft he continues: As free and arbitrary products of thought, normal concepts are mutually exclusive; in a purely formal way nothing pertaining to arbitrary will must be thought into essential will, nothing in essential will into arbitrary will. It is entirely different, if these concepts are considered empirically. In this case, they are nothing else but names comprising and denoting a multiplicity of observations or ideas; their content will decrease with the range of the phenomena covered. In this case, observation will show that no essential will can ever occur without the arbitrary will by means of which it is expressed and no arbitrary 163

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will without the essential will on which it is based. (Cahnman and Heberle 1971, p. 44) In other words, what Toennies says is that essential will and arbitrary will as well as Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are not distinguished in the way the botanist distinguishes trees and grasses or the zoologist vertebrates and invertebrates. Toennies does not employ the descriptive naturalist’s method of distinction, but the chemist’s method of isolation (Scheidung, not Unterscheidung; ibid., p. 91). He speaks of not concretely distinguishable categories, but of intellectually distillable elements. Going a step further, one might say that while the fundamental concepts initially are formulated in an either-or context in pure sociology, they are considered in a more-or-less context in applied sociology. Consequently, what the pure theorist isolates, the applied analyst carries back into the stream of life. These two operations are complementary, not contradictory and, what is more, both operate within the same universe of discourse because pure and applied theory each deal with social relations as positive relations. The fundamental concepts refer to positive social norms and positive social values; negative constellations, such as wars, riots, lockouts, strikes, crime, delinquency, marital discord and, even more so, the radical negation of social bonds that occurs in suicide, are in Toennies’s parlance asocial in character. They are pathologies. Pathology is thus a third category in Toennies’s scheme, in addition to Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and opposed to both. There are pathologies of Gemeinschaft, like crimes of passion, and pathologies of Gesellschaft, like crimes of calculation, crimes that arise sooner in the Gemeinschaft-like context of a rural hamlet and crimes that arise sooner in the Gesellschaft-like context of a metropolitan area: they are negations of their positive counterparts. Pathology, then, while not a fundamental concept, is a mirror image of fundamental concepts and as such has its place in the Toenniesian system (Cahnman and Heberle 1971, p. 91; Cahnman 1973, pp. 15–16). Toennies and Hobbes: Aspects of Modernity Toennies recognized in the Hobbesian model of society the concepts of arbitrary will and Gesellschaft, meaning a rationally constructed social order. But Toennies realized that these twin concepts provide but a partial view of human nature and he suggests that Hobbes himself may have been aware of it. In a usually overlooked passage of his book on Hobbes, Toennies comments that the view of human nature as essentially and universally rational stands in contrast to another view of Hobbes that is less absolute, namely, that humanity had arisen from animality and that it continues to contain it.13 At this point, an evolutionary spark appears embedded in Hobbes’s mechanistic thinking. It is true, though, that this second view is not fully worked out because Hobbes’s attention is focused on the triumph of culture over nature, 164

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a process which in a Toenniesian context is seen as leading to Gesellschaft. Toennies maintains that the Hobbesian scheme needs to be complemented by the concept of Gemeinschaft (1965, p. 164); in addition, a process of ‘aging’ is implied in the development of a predominantly Gemeinschaft-like to a more Gesellschaft-like society. If one thus completes the Hobbesian argument, which belongs to “pure” theory, by an “applied” sociology, that is, by a historical consideration, one recognizes that Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are present in every societal structure—yet their relative strengths may vary and have actually varied over time. In Toennies’s view man is by nature a social being in Gemeinschaft and an initially asocial being in Gesellschaft; but Gesellschaft makes for social relations through convention and law. The relation between these two fundamental concepts and their application can be viewed in a variety of ways. In his paper “The nature of sociology” (Das Wesen der Soziologie) Toennies says that both theses, that man is a social being and that he is an asocial being, are valid and applicable and that they complement each other (Cahnman and Heberle 1971, p. 91). In his paper “A prelude to sociology” (Einleitung in die Soziologie) he adds that it would be inaccurate to say that the organic, or historical, and the mechanical, or rationalistic view are both right and that they are to be combined in a synthesis (Cahnman and Heberle 1971, pp. 81–2). The organic view, he means to say, precedes the rationalistic view logically and historically: Gesellschaft is derived from Gemeinschaft in the same sense in which arbitrary will is derived from essential will, reflection from emotion. But this statement, seemingly the starting point, actually is the conclusion; in Toennies’s mind the argument runs the other way round, in line with the philosophy of Hobbes, which starts from an analysis of Gesellschaft, that is, from the need for societal order. In other words, as Toennies explains it in “A prelude to sociology,” wherever organic unity exists, thought, rational deliberation, arbitrary will are likely to corrode it; but the self-same arbitrary, or reflective, will must strive to establish unity where unity has been abandoned. Thus multiplicity either arises from unity, which exists prior to the parts or multiplicity is the starting point and unity, or union, is the desired goal (Cahnman and Heberle 1971, pp. 75ff.). Clearly the conscious construction of societal cohesion where there is a lack of it is the normative thrust of the Hobbesian argument. Hobbes observed the corrosion of Gemeinschaft. He recognized in their initial stages the ills that are still with us: the spirit of permissiveness among intellectuals, the abuse of the churches and other public institutions for private purposes, the venality of people in all classes of society, the power of the purse of the big trading cities as well as of individual entrepreneurs and the exploitation of the poor (Hobbes 1969b, pp. 2–4, 126). Toennies took these statements as an indication that Hobbes was aware not only of the beginnings but of the very nature of the capitalistic mode of production. He further contended that Hobbes had 165

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recognized in his mind’s eye the continuing dissolution of Gemeinschaft-like relations and unions, especially insofar as their consequences for women are concerned, and their replacement by Gesellschaft-like relations, that is, by the accommodation of individual interests.14 The Marxists, using the terminology of political economy rather than that of sociology, called the new society not Gesellschaft, but capitalism. C. B. MacPherson, in his challenging book, called it the society of ‘possessive individualism’.15 American sociology, consciously or inadvertently has continued in Toennies’s approach although freed from the Hobbesian assumption that society can only be organized by means of a centralized government—an assumption that Toennies had already rejected. There are other agencies of social control, especially in America. The transformation of tradition-bound villagers into restless urbanites, the drift from established custom to social movement and the attempt to cope with the disturbances that arise from these changes have become the focus of attention in a variety of investigations by American sociologists, starting from Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918) and the urban studies of the Chicago school and now pursued in the analysis of deviance and especially in studies of development, particularly in Africa. The guiding spirit of the Chicago school, Robert E. Park, provided a Toenniesian formula for studies related to the urban environment: he assumed that the element of competition in the biotic-ecological complex would have to be checked by a new “moral order” which he conceptualized as “consensus,” the combination amounting to the notion of Gesellschaft.16 An effort at societal unity, indeed, has to be made because from where we stand now the new moral order that is required can hardly be seen emerging. What we do observe is that the individual initially has been freed from feudal bonds, then from customs and usages, and finally from each and every obligation that goes beyond the satisfaction of individual needs. Arbitrary will, the striving for isolated goals, now rules supreme and a vast emptiness occupies the mind. As a consequence, unrest is spreading in ever-widening circles and the time has come for the rational reconstruction of society. But how will such a reconstruction be achieved? By means of a consciously conceived ethic, as Toennies hoped?17 What will be the content of that ethic? The recognition of the need for a more effective government in a Hobbesian mold? An agreement on the procedures that lead to consensus through public debate? An achievement of consensus through a new coercive power, namely, public opinion? A combination of a variety of approaches? These are questions that science can pose, but hardly answer. Hobbes and Vico: The Verum Factum As we move from Hobbes to Vico, we enter a different world. Yet the similarities as well as the dissimilarities between Vico and Hobbes have occupied Italian scholarship in recent decades. Vico polemicized against Hobbes at 166

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various points in his writings, but two of the foremost Italian Vico scholars, Fausto Nicolini and Eugenio Garin, have pointed out that it is not likely that Vico knew much of Hobbes’s work firsthand and that he seems to have relied in large part on the biased interpretation of Hobbes by the Kiel professor Georg Pasch.18 Following the spotty information he received from Pasch and others, Vico mistook Hobbes’s emphasis on human ‘will’ in the construction of governmental institutions as an assumption of arbitrariness in the way the world is run and a reliance on chance in human conduct in the Epicurean understanding of these terms. Yet Vico uses the expression homo homini lupus, which is commonly considered Hobbesian in connotation, in several of his writings.19 A contemporary author, Ferruccio Focher, in comparing Vico and Hobbes, points to Hobbes’s contention that two principal parts of human nature, reason and passion, correspond to “two kinds of learning, mathematical and dogmatical,” and that the latter kind, which is the conventional historian’s manner of proceeding, has no claim to scientific standing.20 At the same time, Focher is aware of Hobbes’s high appreciation of serious historical scholarship, as evidenced in his translation of the work of Thucydides. Focher’s main point in dissolving the seeming contradiction is that linguistic approaches to the critique of sources and their interpretation in historiography, which originated in the eighteenth century and of which Vico is a principal originator, remained unknown to Hobbes and were therefore not utilized in the Hobbesian argument (Focher 1977, pp. 96–104). Viewed in the light of that contention, Vico is not so much an antagonist of Hobbes as his successor. Focher’s point is well taken, but not decisive. In order to demonstrate Vico’s successorship, it must be shown that the different point of departure in Vico’s thinking, in addition to his different methodology, enabled him to arrive at a more comprehensive resolution.21 Giambattista Vico, a trained lawyer and a teacher of rhetoric at the University of Naples, grew up in a Cartesian intellectual atmosphere, that is, in an environment where Hobbes and Spinoza as well as Descartes were widely discussed, but in which he remained opposed to the mechanistic worldview he felt they represented. Vico established in his New Science a historical approach as a counterimage to their mechanistic worldview, but I shall attempt to show that the New Science in effect is a complement rather than a contradiction to the Hobbesian construction, the difference in the philosophical points of departure notwithstanding. Vico objected to the Cartesian assumption that judgments claiming to be true must consist of “clear and distinct ideas,” as in mathematics, and that consequently mathematical certitude was the only permissible certitude in the pursuit of knowledge. The Cartesian assumption has dominated the sciences ever since, and inasmuch as many sociologists have conceived of sociology as a science it has exerted a vast influence in sociology also. Vico especially objected to Descartes’s disregard of history because it was lacking in mathematical certitude. The geometrical method of Descartes appeared to Vico as tantamount to “disregarding the 167

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nature of man, which is uncertain because of man’s freedom.”22 Moreover, in Vico’s view, man’s freedom makes for a new certitude because we “make ourselves,” that is, we are doing what is done in history. A Neapolitan of the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas, in using Aristotelian distinctions, had contrasted nature as ordo quem ratio considerat with human action in society as ordo quem ratio considerando facit, in other words, nature as the work of God with history as the product of man (Croce 1964, pp. 27–8). Vico, not a Thomist, transformed the Thomistic formula into the statement that verum et factum convertuntur, meaning that our freedom in action permits us to know the truth of that which we have made.23 Vico: Historical Sociology As we proceed from Descartes to Hobbes, the vista widens. While constructing law and government is not identical with making history, it is remarkable that Hobbes, in connecting mechanics and geometry with the science of government, asserted that we have knowledge not only about the geometrical figures whose lines we draw, but also about right and wrong, fairness and injury, because we have made the laws and agreements on which they are based (1839b, chap. 10, sections 4, 5; Toennies 1971, p. 113). Vico adds to the Hobbesian contention the observation that the new science of history—or shall we say, of historical sociology—has more reality to it than geometry because “the institutions having to do with human affairs are more real than points, lines, surfaces and figures are” (Vico 1948, para. 349); Vico agrees with Hobbes that men, dominated by passions, such as ferocity, avarice and ambition, “would live like wild beasts in the wilderness” if they had not “made the civil institutions by which men live in human society” (Vico 1948, paras 132, 133). The difference is that the Hobbesian scheme is meant to be a thought experiment, not a historical fact, the agreement between Vico and Hobbes that humanity arose from an animal-like condition notwithstanding. Vico’s statement, on the other hand, is clearly historical. Vico provides the historical dimension to the Hobbesian construction, including the Toenniesian complementation of Gesellschaft by Gemeinschaft, because even in the term Gemeinschaft the constructional character overlays the historical derivation. Originally, Vico imagines—and the term imagination is important—savage giants, that is, wild men with bestial natures, to have roamed the forests in the pursuit of their desires, until they were tamed, tied, as it were, not by the state, but by religion. They were subdued by the clap of thunder and the stroke of lightning, terrifying manifestations of the uproar of nature, which they understood to indicate divine displeasure with their bestial conduct. Their bestiality consisted not only in their killing each other, chiefly in competition for women, but also in the rape and abuse of women, the neglect of offspring and the abandonment of the dead. To abolish these horrifying crimes, the family was first constituted in the caves where the thunderstruck 168

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fugitives had come to dwell. Thus, religion, marriage, and burial, according to Vico, mark the beginnings of civilization or, as we might prefer to say, of social organization (Vico 1948, paras 333, 337, 504). These three institutions, religion, marriage and burial, are common to all civilized nations. It follows that custom brought a hallowed order into the aboriginal chaos and Gemeinschaft was initiated by the compulsion of religious awe, long before a condition of Gesellschaft prompted the establishment of governmental authority. That is what Vico has in mind when he objects to the position of the theoreticians of natural law, namely, Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf, and implicitly Hobbes. Vico maintains that these authors argue from “the latest times of civilized nations” rather than from the beginning (Vico 1948, paras 318, 329, 493 et passim). Indeed, the genetic approach, the grasp of the “initial phenomenon,” as Goethe put it, a case history as we might call it, is indispensable for the comprehension of the phenomena that present themselves to us in the here and now. It is Vico’s contention that we understand what happens now from its beginnings and what is going to be from what has always been. Vico’s theorem, that doctrines or theories must begin where the matters they treat begin (Vico 1948, para. 314), is notable as the basic statement in historical sociology. Vico’s historical reconstruction of the societal order, then, complements rather than invalidates the Hobbesian statement. To be sure, the idea of a Gemeinschaft-based rather than a Gesellschaft-based natural law had occurred to Toennies (1965, p. 217; Cahnman and Heberle 1971, p. 205), although more as a desideratum than as a factuality. Such a Gemeinschaft-based natural law, Toennies argues, would consider prerogatives and obligations not as separate but as complementary categories, which is precisely what happens in the family, both in the historically emerging and in the ideally constructed family. However, as it is dubious whether and to what extent the principle of the family can be applied to the larger society, a Gesellschaft-based legal order is likely to remain the preponderant feature in modern societies, a variety of attempts to introduce ingredients of mutuality notwithstanding. Hobbes’s grasp of this basic fact is compelling. The need to confirm ‘liberty in law’ cannot be gainsaid in the enormously extended context of contemporary societies. But the theorem that doctrines must begin where the matters they treat begin opens a new vista. In the account of history, matters do not begin with government. Vico has demonstrated that the sociology of religion and the sociology of the family, which arises from the sociology of religion, must take first place in the scheme of historical sociology (Vico 1948, paras 333, 336, 337, 504, with references to Hobbes). Religion, that is, the initiator and protector of the family or, concretely expressed, the God that is alive and potent in the hearth fire around which the family gathers, has first established and then maintained society, as Vico emphasizes in one of the concluding paragraphs of the New Science (Vico 1948, para. 1109). Burial is required in completion of the religion-family complex 169

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because of the bond with which religion “ties” us to our ancestors—religion in Latin means to “bind” or “tie”.24 It follows that the institution of the burial of the dead and, going beyond Vico, the initiation of permanent settlements in the vicinities of the graveyards of revered ancestors, complete the establishment of society. The next step is the city, that is, the rise of civilization as an overarching loyalty, encompassing and containing the loyalty to a family or a clan. In that sense, Fustel de Coulanges’s La Cite antique appears as the crowning effort in a Vichian historical sociology.25 In his book, humanity, starting from the family, constructs its social world in larger and ever more inclusive forms, through clans, phratries, and cities to the imperium mundi that is Rome. One can observe a remote echo of Vichianism even in Durkheim’s Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse.26 Durkheim, a student of Fustel de Coulanges, grasped the interrelatedness of symbolism and social structure and the persistence of that relation over time. However, Durkheim confounded comparability with identity in applying the Arunta experience to the république laique. He thereby turned the scholarly statement that religion is social into the political assertion that “society is God,” a contention that Vico would have rejected. We have, however, a most stimulating discussion of the concept of civilization in a Vichian mold in the symposium on Civilisation—le mot et l’idée, edited by Lucien Fébvre and others, and containing the extensive report by Marcel Mauss, Durkheim’s nephew and successor, on “Les civilisations-elements et formes.” Mauss’s report takes up the Vichian theme of civilization as a comprehensive phenomenon.27 French scholarship in the social sciences had been directed toward Vico by the historian Jules Michelet, a translator of Vico, and the interpreter of Vico for several generations.28 Vico’s Method Vico’s method is linguistic rather than mathematical in nature; within linguistics, the approach is genetically conceived. Vico holds that the savage giants of the beginning could utter only unarticulated sounds; out of these grew song and the elevated speech that is called poetry. Poetry in Vico’s understanding is not a form of art, it is the very language itself of ancient man. Neither is the poetry of the ancients a sophisticated account post festum or an allegory, and it is certainly not an expression of individual sentiment. It is a depiction of the world in images rather than its description in thought. In the history of mankind, as in the growth of the mind from infancy to maturity, the pictorial comprehension of reality comes first, the intellectual generalization afterwards (Vico 1948, paras. 218, 363, 377, 34). What the ancients express in corporeal images bears the name of mythology, but it is actually vera narratio, historical truth, though told by means of legend and saga—mythos. To be sure, mythology, in Vico’s scheme, comes in time before poetry, but it is expressed through poetry; mythology records the actions of men and women whereby, as in the 170

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songs of Homer, a person may stand for a collectivity, a class, a city, a generation (Vico 1948, bk 3: “Discovery of the True Homer”). Thus, a universal truth is created linguistically, from the experience of reality, not constructionally as in mathematics. The poetic characters that stand for reality are imaginative general or symbolic expressions, replacing the mute language of signs and physical objects that guided the entrance of bestial man into the social world. In the present context of our deliberations, there would seem to be no need to assume a fundamental difference between mythology and poetry. In poetry, then, peoples speak as in a single voice. Individuality, philosophy, systematic thought, and intellectual argument come later, when collectivities are dissolved and a widely used “vulgar” language is practiced in which the laws of a diversified society are written. Yet language preserves the memory of origins and popular usage retains poetic images. Vico quotes examples that may not always be correct, but they illustrate the historical methodology he is using. So, to cite only one of these examples, nomos, law or regulation, retains a reference to pasturage, for landed estates were once allocated by heroic kings to subjected clans, with mutual obligations as a corollary. Examples of the corporeal images that we continue to use are head for top, mouth for opening, heart for center; we refer to the vein of a rock, the whistling of the wind, the murmuring of the waves. Thus the oldest and newest phenomena are linguistically connected and thereby elucidated, though not equated (Vico 1948, paras 52, 354, 405, 607). By means of philology, Vico attempts to formulate a scientific approach to the comprehension of historical process. Words carry a meaning through time. We learn to understand the nature of institutions from the record of their coming into being (nascimento; Vico 1948, paras 147–52). We comprehend the flower from the bud. Along Vico’s path we move, as in a mental voyage, across the eighteenth century, from the ideas of the Enlightenment and the theories of natural law to the philosophies of romanticism and historicism, as carried forward chiefly by German scholars and philosophers. Vico differs, though, from Herder and the romantic linguists and jurists.29 They use language and custom as unique expressions of respective “folk-minds” whose unity lies not in their comparability but in their orchestration, as when a violin corresponds to a cello in a symphony. The comparative methodology of Vico also goes far beyond the use that Max Weber, not a romanticist but a historical sociologist, makes of counterexamples when he contrasts the civilizations of China and India to those of Europe and America. More closely related to Vico is the sophisticated heir to romantic thought, Wilhelm Dilthey, who explicitly refers to Vico.30 Dilthey’s hermeneutic approach is Vichian when he points out that nature is a phenomenon “external” to man and hence comprehensible only mathematically, while society is “our world” and therefore accessible to Verstehen, that is, to immediate mind-to-mind understanding as applied in interpretive research. It is possible to compare Vico to the newest efforts in linguistics, 171

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such as Noam Chomsky’s, if and inasmuch as the common features of all linguistic expression are emphasized. But structural linguistics is synchronic rather than diachronic. Structural linguistics overlooks the stages of development and thereby neglects the very historicity that is of the essence in Vico’s theoretical scheme. The “Corso que Fanno le Nazioni” Vico’s fame rests with the concept of the “ideal eternal history”—the corso que fanno le nazioni—a scheme that comprises diversity in universality (Vico 1948, bk 4: “The Course the Nations Run”). Societies move from youth to maturity to decline and, again, to renewal, from crude beginnings to the high noon of thought; from evolution to dissolution. The process that is envisaged is ideal because it is a thing of thought; it permits modification, but it is eternal because it is providential as well as flexibly repetitive; and it is historical because it is specific in its application to the events and situations that are investigated. Vico’s thought construct of an ‘ideal eternal history’ is something forever present and forever unfolding, as if it were a part of creation and thus inseparable from the life of man. Vico envisages three successive ages of gods, heroes, and men (Vico 1948, para. 31) and correspondingly three kinds of customs, three kinds of natural laws, three kinds of civil states or commonwealths; and for the purpose of justifying these institutions, he envisages jurisprudence, authority, and reason (Vico 1948, paras 915f.). To illustrate these sequences, there are three successive kinds of government—divine, aristocratic and legal; three successive kinds of languages—mute religious acts, heroic blazonings and articulate speech, and so on; throughout we can follow the trichotomies of Vico’s order of the human universe. Once the cycles have run their course, a renewal takes place and a new cycle begins. Italian scholars, especially G. Fasso, have pointed out in that context that Vico uses the term verum factum rarely in the final edition of the New Science, replacing it with the term verum certum. By the term verum certum, Vico is assumed to refer to the rationality, that is, the universality and predictability of the corsi and ricorsi, or to their “providentiality,” if the concept is rendered in a Christian key.31 The notion that human history moves in cycles is old. It has been particularly congenial to the Greeks, although in a static way, as in the renewal of the seasons; it is found in Plato, Aristotle, Polybius and also, more flexibly later, in Machiavelli; finally, in our day, in Pareto, Spengler, Sorokin, and Toynbee. In all these schemes, history is conceived more in images of growth and decline rather than of actual change. Vico has been compared to Hegel, but the Hegelian scheme of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and consequently the teleological prospect in Hegelian philosophy of moving ever higher along the spiral of history, is lacking in the sequence of corsi and ricorsi that is envisaged by Vico. For Vico, the decline of institutions and civilizations is as real as their rise, and providence guides them both. However, both Vico and Hegel share 172

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a dialectical methodology; their sequences are repetitive in a varied way, so that, for instance, three stages in the history of medieval and postmedieval Christianity correspond to, but are not identical with, three stages in the history of Roman and Greek antiquity. Trichotomy and Dichotomy The sociologist would wish to translate Vico’s divine providence into recurring patterns of events, no matter who directs them, but he must enter a proviso regarding the theory of the three stages. The proviso is as follows: the trichotomy of a religious, heroic and civic age, which is encountered not only in Vico and Hegel, but also in Ferguson, Turgot, Comte, Lewis Morgan, and others, appears to be modeled after the concept of the Holy Trinity, which, in turn, goes back to ancient Egyptian wisdom. But there are other holy numbers in the tradition of the peoples, so that one is inclined to assume that the threefold division of reality amounts to a cultural compulsion in the civilization of the Occident. One could construct four (tetragrammaton), five, or seven subdivisions with equal assurance. Perhaps a dichotomy, spanning life from birth to death and from evolution to dissolution, and hence indicating limiting points rather than subdivisions, is more in line with the structure of reality. Such an interpretation would demonstrate the similarity between Vico’s view and Toennies’s fundamental concepts and thus bring Vico in line with classical sociological theory.32 A further deliberation will confirm the convergence. We cannot quote at this point the numerous examples from Greek and Roman history that Vico uses to illustrate the theory of corsi and ricorsi. Suffice it to say that Vico consulted all the literary sources that were available to him—not only jurists, historians and philosophers, but apart from Homer, whom he thinks of as a collectivity, also individual poets like Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, and others. Indeed, the historical sociologist would agree with Vico that the creative writer and artist must not be neglected in the search for sources: he gives us not a literal, but an enhanced view of reality. From legendary and poetic sources and linguistic remnants, as we have indicated above, one may even imagine what happened far back in time, when the explicit testimony of contemporaries ceases to speak. From the factual data and their interpretation Vico assumes, to quote from my own earlier writing, that the ferocious vagrants of old, embroiled in a “war of each against all,” threw themselves at the mercy of the settlers who received them as dependents, clients, and serfs (Vico 1948, para. 258). Conquest, then, while not excluded, is not a necessary condition of submission. Indeed, following Vico’s axiom 79, there is a sequence: the protected associates in the first stage become the plebeians in the urban stage and the subjected provincials in the imperial stage. What happens is that the fugitives from violence become famuli who attach themselves to the fama (glory, reputation) of the heroes and are accepted as members of their families; they are 173

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forerunners of the serfs subdued by conquest. Only a family has a god present in the hearth fire and hence enjoys independent status; one can understand, therefore, that the Roman plebeians, in pursuance of the Law of the Twelve Tables, demanded connubia patrum, that is, solemn nuptials, sanctioned by auspicia, with equality before God and man and the rights of citizenship as a consequence (Cahnman 1976, p. 834). The example is taken from Roman history. We do not need to decide at this point whether submission occurs, in ancient Italy or elsewhere, without conquest, or whether submission antedates conquest, both of which are Vico’s assumptions, because in either event, along the very lines of Vico’s reasoning, we arrive at a dichotomous rather than a trichotomous view of the course of events. In following Vico and some of his spiritual descendants, such as Fustel de Coulanges and Marc Bloch, or among contemporary social scientists Louis Dumont, we move from hierarchy to egalitarianism (Dumont 1970). Between protectors and serfs, patricians and plebeians, citizens and strangers, or in the European Middle Ages between lords, peasants, burghers, and priests, and in India between the various castes, a gradation of duties and privileges is found, which implies a rank order, but at the same time assigns an independent and incomparable value to each participating group in a total society. This initial principle of societal organization in the course of time gives way to an egalitarian system, which in the West arises out of Hebrew prophecy and Christian teaching and proceeds via the proponents of natural law and the innovators in science, arrives by means of the destruction of ranks at a system of stratification according to the economic categories of property, income, and conspicuous consumption. These three measurable categories are the criteria of the division of classes in an egalitarian society. Even property qualifications may eventually be cast aside, so that only the dynamic differentiations remain. Weber, and finally Merton, have guided us in the understanding of that process, which Weber called the “disenchantment” of the world. What Vico designated as an “age of men” is ushered in at the end of the corso, where solidarity has given way to tolerance and public institutions are used for the satisfaction of private appetites. Individualism, then, rules supreme until breakdown within or conquest from without brings a reversion to a new barbarism. Such conditions prevailed in the waning centuries of antiquity and, if indications are not deceptive, confront us today. Vico’s way of putting it is forceful: “Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance” (Vico 1948, para. 241). So, what is indicated here is a fivefold (not a threefold) sequence of subdivisions amounting to a continuum from necessity to waste. The Vichian trichotomy is thus reduced to a dichotomy, both in terms of a societal construct and in terms of a sequence of stages. The “ideal eternal history” is transformed from a theory of successive stages to a unified theoretical system, without losing its historicity. 174

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Conclusion One must call to mind at this point that Toennies, like Vico, sees the Middle Ages and the newer centuries as a civilizational unit, moving dichotomously from a prevalence of Gemeinschaft to a preponderance of Gesellschaft.33 Hobbes, from whose philosophy the Toenniesian scheme is derived, envisages man’s moving from an animal-like condition and a sense of belonging, through individualism, to the more firmly established state of a rationally organized society. Hobbes’s counterimage, though, is not Gemeinschaft, but dissolution. Hobbes’s approach is constructional, while Toennies combines the constructional and historical, or the rationalistic and empiristic aspects. Vico, as we have shown, adds a more intensely argued historical dimension to these chiefly analytic schemes. He offers a guide to historical sociology. All three authors, although proceeding from different points of departure, agree that the varied world of human experience must be comprehended within a conceptual context of limits. History provides the dates, sociology the concepts by which the data are analyzed. Applying the approach thus indicated to the problems of contemporary society, or of any society, a viewpoint is provided by which to order the bewildering array of phenomena that are encountered day by day. This is what a theory should do. Notes 1.

2.

3.

I have attempted to put Max Weber into a historical context in the paper Max Weber and the methodological controversy in the social sciences’, in W. J. Cahnman and Alvin Boskoff, eds., Sociology and History. Theory and Research (New York: The Free Press, 1964), pp. 103–27. Toennies was aware of Vico, as documented by his comment in his book, Fortschritt und soziale Entwicklung [FUSE] (Karlsruhe: G. Braun, 1926), p. 36. He compared Vico with those philosophers of antiquity who assumed a deterioration of human life and conditions rather than a continued progress. Toennies was surely aware of Schelling, Schopenhauer, Gierke, Maine and Fustel de Coulanges, that is, of a tradition comparable to Vico’s approach. However, the Enlightenment aspect of Toennies’s thinking remains unimpaired by these considerations. The English works of Hobbes (1839a) in the Sir William Molesworth edition comprise 11 volumes, and the Opera philosophica quae latine scripsit omnia (1839b) comprises 5 volumes. Easily accessible is the Pelican paperback edition of Hobbes’s main work, Leviathan (1968), edited by C.V. MacPherson, as well as the early work, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (1969a) and Hobbes’s last book, Behemoth or the Long Parliament (1969b), both edited by F. Toennies, 1889. Richard Peter’s Penguin paperback volume (1956) offers an introduction into Hobbes’s system of thought. Among the extensive Hobbes literature, two recent publications by C.F. MacPherson (1962) and J.W.N. Watkins (1965) are especially stimulating. Toennies’s basic evaluation, Thomas Hobbes: Leben und Lehre (1971), with an introduction by K.H. Ilting, has not yet been translated into English. 175

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4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

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Hobbes, Collected Works, ed. Sir William Molesworth, vol. 11 (1839a), pp. 108–9. Compare the famous passage about the states of war and peace as the limiting concepts of human relations in Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. V. MacPherson (London: Pelican Paperbacks, 1968), chap. 13, pp. 185–87. Quoted from Ferdinand Toennies, 1965, p. 213; now in Cahnman and Heberle, Toennies on Sociology, p. 203. Compare K.H. Ilting’s introduction to Toennies, 1971, p. 22. Hobbes, 1968, ch.17, p. 225; compare Cahnman and Heberle, 1971, pp. 48–61, where Hobbes’s argument concerning the requirements of societal order is reviewed. Hobbes says in the very first sentence of the introduction to Leviathan that a commonwealth or state is an “artificial animal” and one that is made by “the art of man.” In the preface to the second edition of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft Toennies confirms that he had taken his departure from Hobbes (Cahnman and Heberle, 1971, p. 31). The corresponding conceptualizations of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as well as Wesenwille and Kuerwille are developed in the first and second chapters of Toennies (1970). English translation by Loomis (1963). This basic work, written in the enthusiasm of youth, was published when the author was thirty-two years of age. The fundamental concepts contained in the book were elaborated and clarified in four major subsequent papers and in numerous other writings; they are selectively combined in Cahnman and Heberle, 1971. The four major papers published between 1899 and 1924 are indispensable for the understanding of Toennies. An analysis of all aspects of the work of Toennies is offered in Cahnman, 1973. Other pertinent literature, including literature not available in English, is quoted in both volumes. Several chapters from Toennies’s otherwise untranslated book, Einfuehrung in die Soziologie (1965), are included in Cahnman and Heberle, 1971. Cahnman and Heberle, 1971, p. 10. Corresponding to the GemeinschaftGesellschaft continuum, human will or intentionality should also be conceived as a unity, with essential will and arbitrary will as limiting points. Compare Toennies, 1970, p. 87; Loomis, 1963, p. 103; and Cahnman and Heberle, 1971. p. 6. Compare Funkenstein, 1976, esp. pp. 194–5. Funkenstein fails to mention Toennies in his extensive bibliography. Janowitz, 1976, pp. 82–108, esp. pp. 85–90. Janowitz repeats his misinterpretation of Toennies in a recent publication (1978). Compare my paper “Toennies in America.” Toennies, 1971, p. 190. Reference may be made to Hobbes, 1968, p. 187, where Hobbes observes that “savage people” have no government “except the government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust.” Hobbes makes here a concession to the concept of Gemeinschaft, but rejects its applicability to the conduct of government. Toennies, 1971, pp. 39–40, 206, 267. Future research will have to take up the consequences for women, that is, for love and sex and generally for the family, of the increasingly Gesellschaft-like human relations in contemporary society.

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15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

Hobbes observed and analyzed the upcoming ‘bourgeois’ society, but MacPherson’s contention that Hobbes’s analysis served the interests of that society is an inference that is not born out by the text of Hobbes’s writings. If it were not for that inference. MacPherson’s argument (1962) would closely resemble the one of Toennies. Robert E. Park’s scattered opus is assembled in Park, 1952. See also Park and Burgess, 1972, pp. 165–6. The sentence ‘Every society represents an organization of elements more or less antagonistic to each other, but united for the moment, at least, by an arrangement which defines the reciprocal relations and respective spheres of action of each’ circumscribes a Gesellschaft. One of the most Toenniesian papers of the Chicago school is “Urbanism as a way of Life” (Wirth, 1964, pp. 60–83). Compare also Robert Redfield, 1930. The expression is taken from the last lines of Toennies’s book Die Sitte now translated by A. J. Borenstein as Custom: An Essay on Social Codes (1961). Nicolini, 1931, pp. 30, 46, 1942, pp. 67–99, 1949a, pp. 25–43; Garin, 1962. These scholars argue that Hobbes was not well known in Naples at the turn of the seventeenth century and that whatever knowledge existed was distorted by second-hand information. It seems that Vico gained much information from the writings of Georg Pasch (1661–1707). Georg Pasch was professor of moral philosophy, then of practical (Lutheran) theology, at the University of Kiel. His major books, Schediasma de curiosis huius saeculi (1695) and De novis inventis (1700), are considered superficial pieces of analysis by Nicolini. Pasch compares Hobbes to Machiavelli, Lucretius and a number of other authors. However, Fisch and Bergin (Vico, 1944, pp. 30, 46) comment that some of Vico’s references to Hobbes are not in Pasch, so that is seems that he may have known Hobbes’s Latin, but not his English, works. The expression homo homini lupus, frequently quoted in connection with Hobbesian thought, especially De Cive, chap. 6, and Leviathan, chap. 13, occurs in earlier juridical writings of Vico, especially De constantia jurisprudentis according to Focher (1977, p. 9). Focher, 1977, pp. 73f., referring to Hobbes, 1969a. According to Hobbes the dogmatic historians were given to rhetoric, which he opposed to logic. Vico has become accessible to the English reading public through Bergin and Fisch’s translation (Vico, 1948) now available, somewhat abridged, in a Cornell paperback edition (3rd printing 1975). Bergin and Fisch have also translated The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico (Vico, 1944). A plethora of Vico interpretation is contained in Tagliacozzo and White, 1969, and Tagliacozzo and Verene, 1976; also in vol. 43 of Social Research, nos 3 and 4 (Autumn and Winter 1976). Readers of Italian may consult the Bolletino del Centro di Studi Vichiani (Naples: Libreria Internazionale Guida). Vico, 1709, quoted in Michelet, 1971, vol. 1, p. 354. The entire sentence is as follows: “The Cartesians investigate the nature of objects on account of the prospect of certainty which they contain; they disregard the nature of man which is uncertain because of man’s freedom” (my translation). The principle of the verum factum is clearly formulated in Vico, 1948, para. 331. as “a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modification of our own human mind.” Compare Berlin, 1976, pp. 79–114, for the modifications of the concept. 177

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24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

178

Vico reminds us of the meaning of the word ‘religion’ in Vico. 1948, para. 503. Fustel de Coulanges, 1956. Fustel does not quote Vico in his book, but it must be assumed that he was familiar with Jules Michelet’s translation of Vico. He was in contact with Michelet in Michelet’s last years. Fustel’s students appear to have been aware of his Vichianism; they are reported as having mocked him with a chant: “Qui est-ce qui a pillé Vico? C’est Fustel!” Cf. Guiraud, 1895, pp. 324–34. Indeed, Fustel’s theme seems indicated in Vico, 1948, para. 341, where Vico states that man in his bestial state desires only his own welfare; having taken a wife and begotten children, he desires his own welfare along with that of his family; having entered upon civil life, he desires his own welfare along with that of his city; when its rule is extended over several peoples, he desires his own welfare along with that of the nation; when the nations are united by war, treaties of peace, alliances and commerce, he desires his own welfare along with that of the entire human race. I am obliged to Professors Louis Dumont and Yash Nandan for advice and assistance in matters of French sociology. Durkheim, 1961. Durkheim refers to Fustel de Coulanges in the preface to the first volume of L’Année sociologique; in the preface to the second volume he points out that religion takes first place in the analyses contained in the Année because religious phenomena are those from which all other phenomena are derived. Benjamin Nelson refers to the Vico-Durkheim connection in his 1976 review paper. Fébvre et al., eds. 1930. The most important contribution in that volume is Marcel Mauss’s treatise, “Les civilisations—elements et formes,” pp. 87–196. One of the participants in the forum discussions was Alfredo Niceforo, professor of statistics at the University of Naples. A further extension of the topic of civilization is found in Braudel, 1966. In the preface to the second edition, Braudel acknowledges his indebtedness to Marc Bloch and Lucien Fébvre. About Jules Michelet, see note 25 above. Compare Pons, 1969. The affinity of German romantic thought in philosophy and historiography with Vico’s approach, especially with the appreciation of mythology and with the concept of nascimento, has repeatedly been stressed, but never closely investigated. Croce (1964, pp. 249ff., 323 et passim) pointed to the similarities, even if he may have overemphasized the idealistic tendencies in Vico’s thought; a German (Austrian) author whom Croce held in high esteem, Karl Werner, was emphatic in the contention that Vico’s ideas, even without direct acquaintance of German scholars with his writings, had been carried forward to completion in German linguistic and ethnological studies and, as far as the verum factum is concerned, in the identity philosophy of Schelling (Werner, 1879, pp. 58–9, 320–5). Even more pertinent were Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of mythology. The closest affinity is with Herder, recently noted by Berlin (1976, pp. 143–216). Focher, 1977, pp. 107–26, compares Vico and Droysen. Note Dilthey’s (1957, vol. 7, p. 148) sentence which reminds one of Vico: “The mind understands only what it has itself created.” The reference to Vico is in chap. 15. The best recent work on Dilthey in English is Makkreel, 1975.

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31.

32. 33.

Compare Focher, 1977, pp. 45–61, 102. Focher further points out that philosophy provides the concrete substratum for the scientific understanding of historical processes (pp. 97f.). Focher’s contention is borne out by Vico (1948, para. 138): “Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true; philology observes that of which human choice is author, whence comes consciousness of the certain.” About the meaning of dichotomy in Toennies, see Cahnman, 1973, introduction, p. 12. Cahnman and Heberle, 1971, pp. 288, 318. These passages are translations from Fortschritt und soziale Entwicklung (1926) and Geist der Neuzeit (1935).

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16 The Historical Sociology of Cities: A Critical Review The need for theory and for a historical perspective in attempting to arrive at valid theory are widely recognized among sociologists, but preconceived notions of a systemic nature would seem to be standing in the way of an unbiased evaluation of the data of history. In the following, I intend to analyze the work of two leading urban sociologists who assume that preindustrial and industrial cities represent closed and mutually exclusive systems. Consequently, they assemble sustaining data, but brush aside contrary evidence that would tend to establish the city as a phenomenon in its own right, and the modern city as antedating industrialization. In historical view, the city appears as an emergent rather than as a variable, both in ancient Babylonia and in medieval Europe. The present-day city, ecologically enlarged into “urban regions,” sociologically provides the principle for the organization of the total society, but the twofold model of the ancient and the medieval city, if understood ideal-typically, remains serviceable as an analytical tool. In our book, Sociology and History, Professor Alvin Boskoff and I have quoted Donald G. MacRae’s somewhat flippant but useful characterization of history as “sociology with the brains left out” and of sociology as “history with the hard work left out.”1 Leaving the historians to their own devices, I should now like to briefly elaborate on MacRae’s statement about sociology. I shall proceed from the observation that it has become fashionable among sociologists to pay lip service to the need for theory and to the prerequisite of a historical perspective in attempting to arrive at a valid theory. However, a closer look reveals that the “hard work” of assembling and analyzing the evidence is left out and that its place is taken by preconceived notions that go by the name of “system.” These notions are then legitimized, as it were, by conveniently selected historical data. At times, the data are diligently brought together, but interpreted in a biased way. In other instances, neither the data nor the findings are critically reviewed or evaluated on a comparative basis. I hasten to add that my intention is not to attack systematic sociology, but to insist that a theory that is to aid in social and historical investigation must 181

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not be conceived as an end in itself, but as a model or a point of departure, to be proved correct, disproved or modified by subsequent analysis and that it must not be established as a super reality, with contrary or modifying evidence disputed out of the way or disregarded entirely. Specifically, I am referring to a recent trend in the literature on urban sociology. My examples are drawn from the writings of two authors who seem to be in the lead,2 but there are others who have accepted their approach and disseminated it in college texts and footnotes to research papers.3 With the ecological approach more often than not bogged down in demographic formalism, the literature I am concerned about takes advantage of the desire that has grown among sociologists for a larger view of the urban process.4 But the desire is likely to be frustrated by a misconception. The authors referred to assume the existence of two, and only two, urban “systems,” the preindustrial and the industrial. They then proceed to eliminate consideration of the preindustrial city from the analysis of urban processes in industrial cities on the further assumption—and I emphasize the word assumption—that the two above mentioned types of cities are essentially different and that no useful purpose is served by comparing such presumably disparate phenomena. As already noted, this procedure goes by the twin names of “theory” and “history.” Let me make clear that I am fully aware of the fact that cities without industry, that is, without the utilization of inanimate sources of power do indeed exist, but so do whole societies of this type. If the logic of the initial statement were pursued further, we would be unable to distinguish the cities of ancient Babylonia from the peasant hamlets and the nomadic tribal units of Babylonia or the cities of Flanders and the Rhine valley in the High Middle Ages from the Carolingian manor house; in other words, we would not have come to grips with the phenomenon of the city. Clearly, what distinguishes the city from the noncity cannot be an attribute common to cities and noncities alike. Yet, Sjoberg argues against Wirth, and implicitly against Pirenne, that “the city is in many respects molded by the social system of which it is a part.”5 How is this possible? If the city—Babylonian or medieval—were nothing but a “dependent variable” of a larger neolithic or feudal society, how could it ever have arisen? How can such a static view of society take account of historical processes? To be sure, new social forms arise from antecedent and enfolding ones, but they do so as emergents or contradictions, not as variables. The mistake of characterizing cities in a preindustrial society by the deceptively simple notion that they have no industry entails the corresponding mistake of characterizing cities in an industrial society by the presence of industry. Consequently, with industry defined by the use of inanimate sources of power, the area around hydroelectric installations, such as the Grand Coulee Dam, would have to be considered a city. In view of this absurdity, one might have to fall back on the otherwise derided Wirthian characteristics of cities, that is, size, density, heterogeneity, and individuation. But even the Wirthian 182

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definition is historically at fault,6 although not for the reasons given in the literature that I have in mind. It combines universally observable ecological attributes of cities, namely size and density, and a likewise universally observable attribute, which is both ecological and sociological in nature, namely heterogeneity, with a clearly sociological and much more time-bound attribute, namely individuation. The latter is the hallmark not of cities generally, but of merely one type of city that I have called the anomic city.7 The city of Chicago in the early decades of the twentieth century has served Louis Wirth as a model of such an anomic city. There are other cities of this type that partake of the quality of individuation, but they are entirely outside the industrial nexus, such as imperial Rome.8 We can understand the nature of this pathological type of the anomic city best by comparing it with the classic Weberian model of the city, with its prerequisites of fortification, market, autonomous law and jurisdiction, a discrete associative character, and at least partial autonomy and autocephaly, that is, with the city of citizens, the basic or ideal type of a city.9 To make the methodology that is involved here clear, Weber adds—in my own translation, which is not identical with Martindale’s—that by this yardstick even the cities of the occidental Middle Ages qualify only in part as true cities, but that the cities of Asia, with possible isolated exceptions, were not cities, in the sense of full-fledged urban communities, at all. Max Weber’s sociological model of the city as an independent territorial unit based on the inclusive loyalty of all its inhabitants contrasts sharply with the noncity, that is, a monocultural social unit exclusively based on kinship. It contrasts also with the statistical city, which is merely a relatively densely settled place of a certain size. The model Weber is using is twofold, taking its departure from the Greek polis and reaching its partial fulfillment in the commercial city of the High Middle Ages. The industrial city, which expands into the modern nation-state and which frequently takes on the aspect of an anomic city, must be seen as a deviant from the model. Such a city marks a proliferating late urban, or even posturban, development, a far cry from the citizens’ city of the thirteenth century, yet related to and comparable with it, inasmuch as it is oriented exclusively, or almost exclusively, on the utilization of market chances. In contradistinction, the technological model of the preindustrial city, with its counterpart, the industrial city, is lacking a tertium comparationis. The term technology does not serve as such because technology is not a distinct attribute of cities. Consequently, those authors who in their analysis of the city base themselves on the preindustrial-industrial dichotomy are led to conclude that the industrial city has nothing in common with the preindustrial city and that the study of the preindustrial city, therefore, has little, if anything, to contribute to the analysis of the urban process, as we know it today. Thus, they defeat themselves by their own preconception and bid farewell to history. One contemporary author in the field of urban sociology even goes so far as to suggest that a broad historical perspective narrows the basis for theoretical 183

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analysis.10 Recent history, he concedes, is all right, but remote data are felt to be disturbing. How remote is remote is not said, but it seems fairly certain that Durkheim’s “Elementary Forms of the Religious Life” would have to be indicted as methodologically faulty as far as the analysis of the phenomenon of religion at all times and ages is concerned, if the criterion of remoteness were adopted. What the author in question fails to consider is that, in Durkheim’s words, “in order to understand the present, one must step out of it.”11 Moreover, comparison requires not only a certain similarity or analogy between observed phenomena but also a certain dissimilarity between the environments in which they occur.12 In my paper “The Rise of Civilization as a Paradigm of Social Change,”13 I have attempted to show that the necessary similarity or analogy is provided by the view of the city—and of any inclusive civilization as a multicultural society with differentiated economic roles, as contrasted to a monocultural tribal society with its multipurpose kinship roles, while the dissimilarity in environments between the oldest cities of ancient Babylonia and the newest cities of modern Africa is the factor that makes comparison possible. The difference, as I believe I have shown, is attributable to the combined development of urbanization and industrialization, not to urbanization and industrialization used interchangeably, as if they were one and the same thing. The latter procedure, which is frequently adopted in recent literature,14 confuses the issue because the industrial city, which is a composite reality, is thereby presented as a conceptual device. At this point, we encounter the fallacy of misplaced abstractness. The same author, Leonard Reissman, in his presumed quest for a historically based theory, distinguishes between “theories of contrast,” such as those of Durkheim, Toennies, and Redfield, and “deductive” or “speculative” theories, which he asserts are based on “assumptions” about the nature of cities, such as those of Simmel, Wirth, and Kingsley Davis.15 Among the speculative generalizations, he reckons also the works of Fustel De Coulanges, Pirenne, Mumford, and Max Weber. He proposes to omit all these from consideration because, in limiting himself to the analysis of the industrial city and in defining the preindustrial city as an animal of a different color, he concludes that even the most brilliant analysis of the preindustrial city is dispensable with regard to the task that he has set himself. He forgets that all theorizing about the city must proceed from a contrasting image of what the city is not and that all theorizing about the industrial city must proceed from a contrasting image of what the industrial city is not. In addition, he projects the standard procedure of thinking in systems, which indeed is based on assumptions, to the work of scholars who had steeped themselves in historical knowledge prior to attempting the theoretical summation of their painstaking investigations. However, when he maintains16 “that saying that ancient Rome, like modern New York or London, had its traffic problems, or that the commercial suburbs of the medieval city remind one of the suburbs of today, or that cities always 184

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seem to have slums, does not contribute much to a systematic theory,” he reveals more than his inability to handle the tool of comparison, that is, to consider dissimilarities along with similarities. This kind of quasi sociological reasoning is indeed “history with the hard work left out.” Obviously, the foregoing is not to say that technology is sociologically irrelevant and that changes in technology are without significance for the analysis of the urban process. The division of labor, upon which the city is founded, is a function of technology. Whether in production or communication, technology has a bearing on size, density, heterogeneity, and individuation. Technology tends to promote “urbanism as a way of life” even beyond the reaches of urbanization as an ecological process, thus fusing the city, which was once a small speck in a vast countryside, with society at large. When nearly 70 percent of all Americans live in SMSA’s—not in “cities,” properly speaking—and when about 29 percent of the remaining 30 percent have either wholly or partially adopted urban ways, the commercial city, as we have known it since the High Middle Ages, is both dissolved into, and carried to a triumphant dominance within the total society.17 From the beginning, as V. Gordon Childe has shown, technological development and the growth of cities have been functions of each other, but the spread of a specifically industrial technology has reached the stage where the city is carried beyond itself. Consequently, urbanization (as distinct from urbanism) and industrialization (as a carrier of urbanism) must be kept apart conceptually as well as historically. They are interdependent variables, not one and the same thing. If it is true that the industrial city is merging into megalopolis and megalopolis, in turn, into the industrial society at large, then there is no gainsaying that attention to the industrial factor will be serviceable in a variety of ways. But it is indicative of ahistorical thinking to make the presence or absence of industry the sole criterion of analysis and to force the entirety of urban development into this procrustean mold. To do this would not merely spell the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, but it would also mean to use a catchall concept for a variety of distinct historical phenomena which are thereby blurred to the point of unrecognizability. To use an analogy from zoology, the procedure would be equivalent to subsuming the fauna of the world under the twin concepts of mammalian and pre-mammalian animals, instead of recognizing amoebas, insects, reptiles, fish, and birds along with mammals, both generically and in terms of evolutionary process. Similarly, the exclusive use of the terms preindustrial and industrial with regard to cities blurs the distinction between tribal, feudal, and patrimonial societies and between the clan-dominated city of the Orient, the politically defined city of Greek and Roman antiquity, and the economically oriented city of the European Middle Ages. Athens and Tenochtitlan, Katmandu and Florence would then be one and the same thing because what all these cities have in common is that they have no industry, that is, that they do not employ inanimate sources of energy. 185

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This is as illuminating a statement as would be the analogous statement in zoology that all premammalian animals do not nourish their young with milk. To repeat, the mere use of historical (and ethnographic) data does not make for the historical quality of scholarly work, if contrary evidence is disregarded or interpreted innocuously in order to maintain the integrity of the preconceived system. This is the trap in which the Marxian and Spencerian systems were caught. An example nearer home is Sjoberg’s near identification of the preindustrial city and the “feudal city.” Until recently, none of us knew that such a thing as a “feudal city” was supposed to exist.18 But since Sjoberg classifies all “literate” or civilized “preindustrial” societies and, indeed, all societies with “an advanced agricultural technology that produces sufficient food surpluses to support large non-agricultural populations” as “feudal,”19 it follows from this notion that all cities in all places and at all times past the neolithic era must be considered “feudal” also.20 They are said to be culturally different but sociologically identical.21 If this were so, we might dispense with sociology. Its conceptual tools would be so crude as to leave the world of phenomena untouched. The term feudal is historically too distinct to permit a surface treatment of this kind. In Sjoberg’s view,22 the feudal order “both fosters and demands authoritarianism,” although he concedes that countervailing tendencies are at work in traditional societies, which he equates with feudal societies. This usage of terms leads to considerable confusion. Traditional societies comprise a wide array of societies, that is, all those that are based firmly on custom and, consequently, are not subject to rapid social change. Similarly, authoritarianism of one kind or another prevails in all societies that are not subject to rapid change or, at least, are highly resistant to it. However, feudal societies are societies of a very particular kind. According to Marc Bloch and other scholars who have devoted a lifetime to the study of such societies, the feudal relation is marked by a quasi-contractual lord-vassal relationship, which is absent from other societal structures.23 This relationship, while personalized, is devoid of the magical sanctions that are inherent in kinship bonds in a tribal society and it lends itself, therefore, to further development into the largely depersonalized contractual relationships that are typical of modern capitalistic, or industrial, societies. A feudal society may then be considered as a transitional society on the way from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. In this view, the commercial city of the High Middle Ages appears as the vehicle of change, that is, as the ferment of decomposition in a feudal society, not—as Sjoberg would have it—as part and parcel of a feudal society. The medieval legal principle that “the air of the city makes free” refers to freedom from feudal obligations and thus reveals the betwixt and between concept of a “feudal city” as a veritable contradiction in terms. Like every element making for change, the medieval city grows within an enfolding society, but what is different is decisive, what is similar merely a point of departure. 186

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By way of contrast, the entrapment in rigid theorizing, as exemplified in the case of the “feudal city,” is avoided in ideal-typical procedure, which poses the citizens’ city as a model for the analysis of the urban process, but joyously collects modifying evidence, if such evidence is at hand—which is invariably the case. Typologically, following Max Weber, the industrial city and, indeed, the industrial society of the twentieth century are closely akin to the commercial city of the thirteenth century, but like all reality the industrial city is a variant of the type with which it is to be compared. It could even be said that in its quantitative expansion, which is the feature that distinguishes the industrial city from the cities of medieval Europe, a qualitative transformation is indicated. The city may grow into an urban region and the spirit of “citizenship” may be lost in the face of an unmanageable degree of heterogeneity and individuation. Or else, “urbanism as a way of life” may fill the entire expanse of society and what formerly defined the city may become the hallmark of the nation. If the investigation is carried further, a great many variations and combinations of these trends may be observed without, however, invalidating the model around which they cluster and without which research would be left without direction. All this amounts to saying that ideal-typical procedure establishes a working hypothesis or denotes a point of departure, but avoids pronouncing a gospel truth. It is a guide, but not a master. It provides a conceptual grid to illuminate the wilderness of facts, but does not confound the varieties of reality with the fixity of a preconceived system.24 Ideal-typical procedure is the procedural device of a sociological character that is not merely serviceable, but actually indispensable in historical investigation. Notes 1.

2.

Werner J. Cahnman and Alvin Boskoff, Sociology and History: Theory and Research (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), p. 1, referring to Donald G. MacRae, “Some Sociological Prospects,” Transactions of the Third World Congress of Sociology, vol. 8 (London: International Sociological Association, 1956), p. 302. I am referring to Gideon Sjoberg, The Preindustrial City: Past and Present (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1960), and Leonard Reissman, The Urban Process: Cities in Industrial Societies (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964). Sjoberg’s book is the more influential, the more diligently assembled, and the more clearly conceived of the two, but Reissman’s is too typical for the ahistorical use of historical data by some sociologists to be left out of consideration entirely. However, the very title of Sjoberg’s book is indicative of the sovereignty with which mere data are disregarded in the pursuit of preconceived theoretical notions. If the preindustrial city is marked by the absence of inanimate sources of energy, where, one may ask, shall we then look for a contemporary—or “present”—preindustrial city? Are Lhasa, Mecca, Timbuktu, Kampala, Stanleyville, and other cities of this kind without telephone and telegraph service, river steamboats, automobiles, airplanes, radios, printing plants, typewriters, and the like? To be sure, pockets of earlier technologies are everywhere in evidence, but they are hardly constitutive of 187

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3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

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any city at this time. What one can say is that cities in technically underdeveloped areas are in an incipient stage of industrialization. As one example of many, cf. Noel P. Gist and Sylvia Fava, Urban Society (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1964), pp. 25, 89–90, 232. This widely used text introduces the concept of “industry in preindustrial cities”—a contradiction in terms. Cf. Gideon Sjoberg, “Comparative Urban Sociology,” in Robert M. Merton, Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr., eds., Sociology Today—Problems and Prospects (New York: Basic Books, 1959), pp. 334–359; Gideon Sjoberg, “Cities in Developing and in Industrial Societies,” in Philip M. Hauser and Leo Schnore, eds., The Study of Urbanization (New York; John Wiley & Sons, 1965), pp. 213–264; Leonard Reissman, “Urbanism and Urbanization” in Julius Gold, ed., Penguin Survey of the Social Sciences 1965 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 36–55. These summarizing contributions are more circumspect than the above mentioned books by the same authors, but they do take the prejudicial notions contained in the major works for granted. For instance, the observation is made that many sociologists seem to have been “overly influenced” by the Pirenne thesis on medieval cities; but why there has been too much of an influence is not stated. A brush-off of this kind can hardly be considered a valid refutation. Sjoberg, The Preindustrial City, p. 15. Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” first published in 1938, is reprinted in Paul K. Hatt and Albert J. Reiss, Jr., Cities and Society (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1957), pp. 46–63. The fourth criterion of urbanism, according to Wirth, namely individuation, usually is left out of consideration. For one instance of such an omission, cf., Reissman, Urban Process, p. 139 ff. Werner J. Cahnman, “The Rise of Civilization as a Paradigm of Social Change,” in Cahnman and Boskoff, Sociology and History, p. 547. Sjoberg, Preindustrial City, p. 13 ff., is correct when he points to the limitations of the Wirthian analysis, but he erroneously designates rural-urban differences, as analyzed by Wirth, as typical only of “industrial-urban societies” when in fact they are typical of anomic situations, wherever they are found. Max Weber, Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft (Tuebingen: I. C. B. Mohr, 1922), p. 522; Max Weber, The City, ed. Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1958), p. 81. Reissman, Urban Process, p. 150 ff. Emile Durkheim’s Essays on Sociology and Philosophy, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), p. 352. Marc Bloch, “Pour une histoire comparée des societés européennes,” Revue de synthése historique, 1928, Engl. trans. in Frederic C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma, Enterprise and Secular Change (Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irvin, 1953), pp. 494–521. Cf., Cahnman and Boskoff, pp. 537–559. For one instance, cf. Sjoberg, Preindustrial City, p. 15, where he berates Louis Wirth for viewing “the effects of the city as independent of industrialization.” But where others confound the concepts of urbanization and industrialization inadvertently, Sjoberg does so deliberately. Authors

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15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

who address themselves to the effects of industrialization independent of urbanization are Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd in Middletown (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1929), and Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1939). For an adequate appraisal of the difference between urbanization and industrialization, cf., Maurice R. Stein, The Eclipse of Community: An Interpretation of American Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), chaps. 1 and 2. Reissman, Urban Process, p. 123 ff., p. 138 ff., p. 143 ff., passim. Ibid., p. 153. My interpretation differs from the one of Don Martindale in Weber, The City, p. 62, although it is complementary rather than contradictory to it. Martindale, using an ecological criterion, concludes that “the age of the city comes to an end” while in my view, which is sociologically oriented, urbanism as a way of life becomes dominant in the society at large. Sjoberg, Preindustrial City, p. 9, is aware of the fact that his sovereign redefinition of “feudalism” flies in the face of practically all previous research on the topic, but he takes pride in the expectation that historians will take issue with his usage. Apparently, the historians are out of step. Cf., ibid., p. 7, 10. This has been correctly observed by Oliver C. Cox when he says that the critical question in Sjoberg’s analysis is “whether the society of all preindustrial cities is feudal society.” Cf. Oliver C. Cox, “The Preindustrial City Reconsidered,” Sociological Quarterly (Spring 1964): 133–144. Cf., Sjoberg, Preindustrial City, p. 5. Cf., Ibid., p. 233. Cf. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L.A. Manyon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959); Rushton Coulborn, ed., Feudalism in History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956). Sjoberg does not refer to Bloch, but he criticizes (p. 23) Coulborn because that author in one passage contrasts the lord-vassal relationship to a ruler-subject relationship while in another passage he considers the lord as ruler and the vassal as subject. Sjoberg overlooks that Coulborn refers to the lord-vassal relationship as the “essential” relation in a feudal society—in which characterization he agrees with Bloch—but not as one that exists in conceptual purity, that is unmixed with other kinds of relationships. In other words, Sjoberg substitutes concepts for reality while historical investigation remains cognizant of the complexity of phenomena. Cf. Werner J. Cahnman, “Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences,” in Cahnman and Boskoff, pp. 103–127.

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17 How Cities Grew . . . The Significance of Urban History The city once was like a cloud, not larger than a man’s hand; it is now the tree that overshadows the world. The very word “civilization” in Latin means the culture of cities. The industrial society in which we live is urban through and through, especially in the United States, where the farmer is a businessman who keeps a sharp eye on domestic and world markets, applies scientific methods in seeding and feeding, owns a car and a television set, and has his wife and daughter dressed according to the latest fashion. This is a far cry from the isolation of peasantry. Ecologically speaking, the American farmer does not live in a city, yet his ways are citified. He is of the city even though he is not in the city. For a long period of time urban settlements remained insignificant specks, set in a vast expanse of woods, swamps and fields. Their influence on the thoughts and actions of men terminated at the city gates. Still farther back in history there were no cities at all. People lived in caves, in hovels, in huts, in makeshift dwellings. Many were wandering nomads. How then did the first urban centers come about? Originally, man was a roving hunter, such as Cain, but in the transition period from the palaeolithic to the neolithic culture, the first villages appeared. In the ancient East, people descended from the highland areas, which had become increasingly drier and settled in the marshy lowlands along the mighty rivers, living on mounds and embankments above the watery waste. This happened in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Indus. Scholarly opinion differs as to what made these villages turn into cities, that is, inhabited places where people engaged in diversified activities. Some authorities maintain that the division of labor in civilized society arose from conquest. They say that men from afar, armed with deadlier weapons than those of the neolithic peasants, overpowered them and then offered them protection against further conquest on the condition that they work as serfs for their new rulers. Thus, the Sumerians may have come down from the high plateau of Iran, and the ancestors of the Greeks, in various succeeding waves, from the Balkans. These conquerors established themselves on hilltops or on islands, wherever the topography seemed favorable for the preservation of life and property, and held the surrounding countryside in thrall. However, 191

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when they barricaded themselves in their high strongholds while the subjected population toiled in the open fields, the result was fortresses rather than cities in a proper sense. Only where the various strata of the population dwell together do we have a city. This consideration shows that conquest could not have been a prime factor in the rise of cities, except where conqueror and conquered forgot ancient feuds and fused their interests as well as their families. In most instances, such fusion was a protracted process. Warring clans were able to establish bonds of brotherhood more rapidly where none was able to overpower the other, or where threatening natural forces made recurring feuds look insignificant. Such was the case in Mesopotamia, apparently the cradle or urban civilization. Sumerian and later Akkadian cities, located on elevated ground in the marshy plains between the Euphrates and the Tigris, depended for their survival on dikes erected for protection against floods that came down in the spring, and on canals which distributed water into the parched fields during the summer months. This made permanent settlement and conscious cooperation a necessity. The center of the new society was the temple. A temple was not only a center of worship, but also a place for meditation and research, a warehouse, and an accounting and distributing agency. There, priests gathered vital meteorological and astronomical data which made the first calendar possible, thereby linking science and the city with a bond that was never to be severed. There, writing was invented to keep records of crop yields, of heads of cattle, and of services rendered. Grain and other merchandise was stored, treasure was kept, loans were granted. Divine sanction was invoked when grievances among individuals had to be settled in courts of justice. The urban population, besides the priests, included soldiers watching on the ramparts, privileged tillers of the soil who spent their nights behind the protecting city walls, boatmen and fisherfolk, building and maintenance workers, and craftsmen of all sorts. To all of them, the urban scene meant home. Although the clans continued to exist, they ceased to be independent kin groups. The city is a place where habitat prevails over kinship. Politically, the cities of Babylonia—like the later cities of Phoenicia, Greece, and Italy—were independent entities, or city-states, where sovereignty was vested in the city dwellers and their representatives. The division of labor radiated from the urban center out into the periphery, but the principle of cooperation was restricted to life within the city gates, and relations with outsiders remained power relations pure and simple. The citizens commanded superior armor and exploited the countryside. Roving bands might be compelled to pay tribute from time to time and trading expeditions were dispatched wherever broadly flowing rivers or inland seas facilitated communications. However, the traders were escorted by armed men and often turned piratical in their commercial practices. Trading monopolies lasted as long as the 192

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cities remained strong enough to dictate favorable terms for the exchange of goods, to press workers in distant regions into service, and to defend themselves against competitors. The most powerful city-states made lesser rivals their subservient allies and, in imposing their will upon them, they created empires by unifying vast stretches of territory. The central city, the seat of imperial power, became a metropolis. But the metropolis of the ancient East carried within itself the seed of its own destruction. When the original self-government of tributary cities was weakened or even totally destroyed, the virtues that had grown with citizenship disappeared and the corruption that had grown as a consequence of that disappearance reached the central city. Tribal opponents of the organized empires then reasserted themselves, and civilization, the culture of cities, suffered a severe setback. In such a way, resplendent Knossos, the capital of Minoan Crete, was overrun by Mycenean invaders, and Baghdad of the Caliphes, the heir to mighty Babylon and Niniveh, was sacked by the Mongols. Throughout western Asia and North Africa the conflict between urban settlers and wandering nomads has been an ever-recurring theme in history, with neither side capable of gaining the upper hand until very recent times. The political dominance of a central city over subjected populations does not assure the lasting prevalence of the urban way of life. As cities increase in size and the urban population grows denser the division of labor becomes more intricate. True cities are not mere overgrown villages, and their rise is something more than a quantitative development. The city is the seat of a central sanctuary. Fustel de Coulanges, the brilliant French scholar, has shown how the city of antiquity grew with the unfolding of religious concepts, and what he demonstrated for Greece and Italy likewise holds true for the ancient Near East. The original seat of religion was the family. “To keep the hearth fire burning” was more than a figure of speech in days of old; it meant that the hearth around which the house was built was the altar to an ancestral god who resided there and that the “pater familias” was his high priest and sole representative. Therefore, to defend “house and hearth” was to defend one’s very life, the sustaining root of one’s continuing existence, because once the hearth was lost and the fire extinguished, one’s god had gone forever and his protection had been forfeited. Death then became preferable to harsh servitude in exile from which there was no escape. One family’s god could not be another family’s god, though various families facing a common threat could unite into clans, tribes, or phratries, and these could then unite into cities. If they did they sealed their new bond of alliance by erecting altars for the performance of common rites, but the family gods would still be worshiped at home. Hence, cities were confederations that were called into being by a solemn oath over a burning sacrifice and their rulers were priest-kings who presided over a number of formerly independent kin groups. The city of Rome arose around the hearth 193

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on the Palentine hill where Romulus lighted a sacred fire. Clods of earth from the ancestral dwelling places of his companions were reverently brought to the new city altar. Originally, cities were the dwelling places of families, which retained their particular kinship bonds, but became united in a common city cult. However, those who had lost these bonds for one reason or another remained outsiders also to the city. They were associated with the city, but were no part of it. This was the case of war captives and subjected peasants, of merchants and craftsmen of foreign origin, of escaped clients, discontents, and migrants. All of these abided by their own laws and worshiped their own gods. In Rome, where they were known as the “plebs,” they remained for a considerable time without essential social organization altogether. It was only after a bitter struggle, which lasted for generations that this mixed multitude gained a share in the city government. They became indispensable in the economic system and even more so with regard to the defense of the city, due to the depletion of the old local families. They provided the manpower necessary for military undertakings and the city’s treasury needed contributions from those among them who were wealthy. Thus, the traditional organization founded on birth was replaced by a new order, based either on locality (“demos,” from which the term “democracy” is derived) or on social class, defined through property criteria. This kind of development was marked in Athens by the reforms of Cleisthenes, and in Rome by those of Servius. The new organization brought about by these reforms was not set up to replace the old one, but it overlaid it with a new level of participation in the city government, which was all-inclusive. In this fashion the original religious city, that is, the confederation of associated clans, was superseded by a political organization founded on the geographical propinquity of all the free men who dwelled within the ring of the city walls. By the same token, the hallowed aristocracy of birth was superseded by a new aristocracy of wealth. It is significant that the reforms of Cleisthenes and Servius gave to the commoners local places of worship accessible to all residents of an area. To the family gods who remained the protectors of a few privileged citizens were thus added deities of general appeal. Once begun, this process drew ever-widening circles as increasing numbers of citizens of foreign nativity and undistinguished origin were absorbed into the city of Rome. Something of the kind already had been at work in the Greek cities, which had become incorporated in the Roman Commonwealth. One of the results was the growth among intellectuals of cynical as well as of humanitarian philosophies, such as the schools of Epicur and of the Stoa, but the footloose urban masses needed a more commanding god, a more coercive call to worship. They congregated in mystic societies founded for the purpose of practicing highly emotional rites. 194

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Let us note here that in prophetic and in post-exilic Judaism, the concept of a god who resided in Zion had been transformed into the wider concept of the Ruler of the Universe who rejoiced in the prayers of the poor and the humble and who protected the widow, the orphan and the stranger. In the Church of Christ, this principle of universality became triumphant. In its missionary work, Christianity obliterated distinctions between Jew and Greek, rich and poor, local people and strangers, even between masters and slaves. It extolled humble birth, simplicity of mind, and charity toward all. It gave to the underprivileged of the earth the compensating solace of eternal bliss in the thereafter. Sociologically speaking, Christianity emerged as the creed of the Roman proletariat, the all-encompassing religion of urbanism. The modern city viewed historically, and Western civilization as we know it today, are two titles for the same thing. Asia, Africa, and pre-Columbian America have not participated in the same development. To be sure, huge agglomerations of densely settled and heterogeneous populations existed in India, China, Japan, and in the Islamic world. They may be described as cities because there is no other word for it, but they were not the seedbeds of the urban civilization which now encompasses the entire world. They are cities in the geographical or statistical sense of the word. For instance, the Chinese city, as described by Max Weber and others, never established the prevalence of habitat over kinship that seems to have existed, at least rudimentarily, in early Mesopotamian cities and that became conspicuous in the history of the cities of ancient Greece and later of the entire Occident. The Chinese city remained a loose confederation of kin groups, with no central administration serving common interests. The various sections of the city administered their local affairs, but on behalf of powerful clans and not on a territorial basis. By means of the ancestral cult, the clans whose members settled in the city remained in contact with their original villages and with the spirits of departed ancestors who resided in the village graveyards. Professional guilds were important, but not as in the European Middle Ages, as constitutive elements of the city organization. Chinese guilds, being composed of clan members, frequently excluded members of other clans and thus were instrumental in preventing the growth of a spirit of citywide solidarity. Even where townsmen rose against some overbearing representative of the central imperial power, they fought not for municipal self government, but for the dismissal of a bad official and the appointment of a good one. The city commanded no particular loyalty and had no independent existence. Similarly, the inhabitants of the Islamic city, as described by Roger Le Tourneau in his classic account of the city of Fez, were united only in their common subjugation to the Sultan, not through the adherence to the laws of the city, as in Greece, Rome and the cities of medieval Europe. The populations of Islamic cities were divided into religious, ethnic, and regional groupings, all with their own authorities and under their own laws. These groups fulfilled 195

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socio-economic functions to such an extent that they may be described as occupying the place of stratified social classes in an industrial society. Even if an occupation was not “appropriated” by one single ethnic group, that is, if there were both Jewish and Mozabite money-changers, Armenian and Greek cobblers, Andalusian and Tunisian merchants, camel drivers from one desert tribe or another, they would not organize themselves in guilds or other professional organizations across ethno-religious lines. They adhered to their respective sects and clans and found the organizational niche they needed within the shelter of the kinship group. In other words, they were dwellers in the city, but did not belong to it. In India, as is well known, this principle of religious and tribal monopolies of occupations was carried to such an extreme that the members of castes were forbidden to change their occupations and even to communicate with others across the rigidly drawn caste lines. Under such circumstances, the absolute power of the ruler could not be challenged, and no industrial system of production that was based on free labor could take hold. Both developments, political liberty and economic expansion, presuppose the existence of self-governing cities. The city as a solid organization in its own right originated in Greek and Roman antiquity. Out of these roots, a new growth occurred in the European Middle Ages. In early medieval times when Roman civilization seemed all but lost, the cities were little more than emergency shelters, often the seats of bishops of the Roman church. But as the trade routes were revived and made more secure, footloose people, escapees from the feudal manors in the countryside, began to gather around fortified places, or “burgs,” first in upper Italy and in Flanders, later also along the connecting valleys of the Rhine and the Rhone, finally in other parts of western and central Europe. These places were used for the storage of merchandise. Before long, food, textile, and metallurgical industries and their auxiliaries were established, drawing into service discontented serfs from the surrounding countryside. The merchant adventurers, not unlike foreign traders, such as Syrians, Jews, and Lombards, were “free” in the sense that they could not be made subject to any specific feudal jurisdiction, their origins often being shrouded in uncertainty. The runaway serfs, if recognized, could be claimed for their former overlords, but the merchants insisted on extending to them the “privileges” of the city because they needed their services. The medieval saying that “the air of the city makes free” meant that those who became subject only to the jurisdiction of the city—its “freedom”—were relieved from most of the many cumbersome feudal obligations and encumbrances. In other words, in sharp contrast to the Asiatic situation, the citizens, as urban dwellers, owed no allegiance to any clan, caste, or village association. Nor were they bonded to feudal potentates. Their only allegiance was to the city as an independent corporation. 196

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The member of a clan or caste was magically tied to his companions in the same clan or caste. He could not freely engage in convivial or in connubial relations with outsiders, and in many cases, he could not do his work alongside those strangers. This spell, already broken in the early centuries of Western civilization, was thrown off entirely in the great intermixture of peoples that characterized the late Roman Empire, and it was finally stamped out by Christianity. Compared with Asian and African peoples and with the Indians of America prior to the Spanish conquest, even the medieval European peasantry was only a loosely organized mass of poor people scattered over the countryside. The peasant was bound to the soil (glebae adstrictus), but those who succeeded in escaping from manorial bonds carried no supernatural obligations with them; once they had found asylum behind the city walls, they were free to sell their labor on the marketplace. After having served their apprenticeship, they enjoyed the right of exercising their skill and of plying their trade or craft for their own benefit. Under the law of the city they were free to join in voluntary organizations with others who were unknown to them and with whom they had nothing in common but their trade. Their brotherhoods recognized patron saints, but the patron saint gave his blessing to a principle of social organization that was primarily economic in nature. Indeed, the city itself was a great brotherhood, a guild of guilds as it were, trying to monopolize economic opportunities such as tolls, fees, taxes, even the exclusive right to use commercial channels and trade routes. As the city of antiquity had been founded by a solemn oath taken on a newly erected altar, so the medieval city was founded on a compact for the safeguarding of material interests, known in Italy as conjuratio and in Germany as Eidgenossenschaft. Religious sanction was not absent, but town dwellers of the Middle Ages had no hesitation in asserting their claims against feudal overlords even when these, as often was the case, were bishops and archbishops of the Church. The monetary nexus, so typical of Western cities, was present at an early stage. In contrast, the city of antiquity had been founded as a religious association, and although the Romans kept a sharp eye on their advantage, economic or otherwise, it was the flight of sacred birds that indicated the place where the city should be built. Another difference between the city of antiquity and the city of the Middle Ages rests with the means whereby wealth was obtained. In the ancient city, capitalism was politically oriented, that is, wealth was acquired primarily through public contracts, government credit, employment of slaves, exploitation of conquered territories, and other special privileges. The ability to enter into such contracts was predicated on the possession of political rights. In the medieval city, individual citizens grew rich by the manipulation of market chances. They bought their way into political power, singly or as a class, only when their economic potency had risen to the point where mercantile activities 197

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became a promising source of revenue for the feudal overlord, while at the same time, commercially acquired wealth maintained the armed forces that added emphasis to the position of the wealthy town dwellers. The story has its ups and downs, but it will suffice to say that in the process that we have in mind broad middle classes were generated that became the bearers of modern nationalism, of scientific progress, and of industrial development when the narrowly conceived political power of the cities gave way to the new power of the centralized state. In France, the commercial interests that resided in the cities allied themselves with the power of the absolute king; in England, commercial and feudal interests combined to checkmate the power of the crown; in Germany and Italy, the initiative of the burghers proved insufficient and industrial growth was stimulated from above by the power of the state; in the Netherlands and in Switzerland, the state and the burghers were identical. Everywhere, the nation-states and empires of industrial civilization arose, and they were based on the same territorial principle as European cities, only on a larger scale. The civilization of nation-states, and even of those modern states where various nationalities share in the symbols of power is founded on the same purposive-rational and economically oriented spirit that governed the medieval city. As a result, social mobility, once the privilege of city dwellers, now permeates all aspects of society. People of diverse origin are thrown together and must learn to accommodate themselves to each other. In Western Europe and in North America, to which the energies of Western Europe have overflowed since the Age of Discovery, the process is nearing completion; in Latin America, in the Soviet Union, and in Japan it is far advanced; in Asia and in Africa it is gathering momentum. Urbanism as a way of life appears to be about to fill the total expanse of human existence. From small beginnings, the culture of cities has grown to be the tree that overshadows West and East. Note In my paper “The Rise of Civilization as a Paradigm of Social Change” (W. J. Cahnman and Alvin Boskoff, eds. Sociology and History: Theory and Research (New York: Free Press, 1964) pp. 537–559,) I have elaborated on the theme of how cities developed in various ways. I have defined civilization as the culture of cities, that is, not as a sequential culture of “technicways” following and preceding a culture of folkways, but as a combination of many cultures and subcultures to a larger and complex whole. I have said in the quoted paper that “a multicultural civilizational system represents a different principle of social organization than a monocultural tribal system: a monocultural society consists of multipurpose kinship roles, a multicultural society consists of differentiated economic roles.” Hence, the emergence of cities and the expansion of urbanism with all this implies in a psychological as well as in a structural regard is a paradigm of social change. The nature of the change 198

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can best be observed in the cities of ancient Babylonia. They represent not only an emergent or a historical “first,” but also a conceptual, that is, an “ideal” type. This means that all subsequent social change, especially social change in our time, can most conveniently be comprehended, if measured against the prototypical occurrence of city growth 6,000 ago. However, it ought to be kept in mind that at late stages in history we must contend with multiple variables that result in what has been called “combined development.” Consequently, in the cities of modern Africa, to choose a foremost example, the “federationcity,” where equals form an alliance, is at the same time a “fusion-city,” where individuals converge in a mass, and even an “anomic city,” where social bounds are weakened and likely to dissolve. These modern cities grow not prior to, but in combination with the growth of nations and possibly of supranational and large-scale civilizations. To see all these components together in fact and yet to keep them separate conceptually and, if this becomes necessary, also in research, is not an easy task. But if we keep in mind the phenomena of the beginning—the first cities—we will be able to master intellectually the welter of complexity in the midst of which we live at a late stage in the evolution of our civilization. The Historical Typology of Cities In attempting to develop a typology of cities we must realize that types are ideal images not descriptions of reality. Actual life situations are of a mixed and conglomerate nature, but we stand to gain little by enumerating the bewildering multitude of phenomena that we encounter. If we want to achieve clarity, we are constrained to select predominant traits and to train our sights on them. For example, cities like New York, Chicago, and Boston are classified as leading wholesale centers of the United States although they have less than 15 percent of their aggregate employment in wholesale trade. But if retailers over a wide area are dependent on wholesalers in these cities for their supplies, we feel satisfied in calling them wholesale trading centers, even if they are industrial, administrative, and educational centers at the same time. Similarly, if wholesale interests dominate a city politically, as in old Venice or Amsterdam, we call such a city a wholesale trading center, irrespective of what else the city may happen to be. In other words, ideal types are abstractions from reality. They serve as yardsticks by which to measure actual life situations and to gain a perspective of them. In this sense, then, we have consumer and producer cities, meaning cities that are predominantly consumption—or production-oriented. The inhabitants of a consumption-oriented city import the majority of the goods they need while they export relatively little. In a production-oriented city, imports and exports are more in balance. It follows that a consumption-oriented city must dominate other cities and the surrounding countryside, either militarily or economically, that is, financially, or both. Military dominance means that 199

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a tribute is exacted by military means, either by the application of superior force or by the threat of such force. Economic dominance means that tribute is exacted by economic means, that is, by the exploitation of market chances, for instance by means of a natural or technical advantage. The fortress cities of the Hittites, Babylon, Niniveh and Rome in antiquity, Delhi of the Moguls, Pekin or Peiping, of the Mandshus, Tenochtitlan of the Aztecs, even some of the hill-towns of Tuscany and Umbria, are examples of the former. Examples of the latter abound through history, from Knossos, Tyre, and Carthage via Venice, Luebeck, and London to contemporary New York, Chicago, and Shanghai, along with many other places. Actually, economic control and political or military control are interlinked. A purely military domination is possible, but hardly a purely economic one, because an elevated economic position without the political strength to defend it is too provocative to go unchallenged. If it comes to a reputation for ruthless brutality as the sole basis of dominance, the Assyrians fanning out from Niniveh were unsurpassed in antiquity, and the Aztecs, based on Tenochtitlan, were feared among the Indians of Mexico. But it should be remembered that the majority of conquerors, from the dawn of history until the threshold of our own time, such as the Doric invaders of Greece, the Scythians, Huns, Mongols, even the Arab warriors after the death of Mohammed, were not urban in origin. Cities were their desired goals, not their points of departure. Recognition of this phenomenon as a recurring tendency constitutes one of the oldest sociological insights; it is already stated as such in Ibn Khaldun’s “Muqadimmah,” a work of the fourteenth century. (The theories of the famous Berber scholar are discussed in the essay, “Social Stratification in Cities.”) The important point in the present context is that cities demilitarize all but the most militant invaders. Cities are based on an elaborate division of labor, a principle of economic organization that first overlays and ultimately replaces an earlier organization based on clans and castes. Cities produce goods for exchange or are entrepots for the exchange of goods from elsewhere. They are innovators of industrial techniques and monopolizers of trade routes. But they neither establish nor maintain positions of economic dominance without the background of power. Mercurial Carthage was a harsh master of subjected populations, and so were Venice, Genoa, and the towns of the Hansa League. The rise of the city of London coincides with Britannia’s rule over the waves and the commercial predominance of New York is closely related to the independence of the thirteen colonies and the growth of the United States of America. A central city, or metropolis, which has grown to imperial predominance can exact tribute by means of public law, that is, through political overlordship, or by means of private law, that is, through the nexus of market relations. In the former case, the bounty derives from the contributions of subjected peoples or cities, from the payments of rivals defeated in war, or from overawed allies 200

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who pay a lump sum to those that are stronger than they for the spurious privilege of remaining undisturbed in the exploitation of their own subjects. All conquerors, from Nebuchadnezar to Napoleon, were adept in the techniques of exacting tribute, not only in gold, livestock, and merchandise of many kinds, but also in pieces of art. Rome’s splendor was enhanced by the loot of the East as the drabness of London was relieved by the statues that Lord Elgin had carried away from the ruins of the Parthenon. More numerous are cities that receive tributary payments from a subjected peasantry that renders services and gives up a specified share of its harvests to the magistrate of a central town or to a citified gentry. This was the case in the free cities of antiquity, where city creditors lorded it over country debtors, and in the independent cities of Italy and Germany in the Middle Ages. The patricians of Nuremberg and the nobili of Florence owned serfs in the surrounding countryside and received fees and tithes from them. Biblical Jerusalem and even smaller cities in ancient Israel belong in the same category, as we learn from the Prophets who complain bitterly about those who add field to field and grind the faces of the poor. The consumption-oriented city may be a fortress city or a court city, an administrative, religious, or educational center. Fortress cities have existed from early times and in many countries, distinguished either by offensive or defensive design. Conquerors founded castle-like settlements in the hills, where they set themselves up as warriors, and let the subjected peasantry work in the fields. For instance, the Shangs were a border people who invaded China in the 5th century B.C., provided the subjected farmers with “protection” whether they wanted it or not, and in exchange for that protection took a share of the farmer’s crops. Similarly, the Sumerians descended from the mountains of Iran into the plains of Mesopotamia and founded the city of Ur, a mother of many cities and other places. But in time conquerors and conquered merged, and the walled cities, as in Mycenean Greece or in Boghaz Koy of the Hittites, became citadels for defense, whereto the people of the open countryside could withdraw in periods of stress. Within the city walls were temples, storehouses, the palaces of the rulers and quarters for the garrison. Perhaps the purest type of defensive city that we know is the fantastic mountain city of Machu Picchu, in the Peruvian Andes. This “lost city of the Incas,” with its houses, temples, and palaces, is perched on steeply terraced slopes, high above the most inaccessible part of the grand canyon of the Urubamba river, with only two precipitous paths leading down to the outside world. This city, the building of which may have taken many decades of strenuous effort, was meant to be a last refuge, not a stronghold of conquerors. The court city is an extended fortress city, descended from the hills into the plain. Many cities of medieval Europe, with the merchant’s quarter nestling at the foot of castle hill, and oriental cities such as Fez in Morocco, with the busy medina sprawling beside the walls of the sultan’s kasbah, are intermediary 201

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stages. The European court city of modern times is a child of the baroque period, when territorial states provided security over wide areas, and new military techniques rendered the ancient walls useless. New fortifications were built further out. The castle then became a sprawling complex of buildings at the terminal of broad avenues, as in Versailles or, on a smaller scale, but in classical purity in Karlsruhe, the residence of the margraves of Baden. The city of Westminster was a court city beside the commercial city of London, and Berlin represented a fusion of the same kind. In the last analysis, court cities are administrative centers, populated by civil servants and military personnel, with a number of merchants and craftsmen serving the immediate needs of the court’s entourage without much consideration of wider markets. Court cities are consumption-oriented cities pure and simple. The administrative city, which is not a central court city is found in the old world as well as in the new. Brussels, Prague, and Budapest were such secondary court cities in the former Habsburg domain. American examples are Mexico City, Lima in Peru, Williamsburg in Virginia, and Ottawa in Canada. Quasi-court cities, or republican administrative centers, are The Hague, Washington, Albany. Further examples of consumption-oriented cities are those cities that are religious and educational centers. As we have attempted to show in the preceding chapter, most, if not all, cities of the ancient Near East as well as of Greek and Roman antiquity were religious cities. The very act of founding a city was religious in nature because on that occasion a new covenant was concluded over a new altar and a more inclusive loyalty was initiated. But the fact that Corinth or Athens or Rome were religious cities in origin does not imply that their function was essentially religious. Corinth and Athens were trading centers, as were almost all the cities of Greece, and Rome was a large administrative center, perhaps the greatest in recorded history. If there ever was a purely consumption-oriented city, it was imperial Rome, with its host of officials, jobseekers, scribes, politicians, agents, speculators, and servants, and its idle relief clients. By that time, the temples of the ancient gods had become showplaces. Biblical Jerusalem was a fortress city and an administrative center, but its function as a ceremonial center and a goal of pilgrimage on the occasion of Passover and the harvest festivals overshadowed all other functions. With the erection of the church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem even became a threefold religious city. In our days, its function bifurcated: the old city under Jordanian rule remained a cult center while the new city became the administrative and educational center of the state of Israel. There are numerous other cities that are functionally religious, ancient and modern. The fabulous Singhalese jungle cities come to mind, with their temples, sanctuaries, shrines, and monasteries, and the equally fabulous Mayan cities in Yucatan. Benares in India is a functionally religious city, the goal of untold hosts of Hindu pilgrims. Islam has created a number of holy cities, 202

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Mecca and Medina in Arabia, Kerbela in Iraq, Kairouan in Tunisia. Until 1870, the Rome of the popes was a religious city in a twofold sense, as the center of the papal state and as the focal point of Catholic Christendom. It has retained its second function until this day, but it is now in addition the administrative center of Italy. The Catholic world has a number of minor religious cities, either seats of bishops, such as Toledo or Salzburg, or pilgrimage cities, like Czestechowa in Poland and Altoetting in Bavaria. In Protestant countries, however, purely religious cities are less frequent because the Protestant principle of innerworldly ascesis, as Max Weber called it, cast life in its totality in a monkish mold and minimized religious specialization. Nevertheless, ecclesiastically accentuated cities are found where Protestant churches were hierarchically organized—witness Canterbury in England and Uppsala in Sweden. In newer centuries, the place of the religious center is taken by the educational center, that is, the university city. In the Middle Ages, to be sure, Bologna and Paris might have been called educational centers, but Bologna was a very political city irrespective of its educational institutions, and Paris always has been all things to all men, not merely as a university city but as the universal city of the Western world. In other words, the medieval university is part of a larger whole, but the modern university is more nearly sufficient unto itself, especially where it forms the nucleus of a university city. In England, the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are pedagogical monasteries for laymen as well as ecclesiastics, religiously sanctioned but educationally oriented; the scholastic stamp is indelible on the cities in which they are located. American university cities, such as Cambridge in Massachusetts, Princeton in New Jersey and New Haven in Connecticut are cast in the same mold, but have developed further along the path of secularization. If the consumption-oriented city does not exact tribute or impose onerous taxes in exchange for protection, it may export credit rather than merchandise, which means to say that it accepts deposits, grants loans, and fulfills the functions of an investment banker. In this case, the city is a financial and banking center, comparable to a market town or a wholesale center, where services are offered or exchanged, rather than merchandise. But the financial function is not an independent entity; it grows out of the protective function. Rome conquered city after city in Italy and in the wider Mediterranean region, and its citizens, having acquired substance in the process, invested their wealth in the new territories. At times, the transition from loot capitalism to subtler forms of exploitation is not even made, as in the case of the Sicilian pro-consul who, in Cicero’s phrase, was sent to the rich province as a poor man and left the poor province as a rich man. In newer centuries, the city of London outgrew Venice, Lisbon, Antwerp, and Amsterdam as a financial center pari passu with the ascendency of the British navy. Merchants enjoyed all the more credit because financiers knew that the Union Jack could be unfurled in case a debtor defaulted on his 203

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obligation. Another example is provided by modern Germany, where Frankfurt was surpassed as a financial center by Berlin after the latter had become the capital of the unified German Reich. With all this in mind, it may be stated, however, that a financial center tends to become more production—than consumption-oriented as time goes on. The credit nexus may then have grown so elaborate that it operates without visible props of power. The borderline between consumption-oriented and production-oriented cities is indeed blurred. From the vantage point of economic theory, services of various kinds are as productive as the harvesting of grain or the manufacture of food products, metal goods, crockery, and garments. This holds true whether they are measurable in monetary terms, as in the case of financial or carrier services, or whether they are accounted for merely as costs while their returns remain intangible, as in the case of administrative, educational, cultural, religious, and similar services. Historically speaking, the commercial city, or the city as a distributing center, antedates the manufacturing or industrial city. The production of goods other than raw materials of agriculture and mining was not always located in cities. Tribal and folk cultures are likely to produce almost all the goods they need in their villages, and such infrequent exchange as occurs contributes merely to the growth of trading centers, but the production-oriented city is a later development. In western Europe, whatever there was of it in antiquity did not survive the fall of the Roman Empire. In the dawn of the Middle Ages, when roads fell into disrepair and maritime trade routes were made insecure by Saracens and Norsemen, the manor house and the serfs who were attached to it produced almost all their needs within the manorial economy. But as communications became safer and markets widened, production for exchange increased. Since the city was the place where special privileges were offered to producers of goods because they were prospective sources of revenue and where footloose labor was at the disposal of enterprising merchants, it was in the city that production processes became increasingly concentrated. By the 11th century, the cities of Flanders and the Rhine valley began to manufacture woolen goods and metal wares for export while Italian cities, such as Florence, Milan, and Venice, in addition to the production of a variety of luxury items, imported merchandise of Byzantine and Arab provinces and transshipped it to the merchants of northern Europe. Some cities specialized in one produce and some in another. Their commercial relations interlocked. In the age of overseas discoveries, the markets for city-produced goods expanded still further, so much so that the medieval craft organization became increasingly unable to cope with the pace of expansion. Moreover, as the power of the centralized state grew simultaneously with the opening up of overseas markets, so-called manufacturing activities began to be located outside the protective walls of the cities. Many budding industries, for instance flour and lumber milling, woolen, iron and earthenware manufacture and the like, were 204

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placed in the countryside, out of the reach of urban guilds and their burdensome restrictive covenants. Last but not least, the prevailing use of waterpower in early manufacturing pointed to streams and rivers as suitable production sites. It all seemed like a set-back for the city as a center of production at the same time it grew as a consumption-oriented court city. However, by the middle of the 18th century, the increasing displacement of wood by coal as energy fuel and the invention of the steam engine tipped the scales in favor of centralized city locations, especially for the textile and metal industries. The city of the industrial revolution was a new type of city, perhaps the first entirely production-oriented city in all history. At that time, the cities of the English Midlands arose, places like Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffields, Leeds, to be followed in the 19th century by similar urban developments in Germany, especially in the Ruhr valley, and in Saxony, in Belgium, in France, and in the United States. Most of these new cities had been insignificant country towns, even sleepy villages, previously. Now they grew rapidly into huge agglomerations of toiling humanity, producing from early dawn until late at night, with little opportunity given their inhabitants for leisure and little time left for consumption. Periodically recurring depressions threw even this minimum of subsistence into jeopardy. It is open to doubt whether these sprawling urban agglomerations were cities in the sense in which we have developed the concept in the preceding chapter. Where the balance of production and consumption is lost, the freedom of the city is lost also, and the privileges as well as the responsibilities of citizenship are abandoned. The restoration of civic consciousness in the cities of the industrial era was a painful process, slowly starting in the 19th century and still far from being completed in the 20th. Religious conscience, humanitarian impulse, state intervention, the threat of revolution and the growing strength of the labor movement, all contributed toward the redistribution of purchasing power and the re-establishment of cities as functioning units in society. However, in recent decades, the use of electricity in industry and of motor vehicles in traffic has created new problems by leaving the core of the city exposed to neglect while tending to citify the countryside and dispersing the problems of cities over wide areas. Beyond the bursting confines of cities as we have known them, we are now observing the growth of the supercity, an immense megalopolis. An analysis of the social processes that are encompassed by this development is beyond the limits of this work. A final word must be said about non-Western cities. The very same processes that we have traced in Western cities, namely those by which the preindustrial city has been transformed into the manufacturing city, are repeating themselves in our day in the underdeveloped areas of the world. In these areas also, the consumption-oriented city has been turned into a productionoriented city and the production-oriented city into the all-encompassing urban 205

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agglomeration of the welfare state society. Johannesburg, Leopoldville, Lagos in Africa, Cairo, Baghdad, Teheran in the Middle East, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, Jakarta in South East Asia, Shanghai, Hong-Kong, Tokyo in the Far East, and many others, are filled to the brim with the problems that beset English cities at the time of the Chartist movement and American cities at the time of the Pullman strike. With this analogy in mind, the historical typology of cities may have a contribution to make toward the understanding of the contemporary scene. Social Stratification in Cities Archaeological and legendary evidence shows that the division of society into masters and slaves goes back beyond recorded history, but the division of labor and hence social stratification in a more fully developed sense are primarily urban phenomena. When families and clans abandoned isolation and united at the altar of the new god of the city, they founded a brotherhood encompassed by the city walls, but they did not remain among themselves for long. Customarily, priest-kings and nobles employed house servants and slaves to do menial work and to practice the despised crafts. They exploited the peasantry beyond the city gates and subjected neighboring tribes. But they also sought growth by peaceful association, encouraged merchants and skilled artisans to settle in their midst, and granted refuge to strangers from other cities. In this way, the urban settlement soon included, besides the “old families,” the blood brothers of the gods, a motley population of newcomers who were in the city as of tolerance, not as of right. This was the kind of stratification that evolved in many places around the Mediterranean Sea, the core area of Western civilization. The new forms of living together did not evolve uniformly. Where Dorians held sway, as in Sparta, native populations were reduced to abject servitude and no common civilization arose to unite rulers and ruled. In the trading around the Aegean Sea, however, foreigners or metics, grew numerous in the course of time and formed a middle class interposed between the “old citizens” and the slaves. In Athens, the citizens were landowners and officeholders, but some became impoverished and depended on fees for public services, such as sitting on juries, or else were on relief. The metics, being excluded from citizenship, could neither own land and aspire to office, including the priesthood, nor could they expect relief in times of economic distress. Consequently, they devoted themselves to commercial pursuits and the skilled crafts. By the 5th century B.C., they had crowded the citizens out of the majority of lucrative occupations. The slaves, often captives of war, were laborers, servants, and policemen. Considering the threefold pattern of functions in Athenian society, it becomes comprehensible why the ancient philosophers feared commercial activities and the ensuing social mobility as a ferment of decomposition. The older aristocratic structure of communal life was indeed undermined 206

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by contact with the strange mores diffused by the metics. Conversely, social mobility must be understood as the root cause of social stratification in cities. The story of Rome is even more significant in this respect. Early Roman history had to overcome the cleavage between the Patrician families, who were descended from warrior clans and whose rule enjoyed religious sanction, and the Plebeians, a mixed multitude. Among the Plebeians were small farmers, humble laborers, poor craftsmen, petty traders, and an assortment of clients who had lost their protectors, the Patrician patrons. Also included were foreign residents and merchants of substantial background. The Etruscan kings tried to incorporate these heterogeneous people into the city-state by admitting them into military units organized according to differentiation in wealth. This plan was frustrated when the Etruscan rule was overthrown by the Patricians, but the weight of manpower and industry continued to work on the side of the Plebeians. The dramatic struggle lasted almost two centuries. At times, the Patricians, holding the strings of power, were able to take advantage of the cleavage of interests between the poor Plebeians who pressed primarily for relief of debts and for land reform, and the wealthy among them who strove for admission to the highest, or equestrian, rank in the military order, for investiture with political office, and for the intermarriage of their children with the offspring of the old families. However, the well-to-do Plebeians had to avail themselves of the pressure of the masses to achieve their purposes. In the end, the “plebiscite,” originally a Plebeian institution, became binding on Patricians and Plebeians alike. In the long run, the Plebeians, outnumbering by far their former adversaries, absorbed the Patricians and constituted themselves as the Roman people. Thus arose the first mass society in history, if by mass society we mean an aggregate of isolated individuals held together by extraneous forces. Such forces may be administrative impositions, replacing cultural distinctions, and a multitude of passing fads and fashions. In Rome, an ancient sore was healed when the Patrician families were absorbed into the Plebeian society. An introduction to the story of urban stratification was thus concluded, but a new chapter was opening at the same time. The landowning groups, originating from a fusion of Patrician and well-to-do Plebeian families, formed an upper class of wealth on top of the new mass society, replacing the former aristocracy of birth. Men of achieved status first associated with men of ascribed status and finally succeeded them in positions of prestige and power in the community, especially in the Senate. In other words, Roman history shows up the division of the body politic into the rich and the poor and the establishment of economic potency at the helm of society as a result of the intermixture of strains and the concomitant social mobility, which are the hallmark of cities. It should be understood that class struggle in the Greco-Roman world did not revolve around the antagonism between capital and labor. Due to 207

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the institution of slavery, the ancient city, not knowing free labor, showed a twofold stratification: the differentiation between free men and slaves on the one hand, and the differentiation between creditors and debtors within the ranks of the freemen on the other. The creditors were either city-based aristocrats or homines novi who had acquired citizenship. The debtors were poor landowners who needed consumption credit before the harvest was in and whose progeny, unable to struggle free of their obligations, could not equip themselves any longer for armed services or otherwise assert their rights as citizens. The social legislation of antiquity, therefore, was chiefly political in nature. It strove to ease the debt burden and to reinvest impoverished citizens with the rights and privileges of citizenship. In later times, in the Greek city-states as well as in Rome, the creditordebtor antagonism was largely replaced by the antagonism between producers and consumers, with the interests of the consumers in the cities prevailing over the interests of producers in the provinces. The urban masses, unable as well as unwilling to compete with slaves on the labor market, became state pensioners of a sort. They were interested in the prevention of grain exports and the facilitation of grain imports. Huge tributes of grain from the provinces were needed to maintain social peace in the metropolis until finally the social structure of the ancient cities broke down under the dead weight of a functionless citizenry. Unlike the city of antiquity, the European city of the middle ages had no substratum of slaves. It was distinguished by the growth of individual enterprise and the employment of free labor. To be sure, the creditor-debtor antagonism persisted and bread riots were as frequent as strikes of workers are in our own days, but the medieval city was not primarily a consumption-oriented city. In Rome the organization of the citizenry had been politically determined and whatever occupational lineup existed served predominantly military purposes. In contradistinction, civic life in the High Middle Ages was dominated by productive interests that gained elbowroom in opposition to feudal overlords, secular or ecclesiastic, and groped for expression through the guild system. Moreover, once the occupational associations, the guilds, had succeeded in organizing the city and attaining autonomy or even independence from the powers-that-be in the territory, a process of differentiation among the guilds set in which created a new system of stratification. This system, subsequently developed and modified, has become the structural model of modern societies in Western civilization. The cities of northern Italy were the battlefields. Perhaps we have to recognize the phenomenon of a leading city or prototype of cities in every period of history. Such a city may have been Ur of the Chaldees in ancient Mesopotamia, Athens in Greece, Rome and Alexandria in late antiquity, or Paris in recent centuries. In our time, the title belongs to New York. In the early Middle Ages, Constantinople was supreme in the East, but in the West Venice, “the oldest 208

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child of liberty,” to use the felicitous Wordsworthian phrase, was the queen of cities, perhaps the only city. Yet the further development of cities in Europe will best be understood in contrast, not in sequence, to Venice. In Venice, an aristocracy of arms-bearing and seafaring families formed a powerful import and export corporation, as it were, which ruthlessly monopolized the channels of trade from the Byzantine East to northern Europe and kept all the other strata of the population under strict political and economic control. In other cities, the noble families feuded with each other in such a way that the only solution seemed to be the appointment of a foreign city manager, or podesta. But a city manager system of this type could not eliminate the clash of interests between the nobles whose position was founded on armed strength and the new productive forces that had grown in the city, whose very economic potency, combined with superiority in numbers, could not fail to gain the upper hand in the long run. In Italian cities such as Milan, Verona, Bologna, Florence, Siena, and others, a combination of economic corporations, or guilds, significantly known as popolo (people), established themselves as an organized revolutionary force in the course of the 13th century. Not unlike the Plebeians in ancient Rome in this respect, the popolo had its own officers, besides the signorial municipality. From that position of strength they gained access to municipal offices, so that the popolari, or commoners, came to participate in the government of the city, while the nobili remained excluded from participation in the management of the corporations. From there to the identification of people and city was only one step. The story of differentiation along purely economic lines starts at this point. The victorious populist party was organized in guilds, but one must not imagine that these associations were composed exclusively of small master craftsmen. In Florence, for instance, the senior guilds, comprising medical doctors, jurists, bankers, jewelers, dealers in imported and domestic woolen and silk fabrics, and dealers in furs and groceries were opposed by the lower guilds of the butchers, bakers, tailors, cobblers, carpenters, stonemasons, blacksmiths, sword makers, metal workers, and the like. The former were called popolo grasso (fatheads), the latter popolo minuto (small fry). The former were a nascent bourgeoisie, or entrepreneurial class, the latter, along with discontented and propertyless apprentices, were the fountainhead of the steadily growing urban working class. The nobles associated themselves at times with the popolo grasso, but on other occasions they had no hesitation in inciting the manual guilds against the entrepreneurial elite, and time and again they rode into despotic power with the frantic support of the poor. The lower guilds got into the saddle only rarely and for brief periods of time. What happened in Italy was repeated north of the Alps in a somewhat altered way. The chief difference was that the nobles in the Germanic countries never participated in urban development. However, the story was not 209

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everywhere the same. In the towns of the Hansa League the merchant guilds remained paramount without serious challenge; in the Flemish towns and in those of upper Germany, the manual guilds occasionally revolted successfully. On the whole, however, the merchant class was advancing steadily everywhere in Europe. The social problem of the Middle Ages was one of unemployed journeymen and apprentices who became restless and turned into a mob on a number of occasions, for instance during the Crusades. To this problem was added the one of impoverished master craftsmen. As capital requirements heightened, the little people found themselves less and less in a position to secure the credit that they needed to purchase their raw materials. As markets widened, they found themselves even less in a position to finance transportation to, and sales in, distant centers of consumption. In the course of time, an increasing number of masters, while still working in their own workshops, became utterly dependent on merchants who did all their purchasing and selling for them while the journeymen were left without a chance to become masters. This stage of development, known as the putting-out system, marks the transition to the latter era of the industrial revolution. This era of an epochal socioeconomic transformation, which coincides with the emergence of the modern nation-state, extended in England from the 16th to the 19th centuries, but in other countries, notably in France, Germany, and the United States, the entire process was compressed into a few decades of the 19th century. In England, a new entrepreneurial class arose, characterized not only by a knowledge of markets, but also by technical proficiency and the ability to organize large masses of laborers working under one roof. At the same time, the industrial working classes were incessantly swollen in numbers by closed-out peasants and manorial serfs reduced to vagrancy, the so-called sturdy poor of the Elizabethan Poor Laws. These huddled masses of unskilled laborers formed the most miserable of the three social classes described by the economist David Ricardo. As they did neither dispose of land rent nor of interest from capital, they were compelled to rely on the meager compensation they received for the labor of their hands. Later on, social legislation and the hard-won strength of their own unions enabled the working classes to gain participation in the increasing productivity of industry, but this redeeming process belongs to a chapter beyond the scope of this work. Social stratification in cities is due not only to the presence of merchants and to the elaborate division of labor that commercial activity brings in its wake but also to the presence of strangers. In cities, particularly in port cities, traders from afar settle in the community, so that “merchant” and “stranger” become almost interchangeable designations. In George Simmel’s words, the stranger is not so much a man who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather a man who comes today and stays tomorrow. He becomes a stimulating agent of city growth. 210

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Merchants and colonizers have founded or enlarged many cities on foreign soil, as, for instance, Phoenicians and Greeks in the Mediterranean area, and Germans in northern and eastern Europe. But Oriental and Islamic cities are cities of strangers in an even more far-reaching sense. As they failed to unite kinship groups and quasi-tribal subsocieties into a citywide allegiance and to develop occupational associations that could cut across clannish and ethnic barriers, they may be described as composed of “strangers” all the way through the social spectrum. In these cities, social stratification became identified with ethnic stratification. The cities of the Orient did not generate guilds of footloose men but enterprising men who were detached from their previous kinship or village associations and who, by their very detachment, were driven to combine with others in a like position on a predominantly economic basis. To be sure, guilds did exist in Asiatic cities, but they were clan guilds, as it were, meaning that they served to monopolize the exercise of skills and the utilization of market chances for the benefit of ethnically restricted membership groups. They must be considered as indicative of the continuation of a pre-urban social structure in an urban habitat. In China, guilds were virtually village clans spilled over into cities. In India, they developed into religiously sanctioned occupational castes that kept scrupulously apart from each other and whose members made a virtue out of doing the caste’s work properly, and nothing else. Contradictory forces operated in the Islamic world. On the one hand, the brotherhood of Islam united all the faithful, but on the other hand, the ever-recurrent intrusion of desert tribes into cities served as a check to social mobility. The urbanized tribesmen shrank from engaging in pronouncedly urbanite occupations, especially in commercial pursuits. This aloofness was facilitated by the presence in many cities taken over by Arabs and Turks of highly urbanized pre-Islamic communities. Greeks, Armenians, Nestorians, Copts, Jews, even Islamic sectarians such as the Mozabites of Algeria, were organized into millets, that is ethno-religious communities, under their own ecclesiastical leaders. They were permitted, even compelled, to fulfill vital occupational functions in their respective cities, be it as scribes or bankers, tanners or scavengers. Taken together, these groups filled the total expanse of the middle classes. Yet each of them adhered to a particular occupational pattern, which was to be broken up by the advancing industrial revolution only in our days. In the European city of the Middle Ages, the position of the ethno-religious stranger was occupied primarily by the Jews. In the early Middle Ages, Greek and Syrian traders had lived alongside the Jews in such gateway cities as Marseilles, but the Christian strangers soon became absorbed into the economically determined pattern of European urban life. The Jews, remaining religiously distinct, remained socially distinct also. They were the intermediaries in many fields, the silk weavers, garment makers, and metal workers of Sicily and 211

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Greece, the merchants, bankers, medical doctors, scientists, and artisans of Castile and Aragon. In central Europe they occupied the positions of moneylenders and pawnbrokers, positions that were not desired by good Christians. In eastern Europe they were innkeepers, estate agents, handlers of agricultural produce, and dealers in secondhand goods. Their function in promoting a money economy in feudal societies made them early protagonists of urbanism as a way of life without being “citizens” in the proper sense of the word. However, as the process of urbanization gathered momentum, other groups of merchant strangers made their appearance in European cities. The Hanseatic traders and the Lombard money changers of medieval London may serve as an example. In the end, trading groups of this sort were either absorbed into the larger society or expelled from city and country as soon as a national middle class arose. The cities of Asia and Africa are now entering a similar phase of development, marking the emergence of unified national societies. The story of social stratification in cities would not be complete if we failed to mention that time and again cities were places of refuge for alien scholars as well as focal points of trade. The cosmopolitan nature of cities has always attracted men of learning who could not bring themselves to be bitter-end partisans of social class and ethnic group and who declined to heed the bidding of despotic rulers beyond the point where intellectual sacrifice was the price of survival. On the other hand, commercial and industrial exploits that were domiciled in cities depended for their growth upon the continuance of scientific progress and innovation. The city needed the scholar as much as the scholar needed the city. It remains to be added that the quality of “stranger” encompasses the bulk of the population in modern cities. The requirements of large-scale industry and the increasing ease of communication and transportation in late centuries have accelerated the drift to cities to the point where, as in North America, the majority of the urban working class is composed of recent migrants and their families. This poses a problem that must be stated clearly. Where a working class is ethnically, perhaps even racially, different from the middle and upper classes in the same society or locality, the mutual reinforcement of social and ethnic antagonisms may strain the social fabric to the breaking point. The remedy is more urbanization, an accelerated mobility, which fuses the disparate parts into a larger whole. The Location and Ecology of Cities By the location of cities we mean the place where they are found on a map; by their ecology we mean the social life that unfolds itself in the urban habitat and because of the urban habitat. There are innumerable places where cities have been built and many forms of social life are encountered in them, but we can present here only the major types, keeping in mind that reality has a way of mixing and combining them a thousandfold. 212

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We may start with fortress cities because they are a very old type of urban habitat. Sites for fortress cities were chosen with a view to defense rather than for reasons of an economic nature. They were mostly located on hilltops or rocky heights, across deep valleys or gorges, on islands and narrow peninsulas, or on bends of a winding river. The hilltop towns of Italy and Greece, of Spain and Morocco, and of many parts of the Middle East are conspicuous in this group. Among the cities of antiquity, numerous examples of hilltop towns come to mind. Boghaz-Koy of the Hittites was built on a sheer escarpment that could be reached only across deep and narrow gorges. Jerusalem of the Jebusites, bounded on three sides by steep slopes, yielded to the Israelites only at the time of King David and was considered impregnable for a long time afterwards. Almost every Greek city had its acropolis or high town, and many like Mykenae and Acragas (Latin, Agrigentum), now Girgenti, in Sicily, were entirely built on elevated ground. Others, like Athens, Thebes, and Corinth, extended into plains and down to the seashore, but remained centered around a fortified hill. Even Rome with its seven hills partakes of the same character. In medieval Spain, the need for a defensive location of cities around high-lying castles is indicated by the very name of the provinces of Old and New Castile. For instance, the old town of Avila was built on a rocky overhang while the site of Burgos was determined by a crag on the north bank of the Arlanzon river where a huge castle, overshadowing the rest of the town, served as a refuge against the onslaughts of the Moors. Toledo is surrounded by deep gorges and the same is true in Moslem lands of Constantine in Algeria. Farther north, in Germany, Rothenburg above the Tauber, now a museum piece, is located on a hillside overlooking the valley beneath. But what shall we say about some of the cities on the western rim of South America, such as Bogota in Columbia and La Paz in Bolivia, which are situated on broad plains but high above and miles, even days, away from the river bottoms and the steaming tropical lowlands? How shall they be classified? They should not be confused with cities in low altitudes. Theirs is a mountaintop location beyond the wildest dreams of town-builders from other climes. It is rare, however, that fortified cities develop into large urban centers unless their location is also one of economic significance. Few of the places that are nothing but fortress cities qualify, but there are those that extend from a protecting hill down to a navigable river or harbor by the seashore. These offer a refuge in perilous times and yet are accessible to merchants and other migrants. Athens and Rome belong to this category. Likewise, commercially accessible and at the same time easily defensible, at least until recent times, were cities located on islands or on narrow peninsulas. Venice on its “thousand isles” comes to mind, and Tyre of the Phoenicians. Other insular or peninsular cities are Stockholm in Sweden and some of the urban settlements of Africa, such as ancient Carthage, Lagos, and Mombasa. 213

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In the new world, Tenochtitlan, on the site where Mexico City now stands, was originally surrounded by a lake. Again, locations on bends of swif flowing rivers, such as the one of Berne in Switzerland, are of a more defensive than commercial significance. On the other hand, where cities were located on poorly defensible sites, especially on level plains, they were frequently endowed with an insular character by human effort. In these instances, nearby rivers and waterways were channeled into moats surrounding the city walls, as in numbers of cities in the Po valley, in northern Italy, and in the Netherlands. Most cities are located on “transportation breaks,” in accordance with the theory developed by the American sociologist Charles H. Cooley. Transportation breaks are locations where one means of transportation is being exchanged for another as, for instance, land travel on the backs of animals or wheeled vehicles being replaced by ships and rafts on navigable rivers, or river transportation being exchanged for oceangoing vessels. Even fords or bridges across rivers or the meeting of two roads may constitute a break; in the 19th century, railroads were added to all these. The point is that wherever such a break occurred, there were loading and unloading facilities, warehouses, taverns, hostelries, and the offices of commercial agents; these places offered the opportunity to exact tolls and fees. In other words, it was on sites that were communication hubs rather than at locations that owed their importance to their easy defensibility that huge agglomerations of population even metropolitan cities, came into existence. Every maritime city lies on a transportation break and for this reason attracts people from near and afar. Accordingly, maritime cities have been among the world’s most teeming cities, even before the coming of the steamship. We must call to mind Knossos of the Minoans, the leading Greek and Greek-colonial cities of Corinth, Miletus, and Syracuse, and the Greek originated Mediterranean emporia of Massilia (now Marseilles), Byzantium, (later Constantinople, Turkish Istanbul), and Alexandria. Athens, through Piraeus, and Rome, through Ostia, were maritime cities, along with their other functions. Naples, Genoa, and Venice in Italy, Amsterdam and Copenhagen in northern Europe, Bombay in India, Tokyo with Yokohama in Japan, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and New York and Boston in colonial North America belong to the same type. The list will be vastly extended, moreover, if we include port cities that are situated at a river estuary, at a point up to which oceangoing vessels are able to penetrate inland. At such locations, a double transportation break occurs, the one from oceangoing vessels to riverboat or barge, and the one from both kinds of vessels to transportation by land. Examples are Antwerp, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Stettin (Polish, Szcecin), Le Havre, London, Calcutta, Shanghai, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Montreal, and many others. Other cities, among them some of metropolitan character, are situated at or near the confluence of two rivers or at the crossing points of rivers and 214

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important commercial roads. For instance, Vienna is located where the Danube turns southeast toward the Hungarian plain and where the broad river is crossed by the road which comes down through the Moravian gap and proceeds further toward the shores of the Mediterranean. Paris lies near the confluence of the Marne and Seine rivers and always has been a hub of roads leading from Flanders and the Rhine valley to southern and western France and beyond. Frankfurt am Main lies at the point where the road from Hamburg to Switzerland crosses the Main river, near the confluence of the Main and the Rhine. Likewise, in early 19th-century America, Cincinnati marks the place where eastern wares were loaded on riverboats and transshipped to New Orleans while St. Louis grew to prominence not only as a river port, but also as the eastern terminal point of western trails. St. Louis presents a particular case because the peopling of the plains, in eliminating the “Great American Desert,” has changed the role of the city in later decades. But we know of cities that have been terminals of mountain or desert-traversing roads for centuries, like Milan, Augsburg, Damascus, and Samarcand. A most intriguing example is offered by Peking, or Peiping. The Chinese capital city is situated in a vast plain near the edge of the Chinese culture area, looking out toward the steppes of Northern Asia. From this vantage point, both the marauding Mongols and China proper could be kept under surveillance. The location of such a city as Peiping should be considered as marking not so much a break in transportation but a cultural divide. Still other cities whose location ought to be noted are situated either on roads or on waterways connecting two or more river valleys. For instance, Nuremberg lies on the intersection of roads leading from the Danube valley to the Rhine-Main river system on the other. An example of interlocking water communication is Berlin. In addition to other advantages of its location, Berlin lies at the focal point of a system of secondary waterways—rivers, lakes, canals—which connect the Elbe and Oder valleys. This presaged already in the 17th century the future role of the Prussian capital as the foremost metropolitan center in the North German and Polish plains. Berlin’s role was highlighted in the 19th century when it also became the hub of a railroad system. This is not the only case where railroads merely accentuated existing advantages, especially the availability of cheap water transportation. In North America, the case of Chicago is outstanding. The rule holds true with particular force for cities located near basic raw materials, especially coal; in these instances, an economically reasonable chance must be offered for the shipping of iron ore and other complementary materials to a central location. Only waterways provide that chance. The ecology of cities has much to do with the principle of the division of labor upon which cities are built. Priests, soldiers, merchants, craftsmen, unskilled laborers usually live in separate quarters; specific functions such as defense or commerce are allocated to different parts of a town. The 215

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coordination of functions may be taken for granted, but their spatial arrangement tells us something about the character of a city. Still more important is the classification of cities in terms of focal institutions that seem to hold the entire settlement together. In cities of ancient Mesopotamia, the temple was the focal institution. In a reconstruction of the vanished city of Babylon, the great temple of Bel is placed in the center of a huge rectangle, marking the total expanse of the city’s area, at some distance form the Euphrates river. The temple was a place of worship and study, a place where pageantry was unfolded and power displayed, but the temple was also the place where records were kept, treasures and merchandise stored, and business operations transacted. Furthermore, it was a fortified compound and a place of last refuge. The entire existence of a city depended on the temple. Perhaps the best known example is the city of Jerusalem. The temple of Solomon, as well as the temple built after the return of the Jews from Babylon, served all the functions that we have enumerated. When Herod built his palace at the opposite edge of the town, a bifocalization was introduced that indicated a split between temporal and ecclesiastical power, but the temple retained its paramountcy until the day when a Roman soldier set the torch to it because it served as the focus of last resistance. Still the temple area, later the Haram-es-Shemi (noble sanctuary), remained the focal area of the city under both Christian and Moslem rule. The cities of classical antiquity, in Greece proper, in Asia Minor, in Sicily, and on the Italian mainland, were of necessity temple-centered, but as civic activities expanded, temple and market-place, once almost identical, began to grow apart. However, the marketplace should be envisioned as the place of assembly rather than as a place of business. In numerous Greek cities the matter was one of topography. In Athens and in Corinth as well as in other places, the acropolis with its fortified sanctuaries occupied a rocky hillside, while the agora, or marketplace, was at the foot of the hill in a more accessible location. Theaters or places of amusement were nearby, craftsmen’s quarters and stores in various streets stretched from the center toward the outskirts, and cemeteries were near the city walls. The harbor area—Lechaeum in Corinth, Piraeus in Athens—was even further removed, a center of commercial activity barely in contact with the ancient gods. In Rome, the forum romanum, with its many religious, judicial, and civic buildings, was the center of urban life, and the market halls were located adjacent to, but outside this area. In a typical provincial town of Italy, like Pompeii, the public square seems to have been the focal area with town hall, law courts, and temple bordering on it. Business was enacted in nearby streets, but a specifically marked off fortified area comparable to the Greek acropolis was lacking. Originally, the area around the forum may have been a fortified area, but in the period shortly before the destruction of the city through an 216

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outbreak of Mount Vesuvius numerous villas for the wealthy were erected outside the old city walls. This points toward a general rule in urban ecology. The upper classes tend to reside near the core of the city in times of insecurity but on the rim of the city in times of prosperity and peace. In the towns of the European Middle Ages, the differentiation between acropolis and astu, as we know it from antiquity, reappears as burgus and portus, but accents are set differently. The burgus (German burg, French bourg, English borough) was a fortified place, preferably on a hill, and it almost always contained a church or chapel alongside a castle. This was especially the case where the place was in ecclesiastical hands. Most of the inhabitants of the burgus belonged to the feudal estate as servants, soldiers, craftsmen, and the like, or they came in from the surrounding countryside to render temporary services. But as merchants began to settle in these localities, they established themselves outside the narrow space within the original enclosure, in a forisburgus or suburbium (French, faubourg-English, suburb), surrounded it with walls, and adjoined it to the feudal or episcopal core area of the town. This commercial town was known as portus in England and in Flanders. Whatever the name, this was the area that grew into a city, leaving the castle “high and dry” in a backwater of history. There arose in the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries the magnificent cathedrals of the Middle Ages, with their elaborate Gothic spires rising to the skies, a new focal institution. The cathedrals were not, as the temples of antiquity, the strongholds of a ruling priesthood associated with noble families. They were monuments of civic pride, testimonies of the economic strength of their sponsors. However, in many localities, the ecclesiastical and the commercial parts of the town remained closely associated, as in Ratisbon (French Ratisbonne, German Regensburg) or Mainz (French Mayence). In Rome the ecclesiastical city rose on the left bank of the Tiber river, leaving the right bank not so much to the merchants as to the feudal barons. This is today the site of the separate papal territory of Vatican City. In Paris, the ecclesiastical town of the left bank of the Seine (river gauche) merged gradually into the academic quarter that had arisen alongside the churches and monasteries; the designation Latin Quarter embraces both meanings. But, again, the cathedral of Notre Dame guards the commercial city on the right bank. In the Oriental and Islamic cities, the ecology of the urban settlement bears an ethnic character in accordance with the principles elaborated in earlier chapters. The cities of the burghers of medieval Europe were occupationally divided into the lanes of the cobblers and carpenters, blacksmiths and goldsmiths, clothmakers and butchers. Ethnically determined quarters inhabited by Jewish traders or Hanseatic merchants were the exception, not the rule. In the later Middle Ages, when the Jews were relegated to pawnbroking and related activities in a number of central European territories, the ethnic character of their settlement became indeed identical with its occupational quality. 217

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In Asian and African cities, the lanes of the various craftsmen and traders outwardly resembled those found in European towns in the Middle Ages, but the sections of the city were characterized by the castle, clan, or ethno-religious group by which they were settled. There may have been a lane of cobblers inhabited by one ethnic group, caste, or clan, and a lane of tailors inhabited by another, or else, there may have been lanes of cobblers and tailors in one section of a city and other lanes harboring the same occupations in another section. Whichever system prevailed, the ethnic division remained paramount, though never absolute. Thus, in Peking or Pieping, the imperial city, with its core known as the “Forbidden City,” lies in the center surrounded by the so-called Tartar city. The so-called Chinese city occupies the entire southern part of the urban area. In the Tartar city were the government offices; in the Chinese city could be found the silk, jade, silver, and other business establishments as well as diversified trades and crafts. The imperial palace was the focal institution of the whole city. In Jerusalem, the Haram-es-Shemi, a sacred precinct, formed a distinct section, which dominated the entire city; it was surrounded by Moslem, Christian, Jewish, and Armenian quarters. In newer centuries the European occupants adapted themselves to the prevailing patterns, erecting new cities outside the old urban area. New Delhi was built at a distance from Old Delhi, and westernized residential sections inhabited by Europeans as well as Europeanized Moslems, arose beside the old Moslem quarters in numerous cities and towns of North Africa. It remains significant, however, that the cities of Asia and Africa have no town hall, or town-square, and that commercial life preferably locates in narrow bazaar streets. No civic center rises beside the political and ecclesiastical foci of castle and mosque, or temple. In order to appreciate what is meant, one may compare the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, or Siena’s famous circle, with the narrow lanes of old Cairo. To state that the cathedrals of the Middle Ages in Europe were monuments of civic pride is equivalent to saying that their character as focal institutions was shared with other civic institutions, especially the town hall and the guild hall. All these buildings were erected in close proximity to each other. Town hall, guild hall, and related buildings fronted on a town square or marketplace that may have served commercial purposes, but whose chief function was to be a place of assembly, not dissimilar to the forum of the Romans. The Roemerberg in Frankfurt, a wide place where the emperors of the Holy Empire were crowned until 1806, was such a site. The cathedral was near enough, but accessible only through a narrow lane, somewhat removed from the hustle and bustle of commercial activities upon which it was designed to bestow its blessing. Yet, there is a difference between a cathedral town pure and simple, like Chartres, and a town centered around its markets, which are, to be sure, 218

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surrounded by churches, such as Ghent. Significantly, as we move toward the East, we find the city of Prague in Bohemia, multifocused. Prague contains several incorporated towns, each with its own town hall and marketplace, but the castle that protected the town was likewise in evidence and all of these were overshadowed by the mighty Hradcany fortress on the left bank of the Vltava, erected in the 14th century. Further to the East, in Moscow, the central complex of the Kremlin was the acropolis of the Russian city. Alongside this over-powering fortress was a small city of refuge, the Kitai Gorod; then followed an inner ring where the better classes lived and an outer ring constituting the peasant city. There was no civic center. Ecologically, Moscow belongs to Asia rather than to Europe. However, in the Baroque city, Europe itself experienced an eclipse of civic institutions and the advent of a new, if ever so benevolent autocracy. The castle descended from hill to vale, and the parade grounds around the palace, along with the wide thoroughfares leading up to it, mark the baroque city as dominated by considerations of a military nature. Streets were so designed that army vehicles could move about with great speed (or what passed for speed in the period prior to motorization) and firepower could get a chance to unfold itself without let or hindrance. The southern German court city of Karlsruhe, with 36 avenues radiating from the palace of the margrave while the town hall opposite the palace sounds a modest echo to the central theme, is considered the classical example of a baroque town. Versailles, near Paris, entirely dominated by the vast palace of Louis XIV, is another. The American counterpart, as far as ecology is concerned, is Washington, D.C., l’Enfant’s masterpiece, with its wide vistas and grand avenues. In Washington, the White House and the Capitol used to hold each other in balance, with the Supreme Court building a secondary position. Now the Pentagon adds a fourth chapter to that trilogy. In the European baroque town, everything is oriented around the palace. As in the Middle Ages the prestige-accented quarters of the burghers were located around the marketplace because it was the focal point in the city, so had the baroque-age aristocracy its townhouses erected in the vicinity of the palace. In both instances the middle classes lived farther away from the center of town and the lower classes settled in the least desirable locations, for instance, along the river banks, where sanitary conditions left much to be desired. In the outskirts were miserable hovels. For reasons that transcend the scope of this chapter this ecological pattern is reversed in contemporary cities. The industrial city, as it evolved from the 18th century onward, is focused around the central business district, with factories in the outskirts and living quarters in the area between. The development of suburbs and satellite cities beyond the industrial zone comes much later, not before the end of the 19th century. Yet, the industrial city in the strictest sense of the word, especially the one-industry town, has its factories right in the center of the city, surrounded 219

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by areas of retail stores and taverns and rows of working-class homes and tenement houses. Where cotton or coal or steel was king, there was no place for civic buildings of any importance and the ample green spaces of the medieval and baroque city were gone. This type of city sprang into existence in the English Midlands and spread from there to the industrialized parts of central and eastern Europe, from Milhouse in Alsace to Lodz in Poland. On the North American continent, many of the New England mill towns are of the same general type. They replaced an older New England pattern, with towns centered around a wide, tree-lined place, and municipal buildings, “fashionable” churches, and better homes surrounding it. In the American West, where cities arose simultaneously with the coming of the railroads, the railroad yards frequently were focal institutions. They formed the center of town, with Main Street running either parallel or rectangular to them. However, this is merely an extension of the industrial town of earlier days. Likewise, concerning street patterns, we need not restrict our attention to the North American continent in order to recognize the grid as the hallmark of secondary, or colonial, settlement. Almost all the cities of Spanish America are laid out that way. Similarly, East German cities founded by migrants from the West during the Middle Ages differ from West German cities by their gridiron street patterns. Farther back in history, Roman coloniae, with their straight streets encompassing city blocks, belong to the same category. But Latin American and East German cities, not to speak of the Roman world, have a central place, with the governor’s palace, or the town hall, and the cathedral looking out on its broad square. The business town, especially in the United States, has nothing like it. Its tall buildings compete with each other; its streets lead from nowhere to nowhere. A point of anchorage, sociologically as well as geographically, is lacking. The rebuilding of cities in such a way that it would be an expression of their moral reintegration, leading to the recovery of civic pride, has started only recently. This is a painful process, full of pitfalls and setbacks, and its completion is projected into the future.

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18 The Rise of Civilization as a Paradigm of Social Change The sum total of man’s history cannot be encompassed by a single theory, sociological or otherwise, nor is it likely that all data of history will be of equal value to sociologists. But, as change and transformation are inseparable from any consideration of human affairs, it appears that among sociological concerns social change theory stands the most in need of historical materials and, in turn, is best fitted to illuminate the course of history. The aim of the following deliberations, therefore, is to offer a theoretical framework, based on historical evidence, which may be put to use in analyzing social change. To this end, the concepts of culture and civilization are examined and the transition from tribalism to urbanism (that is, from a monocultural to a multicultural social system) is set up as a paradigm for the process of social change. In doing this, the intention is not to reduce social change to urbanization, but rather to isolate the sociological element that makes for social change within the supersession of a familial by a territorial society, wherever it occurs. The inquiry is structural in character, but the social-psychological consequences will also be indicated. Definitions of Society, Culture, and Civilization Throughout the paper, the concept of society is taken for granted, but the differentiation between society and culture is not pursued. Conceptually, to be sure, it is possible to keep social and cultural systems apart, but to what extent this dichotomy can be brought to bear on a research situation is dubious. For instance, the norms that govern social relationships also refer to a way of life that is shared and transmitted, and therefore is cultural in character. The problem becomes further entangled if we consider change. If one takes as an example the transformation of the cult of the goddess of fertility into the adoration of the “black Madonna,” as analyzed by Moss and Cappannari,1 he can argue that the form of worship of the Italian peasant has remained unaltered while the meaning attached to this formal organization, or his “worldview,” including the sacred artifacts that symbolize the “worldview,” have undergone a radical change. But he can also argue that regularities in behavior and the values inherent in them have persisted and that only the form of worship has 221

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been refashioned. In historical analysis the argument is irrelevant because, as Toynbee asserts, it is impossible, in analyzing societies and cultures in practice, “to study either apart from the other.”2 Going a step further, Sorokin has drawn attention to the fact that social and cultural systems, or the social and cultural aspects of systems, change together, even if no mechanical or precise synchronicity is implied.3 In other words, social and cultural systems, whatever else they may be, are indistinguishable under the aspect of change. Neither do forms of interaction change without changing their meaning, nor can values change without changing in some degree the patterns of interaction in which they are expressed. However, compared with civilization, culture appears as a distinct stage in societal development. Our departure from the concept of culture is provoked by the fact that the unanimity regarding this concept is among the most remarkable convergences in modern sociological and anthropological theory. Ever since Tylor’s definition, almost a century ago, that “culture, or civilization, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society,” innumerable definitions of culture have been formulated, but they all seem to be aimed at the same thing. According to Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s compilations in “Culture—A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions,” there seems to be a slight shift over the decades from a historical to a psychological emphasis. But there is continuing consensus that culture is a group product, that it refers to a social heritage and a patterned system, that it embraces a totality of ways and modes of behavior, that it includes values and artifacts, that it involves learning processes, and that it results in the adjustment of the individual to the group as well as in the reflection of the group in the individual.4 In other words, culture is seen as the motivating force, or the “meaning,” behind the network of formal relationships that we call society. In this sense, the concept of “culture” appears to be closely related to other overall concepts in social science, such as Durkheim’s “conscience sociale” or Sumner’s “folkways and mores.” Like the air we breathe, culture is presumed to be everywhere. Whatever we think and say and do is the container, with culture the content. Culture, in this view, is the “superorganic” aspect of life itself. But is this a workable proposition? To be sure, the very inclusiveness and all-pervasiveness of the concept of culture makes for its fundamentality and wide application in the social sciences, but it would seem to impair its usefulness as a theoretical tool. If concepts are to serve the purpose of isolating and thereby recognizing traits and aspects within the universal context of life as it is being lived in the uninterrupted flow of reality, then a concept which comprises a totality of phenomena must of necessity come very near defying its purpose. The concept of “culture” may be compared to the concepts of “space” and “time,” adding, as it were, a social-psychological aspect to the geographical and historical aspects of human existence and development. Like 222

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“space” and “time,” culture is a mode of seeing phenomena and a means of ordering them, but it must be capable of subdivision and confrontation with related concepts to retain its usefulness for analysis. The only subdivision that is generally accepted—the one between one culture and another—falls short of this requirement because it is based on the assumption that cultures are unique wholes even to the point of being incomprehensible to each other. Hence, one culture may replace another or borrow traits from another, but, regarding their being suffused with “culture” rather than a “culture,” they are all alike. Within the concept of culture, then, we can account for growth and accretion, but not for the transformation of interpersonal relations, that is, for the essence of social change. Contrary to the concept of culture, the concept of civilization has had an uncertain and confused history.5 The term civilization first appears in the Dictionary of the Académie Francaise in 1798 and since has been widely accepted, but in a variety of loosely interconnected connotations. Civilization has been considered as a synonym of culture, as a selected part of culture, and as a kind or phase of culture. We will briefly review these three varieties before we present our own analysis. 1.

2.

The consideration of civilization as a synonym of culture is most common. Webster’s Dictionary defines civilization in terms of culture and culture in terms of civilization. Some anthropologists, for instance, Sapir and Goldenweiser, have used culture and civilization interchangeably. Tylor, in the above-quoted sentence and elsewhere, wavered between culture and civilization, but finally chose the former as less burdened with the connotation of a high degree of advancement.6 This decision makes sense from the point of view of the anthropologist whose chief interest is in the analysis of preliterate societies, but it is likely to make less sense for those social scientists who are concerned with advanced societies. Nevertheless, a sociologist like William Graham Sumner shows the same wavering attitude. In Folkways, to be sure, Sumner uses civilization rather than culture, but in Sumner’s and Keller’s joint work, The Science of Society, we find “the sum of men’s adjustment to their life conditions” defined as “culture or civilization.”7 All this amounts to an imprecise use of language which we will try to avoid. More specific are those authors who see in civilization a selected part of culture, coexistent with other parts. Not satisfied with leaving undecided the problem of how to relate culture and civilization to each other, they construe these two terms as complementary and contrasting elements within a larger societal complex. However, there is a wide divergence with regard to what is considered culture and what is considered civilization. Early American sociologists, such as Albion Small and Lester Ward, defined culture in reference to material products and technology or, in Albion Small’s words, “the control of nature by science and art,” while civilization was thought of as implying a high 223

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3.

and ennobling degree of socialization and “the increased control of the elementary human impulses by society.”8 The derivation of culture from cultivation, as in “agriculture,” and Samuel Johnson’s device of “civility” rather than “civilization” shines through here. Later American writers attached the labels differently. Ralph Linton looks upon civilization as comprising the sum total of human “means” and upon culture as the “collectivity of human ends.”9 Similarly, McIver and Merton confront civilization as the “impersonal” and “objective” and culture as the “personal” and “subjective” element in social life.10 In doing so, they have adopted the position of Alfred Weber, who in his “culture-sociology” defined civilization as utilitarian and materialistic in content and transferable and cumulative in nature. By way of contrast, culture is superstructural, ideational, unique, and creative. Both are associated with social process, which reveals itself in the network of interpersonal relations; all three movements, or processes, are considered as ever-present components in the experience of mankind.11 The notion that pervades a vast body of writing in the social sciences that civilization is a kind, or phase, of culture, is not necessarily incompatible with the view that both are selected parts of culture, that is, divergent conceptualizations of one or the other aspect of the same societal system. Gemeinschaft may coexist with Gesellschaft (Toennies), customary usage with codified law (Savigny), familistic relations with contractual relations (Sorokin), folk culture with urban civilization (Redfield), and folkways with stateways (Odum). But Toennies—to mention only the most influential of these authors—in establishing the dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft meant to say that Gemeinschaft was not only different from Gesellschaft, but also older and nearer to the mainsprings of human nature. In other words, primary relations are established first in societal as well as in personal development and they remain a constituent element in later stages, when mechanization and segmental contacts take command. With still another group of authors, such as Brooks Adams and Oswald Spengler, the secondary and sequential nature of civilization is more clearly established, and the value accent on civilization becomes emphatically negative. Only slightly divergent here and there, both Adams and Spengler agree that from early “culture” to late “civilization” the locus of domination shifts from village to town and then to city, and the dominant institution from the religious to the military and finally to the commercial sector. The end is decadence and death.12 A similarly romantic worldview has been expressed by Howard Odum in defense of his native south13 and by Lewis Mumford with regard to the rise and fall of Megalopolis.14

It is intriguing to note that with evolutionary theorists, especially Herbert Spencer, the sequence from military to industrial society is maintained, but 224

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with the value emphasis reversed: what is “decadence” for romanticists denotes “progress” for evolutionists. However, Spencer’s scheme of unilinear evolution, which took change for granted, did not enable him to grasp the structural differentiation that is implicit in civilization. This is in contrast to the latter-day evolutionism of McIver, who assimilated the structural elements in the theories of Toennies, Durkheim, Alfred, and Max Weber, but not without introducing a significant shift in meaning. In Alfred Weber’s scheme—the most pertinent in the present context—the historical distinction between culture and civilization, which looms so large in romantic thought, is abolished, but the romanticists’ value accent on “culture” is retained. McIver, on the other hand, restored the sequential aspects of the terms culture and civilization, but neutralized the value accent on culture. This occurred almost inadvertently, as is usually the case when traits are borrowed from one culture area to another. As one scans the McIver and Page volume, Society, it would seem as if the thinking of the authors had undergone a subtle process of transformation from Book 2, which deals with the major forms of social structure, to Book 3, which is concerned with social change. In book 2, civilization represents utilitarianism, culture immediacy. By civilization is meant “the whole mechanism and organization which man has devised in his endeavor to control the conditions of his life”; by culture is meant “the expression of our nature in our modes of living and thinking, in our everyday intercourse, in art, in literature, in religion, in recreation and enjoyment.”15 The two orders are seen as interactive, so that particular artifacts may combine cultural and technological aspects. They are regarded as distinct but interpenetrating orders of society. In book 3 the leitmotif is maintained, but in the very last pages of the last chapter, as in an afterthought, the tune is ever so subtly changed. Going beyond Durkheim’s emphasis on the lesser role of the division of labor in primitive as compared with civilized life, McIver and Page maintain that the very distinction between the cultural and utilitarian elements was scarcely discernible in primitive society. This phenomenon, called “primitive fusion,” amounts to saying that primitive society is largely homogeneous in character, that it is based on undifferentiated solidarity, and that it spells Gemeinschaft in the sense in which Toennies gave to the term, that is, that it denotes a type of social organization that springs from the fundamental character of man as embedded in blood ties and familial bonds. In other words, primitive fusion refers to that unified system of values and material as well as behavioral manifestations of values, which is called “culture.” In contradistinction, advanced society, according to McIver and Page, results from the breakup of the primitive fusion; it transcends the familial, or cultural, community and encompasses a multiplicity of values and manifestations of values, that is, cultures rather than culture.16 The implication is that a technological civilization permeates all cultural communities within an advanced society. It would seem preferable to say that the multiplicity of values in and of itself represents civilization 225

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and that the processes which transform a monocultural into a multi-cultural system bespeak social change. Civilization as a Culture of Cultures The anthropologist Philip Bagby proposes that we take our cue from etymology and define civilization as “the kind of culture found in cities.”17 But the philosopher Morris R. Cohen takes a further step when he says that “literally, the term ‘civilization’ means the making of cities, or of city-life,” thus implying the element of change and designating the city as the locale of change.18 Morris R. Cohen’s definition at once raises the question as to the stuff cities are made of and the nature of the non-city-like society that preceded the rise of civilizations. The answer is that prior to the emergence of cities social structure was chiefly, if not exclusively, determined by kinship. For a long period of time, man was a roving hunter, a food collector, a herdsman, and finally—at least in the ancient Near East and in China—a settled agriculturist before he became a town dweller; yet, while a profound difference in social organization exists between wandering nomads and sedentary villagers or, as V. Gordon Childe calls them, food gatherers and food producers, the important point in the present context is that they resemble each other insofar as their social organization is based on the sentiment of kinship.19 Possibly, because of the burdensomeness of children to nomadic hunters and herders as compared to their usefulness in gardens and fields, the importance of the total clan looms larger among food gatherers than among food producers. But it would be a mistake to assume that the fixation of villagers to a particular locality is contradictory to the kinship principle. Actually, in a neolithic peasant village, as in all peasant villages, kinsmen and neighbors are identical. There is nobody else around in the first place, but the idea that one could experience a bond of loyalty with people of different blood lines merely because one shares with them a common habitat is utterly foreign to tribal societies even in those places where people of diverse ancestry are settled side by side. When wandering nomads first provided a permanent and collective abode for their revered forebears in a ceremonial city of the dead and then settled in the vicinity of the caves and graveyards, they reinforced blood ties; they did not break the magic bonds.20 It is only in the city that size of population and the concomitant division of labor proceed to a point where proximity, or habitat, supersedes kinship as the focal point in social organization. The urban revolution gives birth to civilization.21 The Emergence of the City How did the city come about? Following Mumford, the change was initiated when neolithic villagers, descending from the dry uplands to the river bottoms along the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris, or those already settled here and there amidst the swampy waste, mingled with clans of Paleolithic hunters who 226

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acted as guides, protectors, and taskmasters.22 However, according to other authors, such as Childe, Frankfort, and Turner,23 such an initial stratification of rulers and ruled may be viewed either as a precondition or as a consequence of urbanization, but not as its sufficient cause. These authors emphasize that cities emerge when a technological complex, creates an economic surplus.24 The technological complex which makes its appearance between the years 6000 and 3000 B.C. consists in the knowledge of harnessing the force of oxen and winds, the invention of the plow, the wheeled cart and the sailboat, the discovery of the physical property of metals, and the chemical processes involved in smelting copper ores, and in the first steps toward working out an accurate solar calendar.25 The most conspicuous economic surplus was achieved in the river valleys and by means of irrigation; the yields of wheat and barley were multiplied many times over. But even here, the surplus produced in a single village was not sufficient to maintain the specialists who practiced new skills. They broke away and turned into itinerant workers, loosely organized into craft clans, occupational castes and even guilds, which means that they became strangers to the sacred round of village activities. Society had to be reorganized to accommodate an increasingly indispensable segment of the population.26 The agent of reorganization was the city; here was the “dividing” line between a simple, traditional culture and a complex civilization. Cities are instrumentalities of social change, but change is brought about by external contact. At later stages, that is, in more inclusive societies, change may be occasioned by contacts from within, by means of a growth of population which, through closer settlement and improved communication, leads to increased social density, meaning an intensified division of labor. But initially, cities are meeting places of a variety of clans and specialists and consequently combinations of various ethnic, linguistic, and other kinds of groups and subgroups. They are hardly ever “orthogenic” in character; to their heterogenic origin and heterogeneous composition forces from without add a further impetus.27 As the ancient philosophers pointed out long ago, the “cake of custom” is broken by the confrontation of homegrown virtues, which are forever yielding, with disturbing mores introduced by strangers. The creation of an exchangeable surplus promotes commerce with distant areas from which, in turn, raw materials and luxury products are imported. This applies especially to ancient Mesopotamia. According to Childe and Frankfort, imports of building materials and metals were a necessity on the alluvial plains while, at the same time, transport was facilitated because of the availability of waterways.28 In the ancient Orient, as elsewhere, merchants, craftsmen and their escorts travel along accessible trade routes and conquests add forced labor and foreign wives—and with them race mixture—to the elements making for widening contacts and profound transformation. If historical change is not immanent, it is likewise not technological. In Braidwood’s words, “the great change between pre-civilization and civilized 227

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human life came in realms of culture rather than the technological and economic,” that is, in the realm of the social, of new institutions, new modes of thought, new loyalties.29 It came through social action and through man, the actor. The role of material innovation is acknowledged, but what counts are merchants, not ships; craftsmen, not tools; conquerors, not armaments. Innovations are relevant inasmuch as they open new horizons, promote new contacts, and introduce new varieties of contacts. This is especially true concerning the inventions of writing and money. The introduction of abstract symbols for communication and exchange is a symbol in itself for the supersession of the concrete and immediate relationships that permeate the familial society by the more generalized and remote relationships that are the hallmark of civilization. Writing and money are twins; they stand for the transition from quality to quantity, from simple coordination to complex unity.30 The city is the place where these contact situations occur. Once they are institutionalized, “a certain degree of cultural tolerance” is achieved which makes further adjustments comparatively easy.31 The King’s City and the Citizen’s City V. Gordon Childe’s ten “criteria for cities” imply a more inclusive organization of society as a result of interaction.32 Outwardly, according to Childe, a city can be recognized because it is larger and more densely populated than other settlements, but this is already the result of effective accumulation by primary producers and the presence of specialists. Those not engaged in food production are supported by the surplus accumulated in the temple or royal granary, with the resulting social power expressed in monumental buildings and other artistic creations, and made effective in systems of recording and writing and the calendrical and mathematical sciences that are their corollaries. Other parts of the surplus are used for the importation of raw materials. Consequently, the city is described as a “community to which a craftsman could belong politically as well as economically” because, in addition to gaining access to raw materials, he was “guaranteed security in a state organization based on residence rather than kinship.” In terms of a theory of social change, Childe’s summary amounts to saying that customary relations among blood brothers were not immediately superseded by competitive relations in the marketplace (as implied in the theoretical views about the growth of cities of Robert E. Park and his students at the University of Chicago), but by a society under the aegis of kinship. Initially, there was no free market, no independent enterpreneurship.33 As Alfred Weber has suggested, the totemistic magic of the substratum of cultivators became subordinated to the rational bureaucracy of the rulers. The hunter-ruler, established as priest-king, organized, commissioned, protected, rewarded, and punished. The cultivators were taxed, the specialists employed.34 The King’s city, or the city-state, became centered around the fortified temple compound as an all-encompassing symbol. 228

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The transformation entailed in this development is momentous. It enables us to understand what is “social” in social change. That everything changes is an old insight. Climatic conditions or other aspects of the geographic environment may change. Technologies may change, that is, inventions may be introduced. Property relations may change, either in response to geographic or technological changes or in response to political upheavals, such as war or conquest. Ideologies may change as a result of these transformations, or else, changes in idea systems, especially notions of a religious nature, may of themselves bring about profound transformations in other spheres of life. But all these aspects of change are incomplete from a sociological point of view because they do not lay bare the process through which social change is enacted. Change, to be social, must connote a significant variation from accustomed patterns of interaction and the generation of new loyalties resulting from new contacts. This is precisely what occurs when families, clans, and tribes, for whatever reasons, draw together and swear a solemn oath of allegiance over a burning fire upon a newly elected altar to a god who is to be the guarantor of peace among them and the protector of them all, the god of the city. This ceremony symbolizes the absorption of older and narrower loyalties into more inclusive patterns of association. Fustel de Coulanges relates that each kinship group retained its house-god, as it were, but added to it the overarching bond of citizenship.35 In this context, it matters little whether the citizen’s city was already foreshadowed in the king’s city, especially in Mesopotamia—as Frankfort maintains36 or whether its growth occurred in Greece and Rome, or whether it was fully developed only in the European Middle Ages. Historically speaking, a good case can be made for either contention. Personal rule was never abolished east of Athens, and even Roman citizenship excluded slaves. But personal rule as well as self-rule by an independent citizenry is territorially organized and rationally motivated. The Kings of Erech or Lagash, and later the rulers of Akkad, Assyria, and Babylonia, represented everybody within their domain, irrespective of clannish affiliation.37 In Athens and Rome the traditional organization founded on birth (ethnos) in the course of time was replaced by a new order, based either on locality (demos, from which the term democracy is derived) or on social class, defined by property criteria.38 And because the transmission of customary wisdom from one generation to another does not serve where social integration must proceed beyond the affirmation of blood ties, rational (that is, codified) law first complements and then supplants sacred usage. This means that social imitation, instead of being directed toward the ancestors and the continuation of a hallowed past, receives a momentum that may throw it even beyond legality in the direction of the imitation of creative (“charismatic”) personalities who show the way into the future.39 The “disenchantment” of the world that this process entails and the subsequent rationalization of all social processes may then awaken a craving for 229

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unrestricted and unconditional leadership. But this is a late development, typical of mass societies. The analysis of the emergent city confirms our initial contention. The unqualified concept of culture is an inadequate tool for the understanding of social change because it fails to account for the difference between a unified simple culture and that complex interpenetration of cultures that is called a civilization. As clans associate with each other in cities, more than a mere change from one culture to another takes place. The word civilization, says Morris R. Cohen, embodies “our highest attainments and then sets them apart from the attainments of more primitive peoples.”40 The difference is due to federation and fusion on a large scale. What we have in mind is not “primitive fusion,” but the merger of traits and interests in a complex society. Thus, Mediterranean civilization represents a merger of Greek, Latin, and Germanic with Phoenician, Hebraic, and Arabic elements, upon all of which Christianity and Islam were superimposed. Within this edifice, a variety of old regionalisms were preserved and new ones established. However, political unity is merely a reminiscence in the area between Gibraltar and the Turkish straits. Nearer home, American society is held together by a political union, shot through, however, with divergences of race, creed, section, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, party allegiance, and other subdivisions. Moreover, American civilization combines culture traits that originated in many parts of the world.41 In brief, whether in the Sumerian and Akkadian city-states of Mesopotamia, or in Rome with its hospitable Pantheon, or in teeming contemporary America, civilization must be understood as a vastly heterogeneous culture of cultures— from the point of view of pre-urbanites a new departure in history. Terms like diffusion, borrowing, even acculturation, do not seem to be sufficient to describe what is happening. More adequate is Godfrey and Monica Wilson’s designation of a fragmentation or expansion of an existing society, that is, a diminution or an increase in scale, as the mark of change and of societies that are “wide scale” as “civilized.”42 To summarize: isolated tribal and local cultures, held together by blood ties and grouped around a single configuration of traits, are one thing; a complex civilization, comprising a multitude of interlocking associations, is another. Its emergence marks a change of a system, not only within a system.43 Federation, Fusion, and Anomie Rome and America It is not enough to say that change arises from contact and that it involves an increase or decrease in scale. Historically both these aspects are closely connected and their combination requires a further departure. In the ancient Mediterranean world, according to Fustel de Coulanges, the confederation of two or more tribes or clans into a city would have foundered on the fact that a stranger would have been excluded from the participating groups because 230

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he prayed to other gods. A new worship had to be proclaimed, a new moral order established. “The tribes that united to form a city,” says de Coulanges, “never failed to light a sacred fire, and to adopt a common religion.”44 Romulus is reported to have done this when he founded Rome.45 In addition, each of the men of Alba who were cofounders with Romulus contributed a clod of earth from ancestral soil; as these clods mingled, sanction was given to a new societal unit. We call this the process of federation, as distinct from the process of fusion, which is likewise observed in cities and, generally, in complex civilizations. It so happens that Rome offers an example for both. While the citizen’s city was founded on the Palatine, an asylum was created at the foot of Capitoline hill and to it came, to quote Livy, “a heterogeneous crowd of people from neighboring regions, a confused mixture of free men and slaves, all seeking novelty.”46 Fusion and confusion are seen here closely related, with the sequence working either way. An atomized mass of footloose people cannot be federated, it can only be fused; at the same time, the merger of disparate parts that are bound to each other by material interests rather than by shared moral values, may become another source of confusion. In the latter case, the citizen’s city is transformed into the anomic city. In Rome, the heterogeneous plebs were fused into an independent societal unit by the institution of the tribuneship, then federated with the patrician clans who had formed a “city,” that is, their own federation previously; after a struggle lasting four centuries, patricians and plebeians coalesced in the period of the late Republic. When the fusionist process was completed, the first mass society in history had come into existence. Imperial Rome had been described as a melting pot where all comers were subjected to processes of assimilation while “the Roman proper was submerged . . . by the multitude of provincials bringing with them from every corner of the universe their speech, their manners, their customs, and their superstitions.”47 The common denominator was lost and disintegration grew apace. As we observe the emergence of civilization in Mesopotamia, so do we recognize in Rome the processes of federation, fusion, and anomie that—potentially and actually—are present in every civilization. Although space does not permit elaboration, a brief comparative glance at some major efforts directed at the analysis of our own society may be in order. In America, the fusionist “melting pot” philosophy has been challenged by various theories of pluralism.48 In addition, recent urban studies have shown that kinship ties continue to be a potent factor among 73 to 84 percent of low—as well as high-class population in Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New Haven.49 But this does not imply that individuation, even disintegration, and the concomitant as well as consequent sway of the mass media are not potent factors in the situation. Louis Wirth’s famous definition of a city as “a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals”—with emphasis on individuals—retains validity, but it is obvious 231

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that it refers chiefly to the anomic city.50 Wirth’s definition is based on Robert E. Park’s concept of civilization as a symbolic or associational relationship, predominantly economic and political in character, and devoid of the “moral order” that permeates small groups with a homogeneous cultural content. People of divergent cultures, Park maintains, coexist in cities, but in moral isolation.51 Robert C. Angell, on the other hand, goes beyond Park and Wirth insofar as his theory of moral integration in large cities searches for the citizen’s city behind the veil of the anomic city.52 In finding moral integration impaired by ethnic, especially racial, heterogeneity and by a pronounced degree of social mobility, Angell’s analysis, although referring only to American cities, is consistent with the recorded experience from earlier civilizations. Expansion of Urbanism The American city must be seen as a variant of old world patterns. In the European Middle Ages, the process of transculturation, which had begun in antiquity, was resumed and carried further.53 Compared with African tribesmen or with the pre-Columbian Indians of America, the peasantry of medieval Europe was merely a loosely organized mass of poor people scattered over the countryside. Those who escaped from manorial bonds carried no supernatural obligations with them; footloose individuals could repair to the city, join in voluntary associations with others with whom they had nothing in common but their trade, and thus establish a community based predominantly on economic interests.54 Subsequently, the expansion of foreign trade fostered industrial development and the rise of the middle classes in nation-states and empires until the marketplace society, in everwidening circles, engulfed the familial society everywhere. The city grew out of bounds, not only to become “urban region” and “megalopolis,” but to fill out the whole expanse of advanced societies. In the United States of today, people may live in dense or scattered settlements ecologically, but they are all urbanites sociologically. In terms of ecology, the modern city may be losing its “external and formal structure,” but in terms of social organization “the new community represented by the nation” is nothing but a continuation of the city of a vastly enlarged scale.55 The same is true in terms of historical development. Although not unchecked and even reversed at times, a powerful trend runs from homogeneous to complex, from communal to associational, from clan to city, and from there to society of the industrialized nation-state. The urban middle classes are the banner bearers of nationalism as well as the exponents of rationalism. Wherever social change is cast in this mold, a society is exposed to the danger of overextension and anomie. But where this danger is avoided, the varied cultural heritage carried by migrants from small places to metropolitan areas is not simply superseded and cast aside, but becomes part and parcel of a new and inclusive civilization. 232

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African Laboratory If we compare the oldest cities in the Western world, those in the ancient Near East and in the Mediterranean region, with the newest cities that have emerged in our time, the cities of Africa, the historical model that the older cities provide, will have to be modified. Two considerations apply to a comparative evaluation of this kind. The oldest cities provide us with mute archeological evidence, that is, with the material manifestations of a civilization rather than with living evidence; even where scanty literary documentation exists, conclusions referring to human interaction are reached chiefly by inference. By contrast, a multitude of actions can be observed and analyzed on the contemporary scene. Further, the more we proceed in history, the more we have to reckon with “combined development.” The theory of combined development states that a backward country, in assimilating the material and intellectual achievements of advanced countries, does not necessarily reproduce all stages of their past. It may pass over intermediate steps and combine them in one large step.56 The vast laboratory of social change which is modern Africa is a case in point. If one reviews the literature on detribalization, urbanization, and social change in Africa, a number of seemingly contradictory trends may be ascertained.57 1.

2.

The African city, like any other city, creates a society on a larger scale, initiating contacts with strangers, developing marginal individuals, and resulting in a wide network of human relations. The division of labor in commercial, industrial, and administrative activities makes for new experience and offers an “opportunity to choose” (Balandier). Money becomes a measurement of value. Tribal controls and customary behavior are weakened by the very fact of translocation, but also because isolated migrants or small family groups, not entire tribal units, enter the city. Especially in mining towns, for instance in the Rhodesian [now Zimbabwe.—Eds.] copper belt, where the sex ratio is high and up to 70 percent or more of the labor force is nonpermanent (Mitchell), social disorganization, as measured by a high incidence of illegitimacy, disease, alcoholism, petty quarreling, and serious crime, is rampant. The coincidence of high mobility, low status, and excessive segmentality, if accompanied by attrition in kinship contacts, may result in anomie.58 In some places, rootlessness and frustration are indicated by the prevalence of magic practices and messianic cults. Elsewhere especially in the cities of West Africa, where there is less coming and going but hardly less heterogeneity than in some of the urban areas of Central and East Africa, a reintegrative challenge to disintegration is more readily at hand. In these cities, work groups, cliques, and gangs may be fashioned into occupational and recreational associations, which under favorable circumstances grow into sports clubs, craft guilds, and labor unions. Also, Islam seems to be a reintegrative force of this kind. In these instances, new lines of responsibility 233

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3.

4.

5.

6.

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and loyalty, replacing lineage connections, are in evidence (Balandier, Banton, Forde, Little). There are instances of intertribal marriages in the higher strata and of intermingling leading to marital unions of some duration in the lower strata, but this does not appear to be a frequent occurrence. On the whole, “coexistence” rather than “mixing” is the rule (Forde, Comhaire, and also in Introduction to Urbanization in Tropical Africa, vol. 1). There are indications that tribal divisions are being replaced by economic divisions, but the formation of voluntary associations, which is part of the replacement, does not necessarily imply intertribal fusion. Where membership in associations is restricted to people of one tribe or where particular tribes specialize in particular occupations, the resulting social structure remains implicitly dominated by kinship (Balandier, Banton). In all these instances, while the chieftain’s or the elder’s authority, as measured by such indices as lack of residential propinquity, severance of personal relationships and independent source of income, is weakened (Hellman), ethnic cohesion is almost always maintained, and is frequently strengthened. Even where migration to urban areas has been on an individual basis, secondary kin groups in the form of extended families have emerged as a potent structural element in the life of urban natives in Africa (Comhaire, Marris). In such widely scattered places as Timbuktu in Mali, Lagos in Nigeria, and Brazzaville, Leopoldville, and Stanleyville in the Congo, kinsmen tend to live as close to each other as possible, visit each other, take counsel with each other, and extend aid and assistance to those among them who are in need. A “skeleton structure” deriving from the tribal system remains operative even in the disruptive environment of a South African slum (Hellman). Beyond the kin group, larger ethnic units are making their appearance. As a rule, the laboring population is composed of individuals from many tribes and localities, but a tribe native to the region where the city is located usually prevails numerically and dominates politically. The dominant tribe may combine subtribes into a larger ethnic group, as is the case with the Bakongos in Leopoldville, or it may assimilate isolated members of minority tribes, especially young males, into its lower strata, as is the case with the Ganda and Soga in Kampala, Uganda (Comhaire, C. and R. Sofer). In other instances, a lingua franca provides a loose bond, for instance, the Bemba language in the Rhodesian copper belt (Powdermaker). The process is comparable to the emergence of an Italian-American group in American cities where there had been merely village compatriots or, at best, men with provincial loyalties previously. Modern African cities contain large, and heterogeneous racial and ethnic groupings side by side. In East and Central African cities, one finds Europeans as technicians and administrators, East Indians and Greeks as traders, and a fluctuating mass of African laborers of various backgrounds (Denis, C. and R. Sofer, Gutkind, Southall). In West Africa,

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Libanese and Haussa act as intermediaries, while educated Africans have taken possession of the administrative apparatus. Some of these elites are detribalized or even racially mixed, such as the “Creoles” in Sierra Leone (Banton). In Portuguese Africa, the dividing line runs between assimilados and indigenos (Duffy). Everywhere, races and ethnic groups are residentially segregated, but in the Union of South Africa, Bantus, “Coloureds,” East Indians, Boers, and people of British descent are kept apart not only by custom but—as far as nonwhites are concerned—also by law. In South Africa, African and “European” populations do not even dwell together within the limits of the same city. In comparison with the cities of antiquity and the European cities of the Middle Ages, African cities are distinguished by the fact that no sacred fire is kindled, no common allegiance generated. The pluralism of family groups and ethnic units is not transcended; the citizen’s city is conspicuous by its absence. The reason is that urbanization in Africa, instead of being an independent process, is coincidental with industrialization and the formation of nationstates.59 That is what is indicated by the term combined development.” The processes of federation and fusion take place on a more inclusive level. Some African nations, such as Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya, and possibly the Congo, are being initiated by federal tribes, but this is not the whole story. Initially, the Moroccan nation, as one of its contemporary spokesmen, Allal El Fassi, asserts, may have been the outgrowth of a federation of Arabic-speaking and Berber-speaking tribes, but more recently the process of unification has been borne along by Arabized townspeople whose tribal affiliations were blurred.60 Elsewhere in Africa, especially in Ghana, reluctant tribes are immediately forced into a national mold. In most instances, fusion does not so much follow federation, but takes place simultaneously with it, or even without it. In all instances, the new moral order is nationwide, if not continentwide, in scope. Consequently, if anomie is to be avoided, an African civilization must be expected to emerge. Civilization and the Moral Order The African development, which we have compared with a model of the city of antiquity, is in itself paradigmatic inasfar as it exemplifies the forces of disintegration and reintegration, which are present in a changing society. This introduces a social-psychological consideration into what has been, on the whole, a structural treatment of the topic. The transition from a monocultural to a multicultural society, as well as any kind of secondary change within a civilization, is marked by unrest. Accelerated mobility, the mixture of racial and ethnic strains, and the rapid succession of fads and fashions once the cultural anchors are lifted bring about a confusion of values and a desire to re-establish a sense of direction. At first, when previously shared norms are challenged and break down as a consequence of their encounter 235

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with conflicting norms, diffuse mass behavior takes the place of the corroded moral order. But when new ideologies rise to cope with the situation, a new moral order is born with them.61 Thus, the city of antiquity, founded upon an altar of altars and grouped around a temple compound, brought forth its own moral order, encompassing the more circumscribed normative systems that it superseded. Amidst violent dissensions, it created its own loyalty. The same is true of the guild-dominated medieval city in which new attachments, transcending and even supplanting feudal and ecclesiastical bonds, were forged. Later, nation-states and their nationalisms outgrew regional and other specialized allegiances, as the history of England, France, and the United States and many other countries amply demonstrates. In our time, the “two nations” of the rich and the poor, over whom the king of England ruled earlier in the nineteenth century, are about to be reconciled in a new industrial society.62 It may be of interest to return to Robert E. Park at this point. Not unlike the nineteenth-century pessimists, he regards civilization as corrosive of the moral order. In many of his writings, Park emphasizes that the territorially organized society of cities, nation-states, and empires, centering around the marketplace, is held together by material interests while moral cohesion, typified by familial bonds, is formed inside, not between small groups, or folk societies. Luckily at variance with this position, Park adopts another point of view in his paper “The Nature of Race Relations.”63 He points out there that, although people in the modern world “are no longer bound and united as people once were by familial and tribal ties,” they are, nevertheless, “profoundly affected by sentiments of nationality,” and he adds that most of our racial conflicts are conflicts of “we” groups and “they” groups that are, however, “integral parts of a great cosmopolitan and free society.” In these words, the sequential concept of civilization is upheld and the possibility of a moral order in a large-scale civilization acknowledged. In conclusion, we would like to reiterate that the rise of cities, and generally of inclusive civilizations, provides a historically ascertainable paradigm of social change. The concept of a civilization is crucial because a multicultural civilizational system represents a different principle of social organization than a monocultural tribal system: a monocultural society consists of multipurpose kinship roles, a multicultural society consists of differentiated economic roles. At the same time, we must go beyond McIver and Park in emphasizing that civilization connotes more than a technological accumulation or a symbiotic relationship. For example, an Andaman Islander or a Marquesan may have his “basic personality” defined exclusively by the fact that he was brought up as an Andaman Islander or a Marquesan, but a New Yorker’s “basic personality,” if such a thing exists, is not so easily circumscribed. He has a great many ingredients “bred” into him and much depends on what combination of components he represents. On the other hand, a metropolitan city, such as New York, includes not only Tammany Hall and the Stock Exchange, the 236

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St. Patrick’s Day Parade and the United Jewish Appeal, the Abyssinian Baptist Church and the West Side Tennis Club, but adds to these segmental institutions others, like schools and courts, and a value system and behavioral pattern that are common to all. A unifying moral order is not incompatible with cultural diversity. However, a question mark hangs over any kind of change and transformation in human affairs. The moral order of a city or a nation grows more slowly than the specialized institutions which compose and guarantee the coexistence of its constituent parts. This lag between the growth of institutions and their integration into an inclusive moral order is the true “cultural lag.” Unfortunately, while we have not yet mastered the task of the moral integration of our cities, we are faced with the same problem on a grander scale, as we change from a national to a world order. The very probability that Dante’s vision (in De Monarchia) of civilization as humana civilitas may be approaching realization, makes us aware of the limitations interposed by human nature. The technological and symbiotic aspects of a world order are all around us, but the normative aspects, that is, the morality without which coexistence does not work, are but feebly indicated. To reconcile the discrepancy, one must know that those who live through a period of change are always at midpoint and uncertain about the way ahead. But, if analogies serve, the alternative is clear that an emerging civilization must generate its own moral order or fail to survive. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Leonard W. Moss and Stephen C. Cappannari, “The Black Madonna—An example of Culture Borrowing,” in W. J. Cahnman and Alvin Boskoff, eds. Sociology and History (New York: The Free Press, 1964), pp. 313–321. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History—Reconsiderations, Vol. 12 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 273. Pitirim A. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, vol. 1 (New York: American Book Co., 1937), pp. 376–377; cf. Florian Znaniecki, Cultural Sciences (Urbana, IL: Illinois University Press, 1952), p. 398. A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, “Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions,” in Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology, vol. 47, no. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 43ff. The pertinent literature is critically reviewed by Kenneth V. Lottick, “Some Distinctions between Culture and Civilization as Displayed in Sociological Literature,” in Social Forces, vol. 28, no. 3 (March 1950): 240–250. A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, “Culture,” p. 147. Ibid., p. 55 Ibid., p. 13. Ralph Linton, ed., The Science of Men in the World Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), p. 78. Robert McIver and Charles H. Page, Society: An Introductory Analysis (New York: Rinehart, 1949), Chaps. 20–29; Robert McIver, Social Causation 237

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11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

238

(Boston: Ginn and Co., 1942), p. 172ff.; 281–282, 284; Robert K. Merton, “Civilization and Culture,” Sociology and Social Research, 21 (Nov.-Dec. 1936): 103–113. Alfred Weber, Fundamentals of Culture Sociology: Social Process, Civilization Process and Culture-Movement, trans. G. H. Weltner and C. F. Hirshman (New York: WPA and Columbia University Press, 1939), p.1. Cf. Alvin Boskoff, “Social Change: Major Problems in the Emergence of Theoretical and Research Foci,” in Howard Becker and Alvin Boskoff, eds., Modern Sociological Theory in Continuity and Change (New York: Dryden Press, 1957), pp. 281–283. Howard W. Odum, Understanding Society: The Principles of Dynamic Sociology (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 261, 281–287. In a later paper, “Folk Sociology as a Subject Field for the Historical Study of the Total Human Society and the Empirical Study of Group Behavior,” Social Forces, vol. 31, no. 3 (March 1953), Odum defines civilization, somewhat ambiguously, as an “advanced state of culture.” But in the earlier work he says clearly that “modern society has too much civilization and not enough culture” and that “civilization as an end destroys society.” Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt Brace & World Inc., 1961), chap. 17. However, Mumford recognizes the presence of regenerative forces in metropolitan civilization. McIver and Page, Society, pp. 409–499. Ibid., pp. 630ff. Philip Bagby, Culture and History: Prolegomena to the Comparative Study of Civilizations (London: Longmans, Green, 1958), pp. 162–163. Morris R. Cohen, The Meaning of Human History, quoted according to Ralph Marcus, “Notes on Civilization in Historical Perspective,” in Salo W. Baron, Ernest Nagel, and Koppel P. Pinson, eds., Freedom and Reason: Studies in Philosophy and Jewish Culture in Memory of Morris R. Cohen (New York: The Free Press, 1951), Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and its Transformation (Ithaca, NY: Great Seal Books of Cornell University, 1957), p. 10, referring to V. Gordon Childe. Among sociologists, Childe’s position has been most emphatically accepted by William F. Ogburn and Meyer F. Nimkoff in Sociology, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1958), p. 652. Lewis Mumford, City in History, p. 6ff. V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (New York: Mentor Books, 1958), chap. 7. Mumford, City in History, p. 25ff.; V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes, Himself, p. 85. Childe, Man Makes Himself; What Happened in History (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1942); “The Birth of Civilization,” Past and Present, no. 2 (1952); “The Urban Revolution,” Town Planning Review, vol. 21, no. 1 (April 1950); “Civilizations, Cities and Towns,” Antiquity, vol. 21, no. 121 (March 1957); Henri Frankfort, Kingship and The Gods. A Study of Ancient Near East Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948); The Birth of Civilization in the Near East (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956); Ralph Turner, The Great Classical Traditions, vol. 1, The Ancient Cities, vol. 2, The Classical Empires

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24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1941); cf. Karl H. Kraeling and Robert M. Adams, City Invincible. A Symposium on Urbanization and Cultural Development in the Ancient Near East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) et al. The date at which the first walled urban settlements appear may perhaps be updated, as a result of Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations in Jericho. Compare Kathleen Kenyon, Digging up Jericho. The Results of the Jericho Excavations (New York: F. Praeger, 1957), as well as her paper, “Jericho and its Setting in Near Eastern History,” Antiquity, vol. 30 (1956), and the controversy published in subsequent issues of the same journal. A good sociological summary of the argument is contained in Paul Meadow’s “The City, Technology and History,” in Social Forces, vol. 36, no. 2 (Dec. 1957): 141–147. However, Robert M. Adams, in Kraeling and Adams, City Invincible, pp. 28–30—doubts the “social surplus” theory and stresses instead the “complementarity of resources” which prevailed in the lower Euphrates and Tigris valleys and led to the establishment of distributive institutions in the city. Childe, Man Makes Himself, p. 187. V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” in Town Planning Review (1950). Especially the occupation of smith is surrounded by a particular “mystique”; at the same time, as a metallurgical expert, the smith is everywhere in demand. Robert Redfield and Milton B. Singer, “The Cultural Role of Cities,” first published in Economic Development and Social Change, vol. 3, no. 1 (1954): 53–73; here quoted from Man in India, vol. 36, no. 3 (July-Sept. 1956): 161–194. Redfield and Singer’s argument is contradictory on more than one count. The authors separate the technical from the moral order, but fuse culture and civilization; they speak of “orthogenic” and “heterogenic” “roles” of cities, when these terms actually refer to origin; they blur the difference between “orthogenic” and “heterogenic,” on the one hand, and homogeneous and heterogeneous, on the other; they fail to show how orthogenic—and homogeneous—cities are at all possible. They may have had in mind autochthonous cities, founded by natives of a region, and cities founded by conquerors or invaders. Childe, Man Makes Himself, p. 115. What Happened in History; Henri Frankfort, The Birth of Civilization, p. 74 et passim. It should be added that “commerce” and semi-military expeditions were closely related. Robert J. Braidwood, The Near East and the Foundations of Civilization (Eugen: Oregon State System of Higher Education, 1952), p. 42. Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes. Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1958), p. 190, 290–291, 384. Cf. Ignace J. Gelb, A Study of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952) and Richard Thurnwald, Black and White in Africa. The Fabric of a New Civilization (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1935), p. 370 and passim. Thurnwald refers to the super-session of clan and family bonds by individualistic behavior patterns through the medium of money. Cf. Robert C. Angell, Free Society and Moral Crisis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), p. 150. See Childe, Town Planning Review (1950); cf. Childe, What Happened in History, p. 91. Karl Polanyi, Konrad Arensberg, Harry W. Pearson, Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economics in History and Theory (New York: The Free 239

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34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

240

Press, 1957), esp. 12ff. and 30ff. However, initial “spurs of commercial activity,” based on individual enterprise, are acknowledged by the authors. Alfred Weber, Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie (Munich: R. Pieper & Co, 1950), p. 51ff. N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: The Study of the Religion, Laws and Institutions of Ancient Greece and Rome, book 3 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1956). Frankfort, The Birth of Civilization in the Near East, p. 77; cf. Thorkild Jacobsen, “Primitive Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 3 (1943): 159–172, and A. L. Oppenheim, “Nature of Civilization in Mesopotamia,” in Polanyi and Arensberg, 30ff. Ignace J. Gelb, “The Function of Language in the Cultural Expansion of Mesopotamian Society,” in Kraeling and Adams, City Invincible, pp. 315–328. Gelb stresses the role of a lingua franca in the growth of civilizations and empires in the ancient Near East. Jean Comhaire and Werner J. Cahnman, How Cities Grew (Madison, NJ:The Florham Park Press, 1959), pp. 4–6. Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and its Transformations (Ithaca, NY: Great Seal Books of Cornell University, 1957), pp. 55, 112, 113, 119, 120, and 136.; cf. Toynbee, Study of History, p. 274. One can say that education in primitive societies stresses continuity while education in multicultural civilization tends to add education for change. Cohen, Human History. Cohen’s statement agrees with the definition advanced by Carl Brinckman in “Civilization,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 3, pp. 525–529. A. L. Kroeber, “Structure, Function and Pattern in Biology and Anthropology,” in The Nature of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 93. It should be added that Kroeber belongs to those authors who use the terms culture and civilization interchangeably. Godfrey and Monica Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change. Based on Observation in Central Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945), pp. 43–44, 59. Cf. Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: The Free Press, 1951), p. 486. Fustel de Coulanges, Ancient City, p. 127. Ibid., pp. 134ff. Quoted in Raymond Bloch, The Origins of Rome (London: Thames and Hudson, 1960), p. 52. Jerôme Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome: The People and the City at the Height of the Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), pp. 55–56. The most sophisticated of these theories of pluralism is contained in Horace M. Kallen, Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956). Morris Axelrod, “Urban Structure and Social Participation,” American Sociological Review, vol. 21, no. 1 (Feb. 1956): 13–18 and Scott Greer’s article, “Urbanism Reconsidered,” in the same issue, pp. 19–24; Wendell Bell and Marion D. Boat, “Urban Neighborhoods and Informal Social Relations,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 62, no. 4 (January 1957): 391–398; Marvin B. Sussman, “The Help Pattern in the Middle Class Family,” in American Sociological Review, vol. 18, no. 1 (Feb. 1953): 22–27.

The Rise of Civilization as a Paradigm of Social Change

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” in Paul K. Hatt and Albert J. Reiss, Jr., eds. Cities and Society (New York: The Free Press, 1957), pp. 46–63. Everett C. Hughes et al., eds., The Collected Papers of Robert Ezra Park, vol. 1 (New York: The Free Press, 1952–55), Race and Culture, “The Problem of Cultural Differences,” pp. 3–14; “Culture and Civilization,” pp. 15–23; “Reflections on Communications and Culture,” pp. 36–52; vol. 2, Human Communities, “The City and Civilization,” pp. 128–144; vol. 3, Society: “Modern Society,” pp. 321–342. Park’s concept of civilization, although not clearly formulated, is essentially sequential in nature. Robert C. Angell, “The Moral Integration of American Cities,” in American Journal of Sociology, vol. 57, no. 1, Part 2 (July 1951). The term “transculturation” was first used by Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar trans. Harriet de Onis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947). Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, n.d.), pp. 86–87, 94, 153ff. This work was originally translated in 1925 and published by the Princeton University Press. Don Martindale, “Prefatory Remarks: The Theory of the City,” in Max Weber, The City, trans. D. Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (New York: The Free Press, 1958), p. 62. Max Weber uses a twofold model of the citizen’s city— the Greek polis and the commercial city of the High Middle Ages. He does not analyze the modern city because urbanism and nationalism become indistinguishable after the seventeenth century. Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, select. ed. F.W. Dupee (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959), chap. 1. The theory of combined development was devised by Trotsky in order to explain why a proletarian revolution does not have to wait for the rise of a mature “bourgeois society”; one may add that it is applicable to underdeveloped areas without a political (Marxist) purpose to justify it. There is a considerable literature pertaining to urbanization and social change in Africa. [Since 1964, the publication of Cahnman’s essay, the literature has expanded as well as revised and/or updated many of the works Cahnman mentions. Hence, only a small selection of the titles will be included here. The Editors.] Compare especially: Michael Banton, The Study of Tribal Life in Freetown (London: Oxford University Press, 1957); Jean L. Comhaire, “Economic Change and the Extended Family,” in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 305 (May 1956): 45–52; James Duffy, Portuguese Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); Jean L. Comhaire, “Some Aspects of Urbanization in the Belgian Congo,” in American Journal of Sociology, vol. 62, no. 1 (July 1956): 8–13; Peter W. Gutkind, “Congestion and Overcrowding: An African Urban Problem,” in Human Organization, vol. 19, no. 3 (Fall 1960); Guy Hunter, The New Societies of Tropical Africa, (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); Melville J. Herskovits, The Human Factor in Changing Africa (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962); Introduction to the Problems of Urbanization in Tropical Africa, vols. 1 and 2 (Addis Ababa: U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, April-May, 1962), passim. Kenneth L. Little, “The Role of Voluntary Associations in West African Urbanization,” in American Anthropologist vol. 59, no. 4 241

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58. 59.

60. 61.

62.

63.

242

(August 1957): 579–96; Georges Balandier, Sociologie des Brazzaville Noires (Paris: Cahiers de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1955). A. W. Southall, The Theory of Urban Sociology, an address given before a conference held at the East Africa Institute of Social Research, Kampala, Uganda, January 1957 (mimeo). Southall, Theory of Urban Sociology. Southall’s theory refers to urban regions in an industrial society, that is, to a late stage in urban development. It is lacking historical perspective. But it must be taken into consideration that the theory was conceived in Africa where urbanization and industrialization tend to coincide. Allal El Fassi, “La nation Marocaine,” in Etudes Mediterranéens, no. 1 (1957): 21–25. The process has been described and analyzed in Herbert Blumer, “Collective Behavior,” in A. M. Lee, ed., Principles of Sociology (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1951), pp. 165–222. In his monograph on the British cotton industry, Neil J. Smelser develops a seven-step “sequence of structural differentiation” that bears close similarity to Blumer’s sequence from the breakdown of established order through various stages and manifestations of collective behavior and social movements to a “new order of life.” Smelser, using different terminology, proceeds from “dissatisfaction” through “new ideas” to the routinization of the “usual patterns of performance.” However, Blumer moves from experience to theory while Smelser descends to the data from a theoretical a priori. Cf. Neil J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (London: Oxford University Press, 1948); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957); Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1956); Neil J. Smelser, Social Change. Hughes, ed., Collected Papers, vol. 1, pp. 81–116.

Part IV Religion, Race, and Ethnicity

19 Religion and Nationality I Society in the West is based on a territorial principle that is the heritage of the Roman Empire. A child born on American soil, according to the prevailing jus soli, the law of the soil, is an American citizen. This, however, is not true of the East. A child born in Germany, say, of unnaturalized Polish parentage, according to the prevailing jus sanguinis, the law of blood (or kinship), remains a citizen of Poland if no naturalization is granted. Society in the East is based on the concept of the “folk”. We may call the territorial principle the principle of the marketplace and designate the concept of the folk as a personal concept derived from the concept of the family. In this sense, we may speak about personal, as against territorial nationality. It is in the light of these concepts that we are to understand some of Sir John Hope Simpson’s remarks in his survey on the refugee problem. Here is what he says: It cannot be expected that social assimilation will be complete in the first generation but experience shows that in the second and third generation little difference persists in Western Europe and in overseas countries. This is not necessarily the case in Eastern Europe where the minority system, approximating the Turkish millet, is an obstacle to intermarriage and attendance at common schools, and isolates the group.1 In other words, social assimilation seems to be easier in a society of sellers and buyers on the marketplace than in a society approximating what Sir John calls the “Turkish millet.” Apparently, the Turkish millet is regarded as an ideal type when it comes to a consideration of nationalities and minorities in the East. We will, therefore, concern ourselves in this paper with a definition and explanation of the millet system. We will follow up its roots in the history of the region and briefly consider its development and decline, as well as its persistence, in our time. The millet system of the Ottoman Empire may be conceived of as a part of the religious law of Islam. The world of Islam, roughly speaking, falls into two sections—dar-ul-Islam, the world of peace and devotion, and dar-ul-harb, the world of warfare. The world of Moslems is considered under an obligation to engage in holy warfare until the dar-ul-harb progressively diminishes as more and more of it is brought into the dar-ul-Islam. 245

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In the dar-ul-Islam, however, non-Moslems, under sufferance, may continue to exist if they are not idolators but communities of the peoples of the Book, that is to say, Christians and Jews.2 They may be allowed to profess their faith and to organize their family affairs according to their own customs; but the theory has it that they stay on their lands only on lease, paying a heavy tribute for themselves and for their lands to the Moslem state. They are reduced to the status of Dhimmis, that is, persons protected by specific covenants.3 The techniques of the sociology of knowledge serve to explicate this ideology. It is the ideology of a conquering warrior tribe from the desert that has swarmed in on the settled land, the trading townships, and the oases. The Bedouins of Arabia, occupying Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and other countries peripheral to Arabia proper, found themselves confronted with the central problem of administration in a region where desert and steppe, on the one hand, and stretches of fertile soil, on the other, are intermingled. They would have found themselves unable to cope with the problems of urban civilization had they not availed themselves of ways and means to put to good use the traditional skills and the taxpaying capacities of subjected, yet more sophisticated, populations. Accordingly, religious life, in the Islamic as well as the pre-Islamic period, conforms to the social pattern of the religion. The Bible abounds with stories depicting the interplay between the settled land and the desert. The life of the prophet Elijah marks one phase in that ever-recurring conflict. Elijah’s God is the God of his fathers; we see him struggle against the Baalim of the hills, or, in other words, we see the Lord of history up against the spirits of the soil. The two deities interlocked and then separated. It may be said that the community of the Exiles in Babylon returned to the Lord of history after the spirits of the soil had deserted them. Thus, they retained their own status in a strange environment. Later, the “Prince of Exile,” presumably of Davidic ancestry, was recognized under Sassanid rule in Babylonia and Persia.4 It was likewise under Sassanid rule that the first agreement which can properly be said to institute a “millet” was concluded. It was the treaty of Milan between the Shah-in-Shah Jezdegerd and the Catholicos of the Assyrians. The Catholicos, or patriarch, became a political dignitary and, in addition to his ecclesiastical functions, was made responsible for the allegiance of his people to the ruler and the state. The Assyrians, or Nestorians, were granted freedom of worship and autonomous jurisdiction of civil cases among their members. In return, they would, as a community, pay taxes to the shah’s treasury.5 The Sassanid rulers of Persia, themselves, Zoroastrians, had found it advantageous to tolerate Christians and Jews who had fled to them in increasing numbers from the heresy-hunting regime that prevailed in the Byzantine Empire. They could count on the loyalty of their new subjects because they left their community life intact, and these new subjects, in turn, could swear allegiance to a ruler who was alien to them because they had no immediate territorial ambitions of their own. The Arab caliphs and later the Turkish 246

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sultans adopted this system, although not without gradually depressing the status of their dissenting subjects. Both Arabs and Turks were warriors with a following of primitive tribesmen, and, as a result, they were even more dependent on such a system, as well as more likely to abuse it, than the Persians had ever been. The millet may be defined as the peculiar political organization that gave to non-Moslem subjects of the Ottoman Empire the right to organize into communities possessing delegated political power under their own ecclesiastical chiefs. The head of the millet was directly responsible to the state for the administration of all its subjects. Although the millet lacked territorial cohesion and military power and had, therefore, to be protected by the ruling warrior caste, it formed in many respects an autonomous unit within the state. Yet, the members of the millet were limited in their general citizenship by virtue of the very fact that the laws of personal statute were based upon religious sanctions.6 This seems to us a strange notion. In Western Christianity, the idea of the Kingdom of God is interpreted as referring to a purely spiritual realm with no political connection, but oriental Christianity and traditional Judaism, as well as Islam, do not dissociate religion from social life, from community ties, from civic status, or from law.7 In our compartmentalized culture, religion has a special shelf, for exclusive use, so it seems, on Sunday mornings, to be forgotten completely after the midday meal. This, however, has never been so in the East. In early antiquity, two and a half millennia before Christ, Sumerian kings were priest-kings, heads of city-states that were at the same time religious entities. The king of Lagash was but the representative of the God of Lagash, king only in relation to the people, but priest in relation to the King of Kings, the supreme ruler of the state who dominated the whole life of the people. Truly, Lagash was a “Kingdom of God,” and so were Babylon, Moab, Ammon, and Israel. Moreover, public life was intimately connected with ancestral rites. The God of the fathers was venerated along with the God of the locality, as Robertson Smith and, in a larger sense, Emile Durkheim have shown.8 Society, conceived not merely as an ecological or political phenomenon, but envisaged primarily in terms of the enlarged family, retained its religious significance and was perpetuated through worship. Some extended kinship groups preserved their social and religious identities even after centralized states had subjugated wide territories and combined many tribal units within their imperial domain. It matters little whether these established units were based on actual common descent or not; the mere fact that they were founded upon an ancestral myth or, in other words, that their members believed in a common ancestor was enough to unite them with bonds of brotherhood. Maybe we are touching here on a general truth. But the least that can be said is that the time aspect of society rather than the space aspect seems to have been stressed in the East. The Hebrew and Arabic terms for “world” indicate 247

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infinite time rather than infinite space, and the same seems to be true of other Oriental languages. It may be said that in the East, religion, understood in terms of a time sequence rather than as a spatial uplifting from this valley of tears to the high heavens, is constitutive of nationality. Abraham was called by the voice of his God to leave the country into which he had been born and thus to become the father of a nation. The process was repeated when Moses led the slaves of Goshen up to Sinai, and it has been repeated ever since. Arab national consciousness has been called into being by the faith of Mohammed and has been revived by religious zeal on later occasions. Surely, Islam did not invent the pattern in which religion and nationality are inseparably intertwined, but it has drawn upon the pattern of the region and intensified it. Social stratification along economic lines cannot rise to prevalence so long as the conditions of tribal law prevail. Yet, in spite of the ethnic basis of Eastern society, we find the apparent contradiction that race or color prejudice is foreign to Islam. The explanation is to be found partly in the ancient custom of adoption or naturalization; mainly, however, in the encouragement of conversion to a religion claimed to have universal applicability. Tribal patterns do not disappear, but they are overlaid by the conception of Islam as one great brotherhood. The rival tribes of ancient Mecca and Medina, the Quraish, the Aws, and the Khazrajs, had to adjust to the demand that adherence to the faith, rather than birth, was henceforth to be the factor deciding whether an individual was to be included within the community or not.9 Later, brown Javanese and black Africans were accepted under the banner of the prophet together with Arabs, Mongols, and Turks. Aided by the institution of polygyny, the Turks especially have drawn upon the female population of all subjected races, and on imported Negro women in addition, to fill their harems and bear their children. They have taken boys from Christian homes, to rear them in Islam and to have them incorporated into the ill-famed corps of the Janissaries, which was once the fiercest unit of their army. Many of the founders of modern Turkey had foreign mothers, as Enver, Talaat, and Kemal had Greek, Jewish, and Albanian mothers, respectively. If there ever has been a melting pot of races and peoples, it is certainly Turkey. The dividing line in the East runs not so much between classes and races as between conquerors and conquered, or believers and disbelievers. Disbelievers are tolerated but segregated and forced into little subsocieties of their own. Racial and economic differentiations emerge only in a secondary way. Accordingly, the millet may just as well be defined as a church organized into a nationality as a nationality organized into a church.10 Examples are abundant. For instance, the Bulgarians preserved their nationality under their Bulgarian exarch; the Greeks looked up to their patriarch, when he put on the robes of the Byzantine ruler, as if he had been their king. The same is true with regard to the Armenians. The Catholicos of the Armenians, says an Armenian author, “is recognized as their national as well 248

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as religious chief. In this dual capacity, at the time of the Congress of 1878, he had sent to Berlin a representative, whose intervention had procured the insertion of Article 61 in the treaty.”11 On the other hand, the Maronites were simply the followers of Maron, and it was only subsequently that they developed into what is now the bulk of the Lebanese people. A monk called Jacobus Baradaeus initiated the Jacobite church, which was later constituted as the Jacobite millet and perpetuated solely by endogamy, since proselytizing was forbidden to disbelievers. The followers of Nestorius, who had been declared a heretic at the Council of Chalcedon, formed the Nestorian church of the East. They expanded, at one time, far into central Asia; but in Persia and Turkey they were recognized as the Nestorian or Assyrian millet. Their remnants split into several denominations and today are known as the Assyrian people. For instance, the Elijah line of the Assyrians submitted to the Holy See in 1845, and the Turks were quick to recognize them as a separate millet under the name of Chaldeans. Numerous similar phenomena can be found within Islam, where, for instance, the sect of the Druzes, following a religious propagandist by the name of Darazi, developed into the Druze people and, temporarily, under the French mandate of Syria, even acquired some measure of territorial recognition.12 In other words, all these religious or quasi-religious groups came to live in close proximity to one another, married only among themselves, and thus became in the course of time secondary ecological and kinship units. They became peoples.13 As a matter of fact, a Moslem Assyrian or Armenian could not exist. He became, by means of his change of faith, a Turk or an Arab; he spoke, dressed, and behaved Turkish or Arabic. Even if an Armenian left his Armenian Gregorian church only to join one of the Protestant denominations that were proselytizing among the Armenians, he loosened, by so doing, the ties that bound him to the Armenian people. On the other hand, the Christian missions in Moslem lands were confronted with grave difficulties because for a Moslem to change his faith meant to lose his nationality. Another example is provided by the Turkish-Greek population exchange after the First World War. It proved to be well-nigh impossible to discover who was Turkish and who was Greek except by the test of religion. Every Greek Orthodox family of Asia Minor, no matter what their racial or ethnic origin, had to leave for Greece; every Mohammedan family in Greece, most of them probably of the same stock as their “Greek” compatriots, were to be resettled in Anatolia. Even the sect of the Doenmehs, originally Jewish followers of the false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, people who had embraced Islam but remained a strictly endogamous group, had to leave Salonica and take up their residence in Izmir. In brief, religion, which at first can be observed as replacing tribalism, at a later stage fosters a new growth of ethnicity. The institutional expression of this development used to be called a “millet” in the administrative practice of the Ottoman Turks. 249

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What can be seen in the purity almost of an “ideal type” in the countries formerly under Ottoman rule becomes somewhat blurred in the outlying areas of the “East” and it is by no means unknown even in the “West.” The majority of the Moslem subjects of France in Algeria never acquired French citizenship because this would have deprived them of their religio-political status as Moslems. If a Tartar, Jew, Pole, or Latvian in the Czarist Empire took to the Greek Orthodox cross, he not only ceased to be a Mohammedan, Israelite, Roman Catholic, or Lutheran, respectively, but he also lost membership among his people and became a Russian. In Yugoslavia, the Roman Catholic Croats and Slovenes, on the one hand, and the Greek Orthodox Serbs, on the other, have grown together politically, but the cultural divide persists. Roman Catholic Germans in the formerly Prussian province of Poznan tended to become Polonized while the Mazurs in East Prussia, speaking a Polish dialect but being Lutherans, had a German national consciousness. In the old German Empire, the “Permanent Diet,” which convened in Regensburg from 1663–1806, was divided into a Corpus Catholicorum and a Corpus Evangelicorum, and religious division has remained one of the obstacles standing in the way of German political unification. Farther west, the strongest cases that come to mind are those of the Irish and the French Canadians. It has been said that if the English had stayed with Rome, the Irish would have turned Protestant.14 In French Canada, the Archbishop of Quebec in some ways functions as a political, in addition to being a religious, representative of the French-Canadian people. In the United States, the Mormons in Utah might have developed from “sect” to “peoplehood,” if it had not been for the late formation of the group in the railroad age.15 These are only some examples out of many. In a number of cases religion is a protective cloak for nationality; in others ethnicity is born of sectarian separation. In all instances the institution of the “millet” serves as a useful reference. To sum up our deliberations again in the words of Sir John Hope Simpson: When the Assyrians petitioned the Council of the League [of Nations] that they might be allowed to live as a millet as they had done in the past, the Permanent Mandates Commission, taking a Western European view, concluded that the adoption of such a resolution would imperil the unity of the Iraqui State.16 In these words, which refer to the numerically insignificant but highly representative people of the Assyrians, we find the clash between East and West expressed in classical terms. II We can now draw some conclusions as to major trends in our time. The society of the East, based as it has been on the time-consecrated concepts of the folk and the family, has broken down, and the territorial society of 250

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modern nationalism—founded upon the principles established in the late Roman Empire, which were recovered by the French Revolution and centered around the marketplace and the military imperium—has had the upper hand throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The treaties that ended the First World War have carried the French nation-state far into the East. Commercialism has opened up vast colonial areas and brought peoples and races, who hitherto had lived side by side in a merely symbiotic relationship, into close contact with one another. Postcolonial nationalism has taken up the same trend with increased intensity. Territorial nationalism has put dynamite to folk societies and their diversified ancestral rites everywhere; it has conquered the minds and hearts of Eastern youth from Morocco to Indonesia. Turkey, once the seat of the caliphate, has become a lay republic combining the best and the worst of both Germany and France. The Turkish regime has killed Armenians, expelled Greeks, impoverished Jews, and attempts to “Turkify” what is left. Similarly, Nasser’s Egypt has forced its Jewish, Italian, and Greek minorities out of the country, and even the ancient Coptic community is now discriminated against. In Algeria, whatever chances existed for the peaceful coexistence of Moslems, Christians, and Jews are shattered. To be sure, there are exceptions to the rule. In Cyprus, Greeks and Turks have reached a tentative and exceedingly shaky modus vivendi— but not a common nationhood. In Lebanon, the various Christian and Moslem subgroups are jealously preserving their autonomy. The state of Israel retains the “millet” concept of separate ecclesiastical jurisdiction for religious communities, as far as matters of personal status are concerned; as a consequence, a territorially conceived Israeli nationality is as yet but faintly indicated. In India, Pakistan, Ceylon, and Burma, religious as well as linguistic divisions abound and are being constantly reinforced. However, the three smaller states of Cyprus, Lebanon, and Israel owe their existence largely to a precarious balance of external forces while the Indian subcontinent is in internal turmoil, with its definite political shape not yet decided. It is possible that in India, as well as in Europe, the nation-state of French revolutionary vintage is being superseded by a more inclusive territorial loyalty. In the collision between “state” and both “tribe” and “millet,”17 the city-state, later the nation-state, of the West has emerged victorious. It is now the tree that overshadows East and West. At the same time, the record of political nationalism looks like a failure. The principle of the identity of nationality and territory has brought human misery to the East, where ethnic groups interlock in such an inextricable way that dogmatic minds are driven to despair. As a result, tradition has been replaced as a guiding principle not so much by reason as by coercion. Populations that have lived side by side for centuries, even in the face of frequent conflict, have been uprooted from their homes, driven from one country to the other, starved and butchered by the millions, only to please the jealous God of Uniformity, who tolerates no 251

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other gods beside him. To be sure, the world we live in seems to be rapidly moving along the line of expanding political and economic units, such as the “Common Market,” the “Inter-American System,” the “Atlantic Community,” and so forth. But this move from a familial to an ever-larger territorial base in society must not make us overlook the fact that the more intimate forces that have been operating throughout history are not dead; they are only pushed beneath the surface. They will reassert themselves because they are bound up with human nature. Where there is change, there must also be continuity, if normlessness is to be avoided. We must therefore note the need for cultural autonomy in the face of territorial unification. Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

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John Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey (London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 540–41. Cf. C.D. Macartney, National States and National Minorities (London, 1934), 284. These communities had no rights in a Moslem state, but were exempted from attack and “protected” on payment of a jizya, or poll-tax, as provided by the Koran, (9:29). Cf. Reuben Levy, The Social Structure of Islam, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 66–67. R. J .H. Gottheil, “Dhimmis and Moslems in Egypt,” in Robert F. Harper, ed., Old Testament and Semitic Studies in Memory of William Rainey Harper, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908), II, 351–414; Reuben Levy, Introduction to the Sociology of Islam, 2 vols. (London: William & Norgate, 1931–33), esp. vol. 1, chap. 1: “The Grades of Society”; Hamilton A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, 2 vols. (LondonNew York-Toronto: 1950), vol. 2, chap. 14; G. E. v. Grunebaum, Medieval Islam—A Study in Cultural Orientation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), 180ff.; cf. also Andre Chouraqui, La Condition Juridique de l’Israelite Marocain (Paris: Presse du Livre Francais, 1950), 47–55. Salo W. Baron, The Jewish Community, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1942), vol. 1, 118ff., 157ff. W. A. Wigram, The Assyrians and Their Neighbors (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1929), 51. Cf. Malech, History of the Syrian Nation and the EvangelicalApostolic Church of the East (Minneapolis: 1910) and John Joseph, Nestorians and their Muslim Neighbors—a Study of Western Influences on their Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961). For other definitions of “millet” see James Thayer Addison, The Christian Approach to the Moslem: A Historical Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 62, 113; Macartney, National States, 58, 64, 284; Elliot Grinnel Mears, ed., Modern Turkey (New York: Macmillan, 1924), pp. 98, 121, 419; The Statesman’s Yearbook (London: 1940), 1350. A. Hourani’s statement that only three “millets,” the Greek, the Armenian and the Jewish, were organized prior to the nineteenth century is irrelevant in the present context: Cf. A. Hourani, “Race and Related Ideas in the Near East” in Andrew W. Lind, Race Relations in World Perspective (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1955), 116–144; cf., also, John Joseph, Nestorians, 20, 27, who quotes from “Religion and Nationality,” but fails to acknowledge the source. There is no definition of “millet” in the Encyclopedia of Islam.

Religion and Nationality

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

Levy The Social Structure of Islam, p. 192. William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (New York: Macmillan, 1927), esp. lect. 2: “The Nature of the Religious Community and the Relation of the Gods to Their Worshippers,” 28ff.; cf. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: Allen & Unwin, 1954); now available in paperback edition (New York: Collier Books, 1961). Reuben Levy, Social Structure, p. 271. Wigram, Assyrians, pp. 51, 77, 93, 157, 161, 162, et passim. Wigram considers only the sequence: nationality-church although some of his examples would seem to indicate the sequence church-nationality as well. Boghos Nubar Pasha, “Armenians,” in Mears, ed., Modern Turkey, p. 70. Philipp K. Hitti, The Origins of the Druze People and Religion (“Columbia University Oriental Studies,” vol. 28 [New York, 1928]). Leo Dominian, The Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe (New York: Holt, 1917), 271ff. As for the Irish case in the United Stages, cf. Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy, “Single or Triple Melting-Pot: Intermarriage Trends in New Haven, 1870–1940,” American Journal of Sociology, 49, no. 4 (January 1944): 331–39, and Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 165–207. The complexity of the development of the Mormons from “near-sect” to “near-nation” is set forth in Thomas F. O’Dea, “Mormonism and the Avoidance of Sectarian Stagnation: A Study of Church, Sect and Incipient Nationality,” American Journal of Sociology, 60, no. 3 (Nov. 1954): 285–293. Cf. E. K. Francis, “The Russian Mennonites: From Religious Sect to Ethnic Group,” American Journal of Sociology, 54, no. 2 (Sept.1948): 101–107. Simpson, The Refugee Problem, p. 541, referring to the League of Nations, Minutes of The Mandates Committee, 22d Session, 43, 375. Macartney, National States, p. 284, relates that the representative of the British Colonial Office contributed to this wish of the Assyrians the splendidly ingenious remark that “the real difficulty lay in the fact that the Assyrians seemed to desire to live now as they had lived in the past.” The unhistorical insistence of the Mandate Commission, certainly, did not provide for them any decent life at all. The massacres in Iraq were soon to follow. Rene Maunier, The Sociology of Colonies: Introduction to the Study of Race Contact, Series: International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction, ed. Karl Mannheim, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), vol. 2, 556ff., et passim. Cf. Joseph, Nestorians, p. 148.

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20 Adolph Fischhof and the Problem of the Reconciliation of Nationalities One of the purposes of this paper is to offer an introduction to the dramatic events that happened in the Habsburg Empire, especially in Austria, in the years 1866–1871, that is, in the years in which Bismarck’s German Reich was created. The creation of Bismarck’s Germany—and concomitantly the separation of the Germans in Austria from the newly founded Reich—will be seen not as an isolated event but as the starting point of a chain reaction, which in the course of time led to the First World War and to the destruction of both the Hohenzollern and Habsburg Empires. Moreover, in the year 1869, in the midst of the tumultuous half-decade 1866–1871, a book-length pamphlet, entitled Oesterreich und die Buergschaften seines Bestandes (Austria and the Guarantees for its Existence),1 by Dr. Adolph Fischhof was published in which the author attempted to show a way toward the solution of the problem of the multinational state. What Dr. Fischhof intended to demonstrate was that several nationalities ought to be able to coexist in freedom in a single state, or else, the cohesion of the state was in danger. In other words, he wanted to show that it was possible to achieve a situation of cultural pluralism in the face of political unification. That is the centerpiece of our deliberations. The attempt failed, as similar attempts, nearer to our time, in Asia Minor, Poland, Algeria, and Angola have failed, with others, too numerous to enumerate, still hanging in the balance. In the case of Austria, the failure was sealed when Albert Schaeffle’s efforts to achieve a solution of the Czech-German conflict in 1871 were frustrated. It must be added that both Fischhof and Schaeffle were scholars and intellectuals, and marginal intellectuals at that. A sharp light is thereby cast on the role of intellectuals in politics, their strengths and their weaknesses. I consider Fischhof first and foremost, Schaeffle only as an afterthought. Adolph (Abraham) Fischhof was born in Alt-Ofen (Obuda), now a suburb of Budapest in 1816, of German-speaking Jewish parents. He attended the Piaristen Gymnasium where the language of instruction was German; 255

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however, Latin was intensively taught and the Magyar language was beginning to be reconstructed. In this period, Count Franz Szechenyi founded the Hungarian National Library, a precursor of the National Museum. In addition, young Fischhof enjoyed an intensive Jewish education in Hebrew, the Bible, and Talmud.2 I have devoted three pioneering publications to proving that Fischhof—contrary to conventional assumption—was not an “assimilationist,” but a thoroughly conscious and even religious Jew, although of the liberal, not of the Orthodox, persuasion and that he was the fountainhead of much of Jewish national thinking in Austria, even if his cultural and political consciousness was clearly German.3 Fischhof studied medicine in Vienna and started his medical career there. Politically, his role in the Revolution of 1848 is wellknown: a spontaneous speech of the then 31-year-old Sekundararzt in the courtyard of the Diet of Lower Austria channeled the uprising along constitutional lines; Fischhof became Chairman of the “Security Committee” and a leading member of the Kremsier Reichstag; after the failure of the Revolution, he was prosecuted for high treason, but acquitted after a prolonged pretrial confinement. In the present context, these events are merely the prelude to Fischhof’s journalistic and propagandistic activities in the 1860s and after when he, although otherwise a sympathizer of the centralistic Liberal Party, became the recognized and frequently consulted expert on multinational coexistence and thereby of a federal construction of government in Austria. We must now visualize the situation in Austria in the year 1869. On the battlefield of Koeniggraetz (or Sadowa), Prussia had emerged as the paramount power in Germany; as a result, Austria was excluded from the German Bund. The compromise with Hungary of 1867 gave the Magyars clear domination over the Trans-Leithanian half of the empire (from the river Leitha which formed the border) against the prospect of a German predominance in Austria (Cisleitania or Die im Reichsrath vertretenen Koenigreiche und Laender). At the same time, a constitution was granted, with the vote tied to property qualifications and consequently with a guaranteed liberal majority in Parliament. On that basis, the Liberal Constitutional party intended to establish a centralized and linguistically German regime in Austria, but formidable obstacles lay in the path of such an enterprise. The Germans were in a minority of 4:6 in Cisleitania; they had a clear majority only in Vienna and in the Alpine regions; the Slavic servant people (Bedientenvoelker), so-called, developed their own intelligentsia; almost all the Crownlands had a mixed national population; and the intermixture of the linguistic groups prevented a clear territorial separation. Austria of 1867 was a multinational state with a German minority. Fischhof ’s argument in Oesterreich und die Buergschaften seines Bestandes (1869) starts at this point. I am now going to summarize Fischhof ’s trend of thought, as it emerges from the pamphlet, and the suggestions that are contained in it. Fischhof poses the question how it comes that the free constitution that has been adopted is 256

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“not habitable” and he suggests that it was not “the defiance of those that are supposed to dwell in it” that was at fault, but a “deficiency in the structure.”4 The author proposes to investigate the problem with the objectivity of a natural scientist, that is, in the way of a medical man who diagnoses an illness. Indeed, Fischhof reveals in the text and the quotes of the pamphlet a thorough knowledge of the social science literature of his day. He refers to Montesquieu, Comte, John Stuart Mill, Robert von Mohl, Lorenz von Stein, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Heeren, Carey, Eoetvoes, Vollgraf, and others;5 he was aware of Marx. Austria appears to the diligent investigator in Fischhof like a collective personality with a Janus face: liberal with regard to the rights of the individual, thoughtlessly tyrannic with regard to the life of the peoples of Austria—a state composed of nationalities that attempts to appear as a nation-state.6 To be sure, minorities might be treated unjustly in nation-states; but the disregard of the interests of a parliamentary minority becomes a disaster, if the minority represents an ethnically defined party or parties and if these parties represent a majority of the population. He argues that Austria, composed, as it is, only of minorities, cannot afford to be unjust toward any of them because none of the different nationalities is powerful enough to dominate all the others and to impress its stamp on the country as a whole. The conclusion is that a multinational state can only be organized as a confederation. Fischhof reviews the ethnic as well as the territorial components of the Austrian conglomerate in order to assay the chances of a confederation. In the present context, the ethnic components are of prime importance and among these, again, the emphasis is on the Germans in Austria because they were the largest and the leading group, the group to whom Fischhof belonged and whose representatives in the Liberal Constitutional party he wished to persuade of the need for a new course. Fischhof starts with the statement that a change in the mood of the Germans in Austria had occurred in the wake of the peace agreement with Prussia.7 As a consequence of that agreement, the Germans in Austria had been torn away from an association that had lasted for more than a millennium. They now found themselves isolated in the midst of a majority of Slavic peoples. An “anxious and uncanny feeling had crept up” on them and they were uncertain about the course they should pursue. Fischhof discerns four factions: the remaining faithful of the Greater Germany (grossdeutsch) idea, aiming at Austrian leadership in a united Germany; the representatives of a special union between Austria and the south German states, possibly within a loose confederation of all German states; the radical nationalists or “hotheads” (Heisssporne) who strove to be united with Germany at all costs and irrespective of the maintenance of a separate Austrian entity; and a fourth group to which Fischhof belongs. The third group is of particular interest because Fischhof includes in it “the fanatics who hate Austria,” that is, the nationalists and racists who were not only insensitive to the existence of the monarchy but became its actual and 257

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deliberate destroyers. That was the group, small at the time, that now stands out as the party of Hitler. The fourth group, however, speaking through Fischhof, proposes a twofold solution: a treaty relation with Bismarck’s German Reich in foreign affairs and a democratically constituted multinational federal union internally. Every attempt to proceed otherwise, that is, to impose a unitary state upon the peoples of Austria—a state in which the parliamentary majority, driven by panic fear, oppresses the minorities and stands for the majority of the population—would be likely to provoke the resistance of the Slavs, dynamite the monarchy out of existence, and entail the abandonment of all dispersed German-speaking settlements throughout the empire. To unite the Alpine and Sudeten regions of Austria in their entirety with Germany would incorporate hostile Czechs, Slovenes and Italians, but forsake the Germans in Galizia, Bukovina, Transylvania and expose Poland and Hungary to possible Russian invasion. As a consequence, Czech nationality, which could be preserved within a federated Austria, would be obliterated in a Pan Slavic embrace. Once these three bulwarks of the Occident had fallen, nothing would then hinder Russia to proceed toward the Bosporus and the Mediterranean Sea, to cut off Germany from the Adria, and to settle the northeastern regions of Germany, as formerly, with Slavic peoples. Germany would thus be “squeezed” (erdrueckt) and Europe made “Kosackish.” Fischhof reminds his readers that such had been already the somber prediction of Napoleon. “Those who leave the sentry,” Fischhof continues, “will make themselves guilty of a grave dereliction of duty and the penalty will respond to the guilt.”8 We know today that the analysis was sharp and clear and that the penalty has been paid. Perhaps, the consequences have not yet run their full course. Fischhof adds that German cultural interests in Austria have no more dangerous enemies than their violent protectors.9 It may be possible for 50 million Russians to oppress five million Poles, but the Germans in Austria could only exhaust themselves in a futile contest.10 In the course of the controversy, the non-German nationalities would seek their salvation in an alliance with Russia. Conversely, if Slavic cultural endeavors were furthered, chances would be that the German language will be adopted as a lingua franca and that the Slavic peoples were going to find in a federated multinational state the guarantor of their liberty. Philosophically, Fischhof ’s position is a combination of liberalism and romanticism: one might say it is a liberal interpretation of romantic thought. Fischhof was an adherent of classical liberalism inasmuch as he stood for freedom of thought and expression for the individual or, conversely, for freedom from unwanted guardianship by the government. He was a follower of romantic philosophy, possibly of historicism, inasmuch as he saw in the idea of nationality the predominant element in the spiritual atmosphere of his time.11 The French Revolution had liberated oppressed individuals; now, Fischhof believes, one is witness to the awakening of hitherto “neglected 258

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nationalities.” Fischhof turned against the conventional liberal misunderstanding that progress and nationality (in the sense of ethnicity) are incompatible.12 Oppressed peoples, he maintains, will no more serve the cause of freedom than oppressed individuals: their minds will be crippled. Fischhof recognized a condescending and in effect discriminatory attitude behind the notion that “lower nationalities” ought to be sacrificed on the altar of civilization. “Lower nationalities” were understood to be the cultures of “ahistorical peoples” who were called by that name because they had no political history or were supposed to have had no political history. Fischhof knew that a position of this kind was an expression of national conceit, but conversely, he extended his aversion to those who are ready to abandon what is their own. At one point he says: “A people that disappears without being aware of what happens offers a sad view—but a people that were to facilitate its own cultural demise would be a disgusting spectacle.”13 Fischhof recognized in language the spiritual home of peoplehood because language, as he asserts quoting Wilhelm von Humboldt, is nothing less than “the organ of thought, the very creator of thought.”14 Consequently, a people that is robbed of its language must be considered as having been condemned to death and freedom without life would have lost its meaning. An awakening nationality, like searching youth, ought to be treated with exquisite considerateness; it must not be ridiculed or in any way impeded in its development. While nothing but rational comprehension is needed in diagnosis, feeling and fantasy are required in treatment because diagnosis is concerned with suffering, but treatment with the sufferer.15 The medical practitioner in Fischhof transfers in such a way to statecraft what he has learned in his experience with individuals. It follows that a constitutionally organized multinational state must respect the spiritual individuality of a people. Fischhof contends that a theory of the multinational state does not exist and he offers an outline of the principles according to which such a theory could be constructed. The guiding consideration is that the nation-state is to be thought of as a “national family,” but the multinational state as an “association of peoples.” Government and nationality coincide in the nation-state; such a state is founded on the unity of descent, sentiment, language, fate, and historical memory or what Fischhof prefers to call the remembrance of a glorious past.16 The multinational state must make do without the coincidence of government and nationality and instead is based on the association of interests. These interests are of a political and economic, but also of a spiritual nature inasmuch as they rest on the mutual recognition of language as the expression of peoplehood. In a way, Fischhof goes further when he suggests, following Montesquieu, that even an offense to the mode of thinking of a people must be avoided in a situation that is predicated on an association of interests.17 In all these aspects it is the recognition of the particular interests of its peoples that is the guarantor of the continued existence of a multinational state. Fischhof quotes the sociologist and political scientist 259

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Robert von Mohl at this point in order to confirm his notion that the analysis of the requirements for a multinational state leads to the conclusion that its federal construction is a postulate of its nature.18 Fischhof turns to a thorough investigation of the principles, laws and ordinances that serve to safeguard the cultural autonomy as well as the political equality of the three major nationalities of Switzerland.19 He refers also to the federal institutions of the United States although he realizes that both size and the absence of politically organized nationalities sets the United States apart. But he recognizes that the federal structure of the United States offers a guarantee for the cohesion of a widely diversified country. He deals at length with a variety of objections to a federal constitution for Austria and the reasons why previous attempts at the solution of Austria’s problems have failed.20 He presents his own proposals, namely, a nationality law, a curiat system of voting, a two-chamber parliament, and a national court of arbitration.21 Of these, the two first items are the most important, but all suggestions interlock. The nationality law is supposed to guarantee equal rights for every language group in education, administration, legislation, jurisdiction and religious affairs in any one of the crown lands (Kronlaender), that is, the territorial state of Austria. The protection of these rights (focused on the use of one’s language) is being secured through a curiat-system, meaning that deliberation in a territorial diet would be in an undivided body, but that votes would be taken in separate nationality curia, with the proviso that a law will pass only if a majority in both curias agrees. However, the curiat-vote need not be applied in all cases, but only in those where nationality interests are in question. Nationality interests, while not easy to pinpoint, would be in question in matters of education, constitutional amendments, election laws, and all laws pertaining to language. The principle of the curiat-vote could be extended if three-quarters of the representatives of a national minority request it. The latter provision seems of importance because divergent economic considerations will undoubtedly come to the fore in situations of nationality conflict. In municipal and district representative bodies the vote should likewise be curiatim, as far as educational and linguistic matters are concerned. Furthermore, district lines in ethnically mixed areas should be redrawn in such a way as to create areas that are as far as possible ethnically homogeneous. Fischhof refers at this point to a pamphlet of his on municipal autonomy that had appeared in 1868.22 For Austria as a whole, Fischhof suggests a chamber of deputies, directly and universally elected, and an upper house of representatives composed of delegates of the territorial states (Kronlaender), with equal representation for each of them, whether large or small. Finally, there should be a national court of arbitration. In each case that comes before the court, there should be three judges, one each from the contending parties, in this case nationalities, with a third judge coming from a neutral nationality. If we compare Fischhof ’s suggestions with legislation referring to language rights in various countries at the present time, for instance in Finland, Belgium, 260

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Switzerland, and South Africa, possibly Carinthia and Alto Adige (South Tyrol), we will find that in some countries the territorial principle prevails, in others the personal principle, but that the curiat vote has been adopted in none of them. There are other countries that might be considered in a comparative consideration, especially India and various countries of black Africa. In fact, the majority of the member countries of the United Nations would turn out to have problems of a related kind. To not forget the United States, the problem of the linguistic rights of the Spanish speaking population might reach an acute stage in the near future at least in some parts of the country. Regarding the neighboring country of Canada, wa may consult the Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1967), according to which the linguistic rights of the French-speaking minority are insufficiently safeguarded in law all over Canada, except in Quebec (where the majority of the population is French); and where these rights are safeguarded, they are weakly enforced.23 Besides, the English speakers in Canada are not readier to learn French than the German speakers of Bohemia were to learn Czech. It should be noted that Fischhof looked upon the peaceful solution of the nationality problem internally and the reduction of armaments internationally as precondition for the solution of the “social question.” Fischhof considered the integration of the laboring classes to be the major problem of his time. He indicated that much in articles entitled “On the Reduction of Continental Armies,” published in the Neue Freie Presse in 1875.24 Fischhof failed to share the belief of the socialists that the nationality problem would solve itself as soon as the proletarians of all countries had succeeded in overthrowing the capitalistic system.25 Surely, a conflict situation arises, if a disadvantaged working class coincides with an oppressed nationality, but Fischhof accorded prime efficacy not to class consciousness but to sentiments connected with nationality. He feared that a destructive explosion might be inevitable, if these sentiments were not satisfied. A comparison of Fischhof ’s position with the position of Albert Schaeffle is called for because the efforts of these two men were parallel and antagonistic at the same time and because they failed precisely on that account. Fischhof ’s suggestions received attention in the bureaucracy— Count Potocki even offered him a Cabinet post on condition that he become a Catholic26—but they were rebuffed, ridiculed, and combated in his own liberal camp. Schaeffle’s failure in a related attempt, apart from foreign policy considerations, was likewise due to opposition from the German liberal camp, but in his case the opposition was provoked by Schaeffle’s antiliberal stand. What both men had in common was their marginality in the political system. If Adolph Fischhof was a medical man turned political scientist, Albert Schaeffle was a political economist and sociologist from the start, indeed, one of the early figures in the story of sociology in Germany. If Fischhof was a Jew from Hungary, Schaeffle was a Protestant from Wuerttemberg.27 Born 261

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in Nuertingen, Wuerttemberg as the son of a schoolteacher who died early, he attended the famous Tuebinger Stift, among whose pupils had been Hegel, Schelling, Hoelderlin and Schaeffle’s fellow sociologist Robert von Mohl. If Fischhof entered political combat by force of circumstances, Schaeffle was a frustrated politician on his own account throughout his life. In his younger years, he was a member of the Wuerttemberg Diet and of the German Zollparlament as a member of a moderately conservative group of deputies. But he failed to fit into a party mold. He was against parochialism and particularism and hence opposed to reactionary stubbornness. He was an adherent of the principles of parliamentary democracy, but disgusted by radical slogan mongering. He was a sharp critic of economic liberalism of the Manchester type and of the domination of economic legislation by capitalistic interests. Schaeffle was a socialist of sorts, partly as an adherent of a cooperative society, partly as a proponent of planned intervention in the economic process in the interest of the working class; he was the author of a brilliant pamphlet on The Quintessence of Socialism,28 but not a partisan of Marxian socialism because he rejected the labor theory of value and the nationalization of production. However, he was sympathetic to Lasalle’s kind of anticapitalistic stance.29 In his early study entitled Man and Merchandise in the National Economy (1861) as well as in subsequent writings, he held up an “ethicalanthropological” against a “chrematistic” point of view in economic theory.30 He was an anti-Darwinian social reformer and a theoretician of social security legislation.31 However, unlike Fischhof, Schaeffle was not primarily interested in the problem of nationalities. When he came to Vienna in 1868, to occupy a chair of political economy by the side of Lorenz von Stein, he was revolted by the pervasive influence of a clique of political and financial operators, which he called the “money barons,” and since most of the magnates of the banking and newspaper business were Jews, Schaeffle’s revulsion assumed a strongly anti-Semitic tinge. The moneyed interests were represented by the Liberal Constitutional party which called itself Verfassungspartei because it upheld the principles of the constitution of 1867. In contrast, Schaeffle, although not a proponent of feudal interests, nevertheless was allied to them. Regarding the Verfassungspartei, he was cast in an adversary role as soon as he joined the Cabinet Hohenwart in 1871. He was appointed Minister of Commerce and entrusted with the task of negotiating a constitutional agreement in Bohemia. Schaeffle’s relation to the nationality problem was one of remote objectivity. In his posthumously published Abriss der Soziologie (1906),32 which contains Schaeffle’s mature statements about matters of nationality, he envisages two enforced and two peaceful solutions in situations of nationality strife: if either expulsion of the minority or cession of the territory inhabited by the minority, mostly as a result of war, are to be avoided, there can either be amalgamation through commercium and connubium or a twofold organization of common affairs. Schaeffle qualifies that statement by adding that amalgamation may 262

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occur only in the upper layers of society where bilingualism should be as easy to achieve in the initial stage as the thorough adoption of a lingua franca in the ultimate stage. Clearly, Schaeffle looks upon language as a means of communication rather than, as Fischhof did, as the expression of an inner urge. Schaeffle concedes, however, that the imposition of a language in public life will fail to lead to amalgamation, if a different language of intimate social intercourse remains intact. In this late testimony of 1906, Schaeffle confesses that the same considerations guided him in the months of his participation in the Cabinet Hohenwart. Schaeffle’s main aim was to achieve “a corporative society in contrast to an atomistic economic individualism,”33 that is, practically speaking, the elimination of the influence of the centralistic Liberal party and of the moneyed interests represented by the Liberal party. In contrast, Fischhof’s desire was to preserve and extend the achievements of the liberal era by the adoption of the federal principle, which, in turn, entailed the recognition of nationality. Thus, the two men worked at cross purposes philosophically although they could have cooperated in the solution of the problem at hand, namely, the conciliation of German and Czech interests in Bohemia. Nevertheless, the nationality bill that was worked out in the “Bohemian Compromise” between Schaeffle and the old Czech leaders, contained much that was conceived along the line of Fischhof ’s proposals in Oesterreich und die Buergschaften seines Bestandes. These proposals were known both to Schaeffle and to the chief Czech negotiator, Francis Ladislas Rieger.34 According to the compromise, the Bohemian Diet was to be divided into two national curiae, and it was stipulated that each curia should be able to prevent the adoption of a law by a two-thirds majority against it. There was a provision for separate budgets for the cultural requirements of both the Czech and the German groups and a provision for the creation of districts that would be nationally nearly homogeneous, yet with the additional requirement that the use of the second national language should be recognized in official public intercourse, if at least one-fifth of the population so requested. Both languages should be used in any administrative function throughout Bohemia.35 So far, so good; but Fischhof joined German public opinion in sharp condemnation not only of the accompanying “Fundamental Articles” (see below) that might have replaced German with Czech supremacy, but also of a provision that an appointment to any public position requiring academic training should be made dependent upon the command of both national languages by the applicant. Obviously this provision would have favored Czech applicants who were bilingual in any case. The point seems minor in retrospect and one can say that Fischhof made a mistake at this stage even in the context of the entire “Bohemian Compromise”. Fischhof ’s opposition, in all likelihood, was motivated as much by his aversion against the strong feudal and clerical bias that was the hallmark of the Hohenwart regime as by his objections against the provisions of the nationality bill as such.36 263

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Fischhof ’s actual test came later, in 1878, when the “Emmersdorf Discussions” failed because of the intransigence of the German liberal leader, Dr. Herbst, and in 1882, when the attempt to create a federal and liberal Deutsche Volkspartei miscarried because of a violent counterdemonstration by nationalistic opponents.37 Fischhof trusted in the strength of his arguments to persuade his fellow liberals to accept federalism rather than in the combination of federalistic forces irrespective of ideological differences. But Schaeffle’s mistake was more crucial and its deleterious effect more farreaching. Schaeffle attempted to embrace too much and ended up holding nothing. He may have succeeded, if he had introduced only the nationality bill. But as part of an entire legislative package he also introduced the “Fundamental Articles,” which would have destroyed the unity of Cisleithanian Austria by setting up an independent Bohemian entity within Austria.38 The merits or demerits of the scheme are not in question here. But by introducing the “Fundamental Articles,” Schaeffle aroused the opposition of the Magyar politicians who saw Magyar supremacy in Hungary endangered along with the dualistic compromise of 1867. He called up as well the objections of powerful voices in Berlin (Bismarck) and in Vienna (Beust) who feared the rise of radical German nationalism as a result of the double frustration of the Austrian Germans: they were shaken because of their separation from the Reich and apprehensive on account of the specter that haunted them of domination by a Slavic majority.39 However, radical German nationalism, culminating in National-Socialism, arose anyway in the wake of the failure of the attempt to reorganize the Empire on a federal basis and to conciliate the nationalities.40 All later attempts of the Emperor to patch up the structure of the empire were bound to be half-hearted. Liberalism could not be salvaged and race took the place of language as a determinant of nationality.41 A sense of frustration and despair spread throughout public and private life, nipped in the bud each and every constructive activity and unleashed aggressions that were not only to destroy the monarchy but to shake civilization. Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 264

Adolph Fischhof, Oesterreich und die Buergschaften seines Bestandes (Wien: 1869) Richard Charmatz, Adolf Fischhof, Das Lebensbild eines oesterreichischen Politikers (Stuttgart: 1910) Werner J. Cahnman, “Adolf Fischhof and his Jewish Followers,” Yearbook IV of the Leo Baeck Institute (London: 1959), pp. 111–139. Cf., apart from the paper in the Yearbook of the L.B.I., the following publications: “Adolf Fischhof ’s Juedische Persoenlichkeit und Weltanschauung, Kairos 2, (1972): 110–120; “Adolf Fischhof als Verfechter der Nationalitaet und seine Auswirkung auf das juedisch-politische Denken in Oesterreich,” Studia Judaica Austriaca I. (Wien 1974), pp. 78–91. Fischhof, Oesterreich, p. 3. Ibid., p. 66ff, 72, 87, 102, 112, 135, 181, 213.

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

Ibid., p. 2, 6. Ibid., pp. 11ff. Ibid., p. 34, 35. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 54ff. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 59ff. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 67ff. Ibid., p. 102.22. Ibid., p. 72ff. Ibid., pp. 88–170. Ibid., pp. 170–186. Ibid., pp. 186–197. In Fischhof ’s “Nationalitaeten-Gesetzentwurf ” of 1867, the following qualifications had been added: All federal and territorial offices should use the language spoken by the majority of the local population, but the minority language should be admitted; communication of territorial with federal offices should be in the German language; parallel classes with the minority language as a language of instruction should be introduced in linguistically mixed territories; the second language should be taught beside the language of instruction. Charmatz, Adolf Fischhof, p. 201 ff. and Appendix. Fischhof, Zur Erweiterung der Munizipalautonomie (Wien: 1868), Fischhof, p. 192. Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Book 1. (Ottawa: 1967), esp. pp. 84–132. A review of the experience of four other countries is found on pp. 75–84. In Neue Freie Presse, Sept. 26 and 28, 1975. [The best-known Viennese newspaper. Eds.] Fischhof was acquainted with socialist literature, especially with the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lasalle. See Charmatz, Adolf Fischhof, p. 289. Fischhof’s position, which differed from the position taken by the socialists, emerges clearly from the motto of his book (quoted from the Belgian author Leon van de Kendere): “Les politiques qui pretendent faire abstraction des races [=peoples], errent dans les tenebres.” Charmatz, Adolf Fischhof, p. 250. Albert E. F. Schaeffle, Aus meinem Leben, 2 vols. (Berlin: 1905), Book 1, pp. 63.ff.; Richard Charmatz, Oesterreichs innere Geschichte on 1848 bis 1907, Book 1, 2d ed. (Leipzig: 1911), p. 107. Schaeffle was appointed Professor of Economics in Tuebingen 1860, in Vienna 1868; he was Minister of Commerce in the Cabinet Hohenwart. Schaeffle returned to Stuttgart 1871 as a private scholar. Schaeffle, Die Quintessenz des Sozialismus (Gotha: 1874) cf. Kapitalismus und Sozialismus (Tuebingen: 1870). On Schaeffle’s sociological position, compare Eckart Pankoke, Sociale Bewegung-Sociale Frage-Sociale Politik (Stuttgart: 1970), esp. pp. 151–157, 172–174, 188–194. Schaeffle, “Albert Schulze-Delitzsch und Lasalle,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, Heft 3. (1863). 265

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30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

266

Schaeffle, “Mensch und Gut in der Volkswirtschaft oder der ethnischanthropologische und der chrematistische Standpunkt in der Nationaloekonomie,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, Heft 4 (1861). In der introduction to his main work, Bau und Leben des sozialen Koerpers, 4 vols., 1875–78, Schaeffle says that he pursued the biological leads that he had found in the works of Comte, Spencer, Littre and Lilienfeld, but that he tried to avoid the dangers of analogical thinking and that his attention as a sociologist was drawn to collectivities, not to individuals, as effective forces in social life. He turned sharper against Social Darwinism in his article on invalidity insurance in Allgemeine Zeitung, Oct. 7 and 8, 1881. This article, which contains a theoretical justification of social security legislation, aroused the attention of Bismarck. Cf. Karl Tuschinsky, Schaeffle’s Werdegang als Sozialpolitiker. Diss. Hamburg 1921. Schaeffle, Abriss der Soziologie, ed. Karl Buecher (Tuebingen: 1906), pp. 219–20. Cf. Schaeffle, “Ein bedeutsamer Vorschlag zur Schlichtung des Nationalitaetenstreits in Oesterreich” Zeitschrift fuer die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, 58, 902, pp. 720–736. The reference is to Rudolf Springer (=Karl Renner). Der Kampf der oesterreichischen Nationen um den Staat (Vienna: 1902). As is well known, Renner refers largely to Fischhof. Schaeffle, Aus meinem Leben, vol. 2, p. 76. Schaeffle refers to his paper on “Kapitalismus und Sozialismus.” Charmatz, Adolf Fischhof, pp. 265 f., 268, 270, referring to the correspondence between Fischhof and Rieger. Robert Kann, The Multinational Empire, 2 vols. (New York: 1950), vol. 1. pp. 181–191; cf. Charmatz, Oesterreichs innere Geschichte, vol. 1, pp. 106–116. Charmatz, Adolf Fischhof, pp. 265, 273ff., 275ff. In a letter of Oct. 15, 1871 to Alexander Scharf, real estate operator and editor of the “Wiener Sonn-und Montags-Zeitung,” Fischhof emphasizes that he is apprehensive regarding the “Fundamental articles,” among other things, because of the delegation to the territorial diets of legislation pertaining to religious affairs. He says he fears that the gates will be opened to “reaction and religious controversy.” Alexander Scharf was a friend of Fischhof and one of the few “money men” of Jewish descent and liberal persuasion who kept in close contact with Schaeffle: but he never brought Fischhof and Schaeffle together. Cf. Schaeffle about Scharf, Aus meinem Leben,vol. 1, p. 248. Schaeffle’s comment about Fischhof (vol.1, 221) is worth noting. Some isolated prominent Jews who stood in opposition to the money party were federalists, among them Fischhof.” See Charmatz, Adolf Fischhof, pp. 319–334. about the “Emmersdorf discussions” and pp. 377–397. about the aborted meeting the Deutsche Volkspartei in the Musikvereinssaal in 1882. The impact of the failure of the last meeting is analyzed in Cahnman. “Adolf Fischhof and His Jewish Followers.” Charmatz, Oesterreichs innere Geschichte, pp. 113–114; Kann, Multinational Empire, pp. 184–185, 187–91. Cf. Schaeffle, Aus Meinem Leben, vol. 2, pp. 10–31, 44–62, 119–123. Count Gyula Andrassy was prime minister of Hungary and after 1871 the foreign minister of Hungary. Count Friedrich Ferdinand von Beust was one of the principal opponents of Bismarck as foreign minister of Saxony; after 1866, he was successively foreign minister, prime minister,

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40.

41.

and Chancellor of Austria. Concerning Bismarck, it should be understood that he was interested in Prussian hegemony in Germany, not in German nationalism. In a letter to the emperor, Chancellor Count Beust pointed to the fact that the Constitutional Party had become a German national party. He added that the student demonstrations against the “Fundamental articles” should be considered as “the precursors of a revolution which one is well advised to keep before one’s eye.” Quoted accord. to Kann, Multinational Empire, vol. 1, p. 189. As the official language in Austria, German could not be considered the mark of German nationality. Every Polish count who was a minister in the emperor’s cabinet spoke German. Another reason for proclaiming “race” as a criterion of nationality was that not only banks and newspapers, but also the bureaucracy, in respect to the reserve officers corps, even the army, were interspersed with Jews, half-Jews, baptized Jews and persons married to Jewish spouses. This aspect of the matter, which turned out to be of crucial importance in the Hitler era, has been analyzed by Oskar Karbach in “Die politischen Grundlagen des deutsch-oesterreichischen Antisemitismus,” Zeitschrift fuer die Geschichte der Juden, vol. 1, nos. 1 to 4 (1964): pp. 1–8, 103–116, 169–178.

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21 Nature and Varieties of Ethnicity In the beginning, life rested in unity. Your kinsman was your neighbor and your neighbor was your kinsman. Everybody lived near to everybody and there was solidarity within the fold. But as numbers grew and space expanded, differentiation set in. Kinsmen who lived at a distance from other kinsmen became strangers to each other, acquired different skills and adaptations, married different persons, and developed different loyalties. When, in the course of time, they met in a city, along with complete strangers, the diversified loyalties to one kin or another did not suffice to create an overall unity in what had now become a more inclusive society. Not the like, but the unlike, traded in the marketplace. Consequently, to establish order in the multiplicity of customs and expectations, rules and regulations, that is, a commonly valid law and a government to enforce the law, had to be introduced. In other words, to follow Toennies (1971), as diversity arose from unity and threatened to overwhelm it, a new unity had to be constructed and upheld. It is reported that, as Romulus founded the city of Rome, each of the men of Alba, who were cofounders with him, contributed a clod of earth from the ancestral soil; as the clods mingled, sanction was given to a new societal unit to which all of the founders were bound to be obliged. The culture of the city, such as Rome, and later of larger territorial units called nations and even combinations and confederations of nations, indeed, is transcending a single culture. It is a culture of cultures, or a civilization. By civilization, then, we mean a unified cultural multiplicity, an overarching societal system. Ethnos and Demos In a large and diversified system, or a civilization, ethnicity is contained but not abolished. What do we mean by ethnicity? The genius of the Greeks has given us the terms ethnos and demos, denoting fundamental differences in the nature of social cohesion. In Homeric writing, both ethnos and demos meant group, but different kinds of group. By ethnos, a swarm or flock of animals, like bees or sheep, could be meant, that is, a biologically defined 269

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grouping; eventually the term was applied to human beings. By demos is meant a geographically defined group, that is, the people inhabiting a larger or smaller district. Consequently, by ethnos we refer to people in a temporal connotation, by demos to people in a spatial connotation. The temporal connotation is earlier and more profound because people felt tied to their ancestors and concerned about their offspring long before they began to live in permanent dwellings and settle down in a fixed habitat. The temporal nexus encompasses family and religion and the sanctions of both, because being tied to, and united with, one’s ancestors is the essence of religion, as the meaning of the Latin word religio indicates. Even when the spatial connotation becomes more pronounced in the course of civilizational development, the familial nexus remains a powerful factor until finally, when the mixing of familial lines in an area proceeds, the demos, or the district, with the people in it, appears to be the more appropriate form of social organization. In that case, a jus soli prevails over a jus sanguinis, meaning that the child follows the law of the land, not the law of the bloodline. A society with an emphasis on ancestral ties tends to be a hierarchical society with a gradation of obligations and privileges. Remnants of such a societal order remain long after a hierarchical society proper has disappeared. By way of contrast, if jus soli prevails, we are in the presence of an egalitarian society, where all inherited or ascribed distinctions fall and only achievement counts. In an egalitarian society, the spoils go to those who “make it,” so that monetary success and conspicuous consumption become the principal measuring rods of human worth. In another turn, a temporal connotation in social relations, while not precisely identical with Gemeinschaft, nevertheless is related to it, inasmuch as a sense of belonging arises first in the setting of the family, especially in the relation of mother and child. In the same way, a spatial connotation, epitomized in the marketplace, is Gesellschaft-like. Even in the marketplace, where all are equal, ethnicity shines through in many ways. One must not confound analytic concepts, which are pure, with concrete manifestations, which are always mixed. When we say we are attached to our hometown, we mean not only the trees and the river and the assortment of buildings, but also the people who nourished us, our brothers and sisters who grew up with us, our kin and all those who were neighborly and friendly to our kin and to ourselves. What we have in mind is that back home are the people we believe we can rely on. Yet, if whom we can rely on is the point in question, the meaning of ethnicity can be extended. In ancient Rome, the fugitives from violence became famuli who attached themselves to the fama (glory, reputation) of the heroes and were accepted as members of their families. In a tribal context, a stranger is admitted to membership by the symbolic ceremony of blood brotherhood. Where you are accepted, there is your family, there is your home. So, it is said about Robert Frost’s hired man who returns “home” to the farm to die: “Home is the place 270

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where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Significantly, it is added that home is “something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” The achievement motive is muted. Sometimes, as in the assumption of blood brotherhood, even the blood relationship is muted. Nevertheless, the family remains the model of what is meant by home, even if the meaning is extended to what is familiar, that is, to our extended family affiliation or ethnic group or what, as for Frost’s hired man, stands in for our family or ethnic group. In that sense, when the Hebrew prayer says that “all of Israel stands up for one another,” what is meant is that all of Israel are united, as in one big family. Ethnicity, then, refers to an enlarged sense of kin, a feeling of belonging beyond purposive striving or fleeting attachments. If that is so, an ethnic group, although ideally small, can be, and often is, of considerable size. If the group is localized in addition to being of considerable size and if the people thus defined aspire to political autonomy or independence, the ethnic group may be called a nationality. Ethnicity in East and West To ethnic nationalities, based on kin, are contrasted demotic nationalities, based on territories. The societies of the East are organized according to the principles of ethnic nationality; the societies of the West are predominantly demotic in nature. In Europe, the limes Romanus, the border wall of the Roman Empire that extended from the Rhine north of Mainz to the Danube west of Regensburg, and the similar wall that severed England from Scotland, separate the East from the West, the North from the South. West and south of the wall and encompassing the communities around the Mediterranean Sea, were the countries belonging to the Roman Empire, an area of unified law, of citizenship granted to people of varied ethnicity, and of common Latin or Latin-derived speech. In the wake of the Roman example, which was essentially political in nature, arose modern territorial nationalism, especially in post-medieval France. The absolute monarchy bequeathed to the revolution the attrition of local self-government and the pre-eminence of the central bureaucracy. On that basis the Republic constituted the “third estate,” meaning the bourgeoisie, as the nation, that is, as the sole sovereign. All local, regional, and ethnic particularities were submerged in the requirement of exclusive loyalty to “la Republique une et indivisible.” The political state came first; the nation arose as the creation of a centralized administration, then identified itself with, and took over, the state. The nation-state was the result, the common territory of France the unifying factor. It was entirely different in the East, the area of “les nations romantiques” (Fournol 1931). These nations, as political entities, were not a primary factor of experience, but an object of romantic longing. Sovereignty was fragmented, the required loyalty dynastic in nature, and what was to unify the inhabitants was not a territory but a sense of common ancestry, expressed in a common 271

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language or what was to become a national language, emerging from the many dialectical ramifications. Among the Germans, the Italians, the Magyars, and the Slavic peoples, nationalistic movements started with the fixation on revival of the national language, with the creation of a national literature, with the resurrection of the saga of a common origin and cultural heritage, and with the story of the founding heroes. Time rather than space appears to have been stressed in the East, especially in the Middle East. The Hebrew and the Arabic terms for “world” indicate infinite time rather than infinite space, and the same seems to be true of other oriental languages. Society, conceived not merely as an ecological or political phenomenon but envisaged primarily in terms of the enlarged family, retained its religious significance and was perpetuated through worship. Some extended kinship groups preserved their social and religious identities even after the centralized states had subjugated wide territories and combined many tribal units within their imperial domain. It did not matter whether actual common descent was demonstrable or not; the ancestral myth was the unifying factor. The model institutions of the society of the East is the “millet.” The millet is the organization of a subjected but tolerated group into a separate entity under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire, although autonomous in internal matters. The organization frequently takes the form of a church, but the point to be emphasized is that religion and nationality are inseparably intertwined. A millet may be just as well defined as a nationality organized into a church as a church organized into a nationality. The Greek patriarch continued to represent the Greek nation, even after the Greek Empire had fallen, but without military strength to back him up. The Bulgarians preserved their nationality under the Bulgarian Exarch, the Armenians under the Catholicos of the Armenian church, the Jews under the Chacham Bashi, the highest rabbinical authority among Jews. The Maronites were the followers of Maron, subsequently the Maronite people. The followers of Nestorios formed the Nestorian church and were recognized by the Turks as the Nestorian or Assyrian millet. Similarly, the Druzes are a sect-like entity in Islam. All these sectarians settled in close proximity to each other, married only among themselves, and thus became in the course of time secondary kinship units. They became peoples. Conversely, religion confined and protected peoplehood, so that a Moslem Armenian or a Christian Jew would have been considered a contradiction in terms. The Jews are a foremost example of an ethnic group in which religion and ethnicity are merely two sides of the same thing. The religion of the Jews is the faith of the fathers, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Conversely, the Jewish people are the corpus mysticum of the Jewish religion. At the same time, the Hebrew language and the attachment to the land of Israel have been maintained as symbols of nationality, fulfilling and at the same time transcending ethnicity. But the Middle Eastern pattern extends in variations beyond the Middle Eastern area. Farther to the East, a Singhalese in Sri Lanka is a Buddhist 272

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and a Tamil a Hindu. Even in the West, there is a close association of the Poles, the Irish, and the Quebecois with the Catholic Church, to differentiate these people sharply from the dominant Russians, the Germans, the English, and the British Canadians whose backgrounds are Greek Orthodox or Protestant, respectively. The Ottoman Empire has been broken up as a result of World War I, and the same fate has befallen the other great multinational empire, the Habsburg domain of Austria and Hungary, with remarkable consequences. Upon the ethnic definition of peoplehood has been superimposed in these areas the demotic, or territorial, definition of nationality. The idea of demotic nationalism is that nation and territory are to coincide in the nation-state. The development merely culminated in recent years. Two contradictory forces were already at work in the Greek revolution of 1821 against the oppressive rule of the Turkish sultans: on one side stood the Greek Ecumenical Patriarchate and the leading Phanariot (Greek) families of Constantinople, now Istanbul; on the other side were the Greek revolutionaries who were inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution. The patriarch and the phanariotes, who, at any rate, occupied high positions in the civilian bureaucracy, wanted the transformation of the corrupt Ottoman Empire into a Turkish-Greek condominium with a modern administration. To combine the military prowess of the Turks with the intellectual ingenuity of the Greeks would have been a significant achievement. The revolutionaries, on the other hand, wanted an independent national state after the French model. The revolutionary nationalists were the winners inasmuch as an independent Greece was established, but with a large number of ethnic Greeks remaining under Turkish rule. Greek autonomy under the Turks or a Turkish-Greek condominium was now out of question. When finally the Greek armies reached out for Asia Minor after World War I, they were utterly defeated, with the result that the ancient Greek settlement in Asia Minor was destroyed. The Turkish-Greek population exchange became the only way out of the impasse. The last chapter of the tragedy has been playing out on Cyprus. The Turkish-Greek case is paradigmatic. The superimposition of Western ideas upon the East, that is, the victory of the principle of the identity of nationality and territory and the concomitant rejection of cultural diversity as subversive, has brought misery to millions of human beings in areas where ethnic groups interlock in such an inextricable way as to defy clear-cut territorial separation. Thus, not only Turks and Greeks, but also Kurds and Iraqi Arabs, Rumanians and Magyars, Germans and Czechs, Poles and Jews, finally French and Moslems in Algeria, Moslems and Hindus in India and Pakistan, and comparable populations elsewhere who have lived side by side in cooperation and conflict for long periods of time, have been exposed to dislocation, expulsion, and outright genocide. 273

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Russia, Asia, and Africa The essentially identical problem of ethnicity versus territoriality has manifested itself differently in the Soviet Union, in India, in Africa, and finally in Western Europe. In Russia, the Czarist Empire has not broken down as have the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. It has been transformed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Poland and Finland are free countries although they are dominated by the Soviet Union, but ethnically nearly one-half of the population of the Soviet Union itself is not Russian by nationality. There are Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Georgian, Armenian, Uzbek, Tadzik, and other independent Soviet Republics, but the extent of cultural autonomy that they enjoy is questionable. That autonomy consists essentially in the permission to publish Marxist-Leninist literature in the respective native tongues. It is not to be expected that this way of disposing of a problem will last forever. [Indeed, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the problem has resurfaced with a vengeance, as Cahnman had predicted.—Eds.] On the Indian subcontinent, which forms a civilizational unit, Pakistan and Bangladesh are separate states, but the core of India has remained intact. There are a variety of ethnic and linguistic groups, largely in federated states, but the imposition of the language with the largest number of speakers, Hindi, as a national language, might evoke serious opposition in the South. The Untouchables are a social caste, or the remnants of a social caste; they are not comparable to a nationality. Historically, India is a caste-dominated, that is, a hierarchical society in which the problems of ethnicity and nationality, while not negated, have been subdued. Now, a territorial unity has been superimposed. China (largely outside the purview of this essay) is a civilizational society of immense dimensions. There are Chinese dialects, indicating a variety of ethnicities; but these dialects are, by and large, variations of a single language. There are Mongolian, Turkish, and Tibetan ethnic groups in the inner Asian reaches of China; but only Tibet had an intellectual leadership class, which, however, was chiefly clerical in nature and could be eliminated by the destruction of monkish institutions. Besides, Chinese continue to migrate to the thinly settled inner Asian territories, so the ethnic character of these territories begins to change. People get accustomed to speaking, and thereby thinking, Chinese, even if they are not Chinese ethnically. On the other hand, there are Chinese minorities outside the sovereignty of China: the overseas Chinese. Indeed, China, besides ancient Rome, offers the prime example of an overarching civilization of long duration. In contrast to China, the ethnic maps of Southeast Asia and of Africa are of great complexity. We must forego analyzing the Southeast Asian conglomerate at this point. In Africa, sovereign states exist presently between lines more or less artificially drawn by the colonial powers. Consequently, these lines 274

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cut across tribal lines. There are in Africa hundreds of tribes, that is, ethniclinguistic groups, whose needs of self-expression in the modern world remain largely unattended. If these tribal groups attempt to assert themselves politically, chances are that the attempts will be forcibly oppressed, as happened to the Ibos of Nigeria, the southern Sudanese, and the Somalis in Ethiopia. In some instances, mutual hatred breaks out in an excess of slaughter, as between the Hutu and Tutsi in Ruanda and Burundi. Zimbabwe is a name for the territory of post-colonial Rhodesia, but the black people of Zimbabwe are either Matabele or Mashona. The reason for these incongruities is that the idea of national, that is, a territorial unification, irrespective of ethnicities is foremost on the mind of Africans. Educated Africans strive to escape tribal confines and become Zairians, Ghanaians, Kenyans, and Zimbabweans. However, frequently, one or the other ethnic group prevails politically and arouses the opposition of other groups rather than uniting them in a common loyalty. Possibly some tribal groupings will grow into permanent ethnicities while others will merely stay on as splintered remnants, a frequent fate of isolated survivals. Thus, it remains open to question whether unification on the present artificially drawn lines will ultimately succeed. It is likely that it will be possible only in despotic regimes; the alternative to despotism will be upheaval and confusion. Regionalistic Movements in Europe Even in Western Europe, the nation-state shows rifts and crevices. Italy and Germany are transitional cases between East and West, that is, between the ethnic and demotic, or territorial conception of nationality. In Italy, regional autonomies have been established in a pronounced way in Sicily, Sardinia, Val d’Aosta, and Alto Adige; they are potentialities elsewhere. Generally, Italy, although formally a nation, actually is a collection of ethnicities. While urbanites from Rome, Florence, Milan, and Turin may have a measure of Italian consciousness and even be intensely nationalistic, common folk and local leaders elsewhere define themselves as Abbruzesi or Napoletani or as people from Friuli or Puglia. Their ethnicity is localized, frequently familistic. In Germany, the communist Democratic Republic as well as Austria are separate political entities, while in the Federal Republic the division into Laender has prevented the emergence of particularistic movements, especially in Bavaria. But it is obvious that Old Bavaria and possibly Swebia, as well as German and Dutch Frisia in the north, retain a specific ethnic feeling, which is expressed in speech. In France and Spain, on the other hand, regional movements stand clearly in opposition to the centralized nation-state. Essentially ethnic linguistic movements have arisen in the Bretagne, in Corsica, Catalonia, Galicia, and most virulently in the Basque country. In Great Britain, there are growing Welsh and Scottish nationalisms that aim at regional autonomy. One can detect 275

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underneath most of these movements an awakening of Celtic ethnicity, with or without linguistic expression. On the Germanic side, one may mention the Flamands’ assertion of linguistic equality with the Walloons in Belgium. As it turns out, the countries of Western Europe, which have the appearance of unified nation-states, actually contain submerged ethnicities. However, an additional comment is needed about Spain outside the Basque provinces, and similarly about Portugal, Morocco, and Sicily, because of the intriguing mixture of ethno-cultural ingredients within the total picture of what appears as a seemingly unified nationality. The combination of Latin, Islamic, and Hebraic components is the equation of Spain. In Sicily, the Greeks are included, in Morocco the Berbers. These countries are amalgams of a most diversified nature. Ireland and Alsace, even Alto Adige, pose special problems. Ireland presents the model of a colonial situation at the fringes of Europe. A similar situation used to exist in the East Elbian and Trans-Leithanian regions of Prussia and Austria, but that problem was eliminated at the conclusion of World War I by the fight or expulsion of German-speaking populations in the wake of the Russian advance. A colonial situation is a situation of conquest, in the process of which an indigenous population can either entirely or almost entirely be replaced, as in Australia or Argentina, or pushed back to less fertile parts of the country, as is the case with the Indians in Brazil or the South African tribal “nations” that are relegated to their respective “homelands.” They are dominated and exploited by a foreign ruling class. The situation of Ireland is comparable. Throughout the centuries of British conquest and penetration, the Irish were divided into clans, which frequently were warring with each other and consequently were defeated in battle by the more efficiently organized English invasion forces. They rose again and again in futile revolts, never escaping from virtual servitude to the English landlords. The decisive point in the present context is the attempt by the English at deculturation and how it has been met by the Irish. In Ireland, a leading country in the early history of Christianity in Europe, the Catholic Church and the Gaelic language were suppressed; but while the Gaelic language practically disappeared, the Catholic church became the rock upon which the native culture of Ireland crystallized. Ireland is a Western variation of the Middle Eastern pattern: religion and nationality are intertwined. At the same time, English, Scottish, and Irish strains have mixed in Ireland, but the Irish ethnic consciousness has prevailed—in the English language. Only in Ulster have the Scotch-Irish Protestants solidified their rule, with a Catholic working class remaining in a grudgingly subservient position. The counterpart to Ireland in the New World is Mexico, a land of a powerfully emerging Indian consciousness that is expressed in the Spanish language of the conquerors. As one can see from these examples, ethnicity, while frequently linguistically expressed, can persist without such expression. 276

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Alsace presents an entirely different, but equally complex pattern that may be explained in comparison with Alto Adige, or South Tyrol. We abstain here from referring to Switzerland. South Tyrol had been under Habsburg rule since 1363, along with North Tyrol. In 1403, the area of the secularized bishopric of Trento was administratively united with Tyrol. The Tyrolian valleys proper, until a point south of Bozen (Bolzano), are overwhelmingly German; but the area of the former Bishopric of Trento is chiefly Italian. After World War I, the combined region south of the Brenner Pass was incorporated into Italy; since World War II, the industrialization of the area of Bolzano has increased the Italian population in the region. Autonomy has been granted to the combined area of South Tyrol and Trento (Alto Adige), a device that serves the purpose of preventing a German majority, which would have emerged if South Tyrol alone had been granted autonomy. The point to make here is that the ethnic division line is clearly linguistic in character, as was the division line between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia before World War II. Whoever speaks German is German, and those who speak Italian are Italians. Religion plays no role here, because both nationalities are Catholic. The matter is entirely different in Alsace. This region on the upper Rhine was an integral part of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages, but was gradually ceded to, or annexed by, France after the Thirty Years War. The French Revolution caused rifts between Jacobins and religionists, but during the nineteenth century Alsace became politically, economically, and emotionally firmly attached to France. The process was arrested only temporarily during the renewed German rule of 1871–1918 and 1940–45. French sovereignty is not contested; and the principle of the unified nation-state, only one loyalty—to the political nation—is permitted, appears to rule supreme. But the second fact of Alsatian life cannot be eradicated, namely that linguistically and also in other respects, for instance in food habits, the population is German. However, because the semblance of German allegiance is to be avoided, regionalistic sentiment is expressed in attempts to establish the Alsatian dialect of German as a literary language. Contrary to South Tyrol, political attachment to the larger power is voluntary; contrary to Ireland, the local language is maintained, but political independence is neither established nor desired. Florian Znaniecki’s “national culture society” (1952) refers to such phenomena as the South Tyrolese Germans outside the political boundaries of Germany or Austria, even to Austria itself, or to the Catholic Irish in Ulster, that is, an Irish population outside the political boundaries of the Irish Free State. It refers with particular strength to a Polish national cultural identity throughout the nineteenth century although the political Polish state was not in evidence at that time. The same holds true for a Yiddish cultural identity across political boundaries in Eastern Europe. One can say that an ethnic Yiddish identity became a nationalistic Jewish identity by means of Zionism and the Hebrew language. By the same token, there is an Arabic national cultural 277

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society, extending throughout twenty political entities. Separate ethnicities may exist inside such a national cultural society, as they do in Morocco, Yemen, and elsewhere. The national culture society is a linguistically or otherwise defined phenomenon of an ethnic nature, disregarding political boundaries, but with aims that ultimately might become political in nature. Against this kind of consciously expressed ethnicity stands the muted ethnicity that has been analyzed by Thomas and Znaniecki with regard to the Poles in America (1927). Political loyalty to the United States is not in question among the Poles in Chicago nor is the adherence to English speech as a lingua franca on the part of immigrants and their children. What is meant here is that primary group connections have been maintained within the Polish-American group in spite of linguistic and political integration. Varieties of American Ethnicity American societies, with the possible exception of Haiti, are demotic or territorial societies, not societies that claim ethnic homogeneity. A just soli prevails. A child born on American soil is an American. For several decades, an attempt was made to introduce quasi-ethnic principles, establishing in the immigration legislation of the United States a quote in preference for immigrants from North and West European countries, especially the British Isles. But the attempt met with rising opposition and had to be abandoned. Besides being territorial societies, American societies are colonial or postcolonial societies, based on racial differentiation and economic exploitation. Racial discrimination and economic exploitation are two sides of the same thing, because one exploits with greater ease those who are not of one’s own kith and kin. Racial differentiation in the Americas differ from ethnic differentiation in Europe and Asia and to some extent even from the situation prevailing on the African continent, inasmuch as it is based to a much larger degree than anywhere else, except in the Union of South Africa, on physical rather than on cultural differentiation. In colonial New Orleans and elsewhere, there were color and rank gradations from one-half (mulatto) to one-quarter (quadroon) to one-eighth (octoroon) of black admixture in mixed blood populations. These were not so much ethnic but class differentiations, but it so happened that class coincided with color. Several authors, starting with Cooley (1909), introduced into the sociological vocabulary the term caste in the place of class; but Cooley’s designation applies chiefly to the United States, where any, even the slightest, admixture of black blood would relegate a person to the “color-caste.” Only among the Nazis in Germany were similarly sharp lines drawn, in this case with regard to Jews and part-Jews. However, it is dubious whether the term caste actually applies in America, as it did in India. The concept of caste runs counter to the perception of America as an egalitarian and demotic society, but it agrees with the actuality of America as a colonial society. According to Myrdal, the choice between the two principles, equality 278

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and racism, constitutes the “American Dilemma” (1944); yet initially the egalitarian society was powerfully supported by a colonial type of race relations. As Myrdal pointed out, the notion of equality did not include the Negro, who was not designated as a human and political being. To be sure, blacks were not an indigenous population, but the fact that they had to be imported to a strange shore facilitated exploitation. The transplanted African black had no common ethnic anchorage to compensate for social submission. The substitute was more serviceable to the masters than an actual native population would have been. However, to further complicate matters, two different areas have to be discerned in Central and South America: the Andean region and the Caribbean region. The Andean region extends from Mexico to Chile; the Caribbean region comprises the islands and rimlands of the Caribbean Sea and most of Brazil. The Andean region, again, comprises two different patterns, the countries with Mestizo populations, that is, mixed blood people of Spanish, Indian, and partly black ancestry, and the predominantly Indian countries. In the Mestizo countries, new ethnicities in the Spanish language are in the making; but only in Mexico has the emerging national consciousness, as manifested in literature and art, assumed a clearly Indian orientation. In the Indian countries, chiefly in Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, a different complexity is introduced. Upper and middle-class populations in the capital cities and in the country towns, and even some of the agriculturalists, are “Ladinos,” meaning Spanish, mixed blood, and Latinized ex-Indian populations, who call themselves Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Guatemaltecos, or whatever. The Indians, on the other hand, are poor peasants in the mountain villages or on the high plains, with an overflow of shantytowns of the cities, culturally isolated, without intellectual leadership or personal ambition, but preserving their ethnic character, including Indian languages, with great tenacity. The Caribbean area is the area of the acculturation of the black. A separate peasant ethnicity, with a strongly African tinge, arose only in Haiti. But a very different development is in evidence in the English-speaking areas, such as Jamaica, Barbados, and the smaller Windward and Leeward Islands, on the one hand, and in the Spanish-and Portuguese-speaking areas, on the other. In the English-speaking areas the lighter pigmented people were absorbed into the black group, while in the Latin areas they were absorbed into the Spanishor Portuguese-derived and more or less “white” population. Everywhere, the dark-pigmented people are placed in the lower classes, doing menial labor, and the light- and medium-pigmented people in the middle classes, even in the higher reaches of society. In other words, the light mulatto is being treated, or used to be treated, differently from the dark black (Cahnman 1943). As a consequence, the educated layers of the population were prevented from providing leadership for the masses, and instead of a separate black ethnicity, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Brazilian nationalities arose. These national societies are not “segmented” as some authors maintain, that is, divided into 279

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definable parts that mingle but do not combine. They do have a common consciousness. Segmentation does occur where ethnicities, or splinters of ethnicities, merely coexist in a territorially organized society, as in Trinidad, Curacao, or the Guyanas. In the United States, the racist definition of each and every person with some known amount of African ancestry into one and the same black category irrespective of skin color has contributed toward a trend in the direction of separate Negro ethnicity. To be sure, a comparable sense of black ethnicity lately arose in the West Indies, but without the interference of a poor white class, as in the American South. That difference accounts for the greater self-reliance of the West Indian, as compared with the American Negro. America is Different The fact that the United States of America is a territorial or demotic society does not prevent ethnicity from being powerfully present. But America is different. Ethnicity, while a background fact of American life, is not an integral component of “the American idea.” The initially Lockean phrase that governments are constituted to guarantee life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (the latter expression standing for the simpler term property), is strongly individualistic in connotation. Every citizen of the Republic must have guaranteed for himself or herself, apart from life and health, the freedom from search and seizure, the freedom of conscience, of expression, the right of peaceful assembly, and the right to make a living and to acquire property. The phrase E pluribus unum of the great seal of the United States refers to a federal union of states that must be preserved and strengthened, not to the association of peoples as ethnic units. However, freedom of worship is included among the assured rights. While the majority of the settlers in the United States at the time of the Declaration of Independence were of English and Scotch-Irish descent, many were members of the low churches, including the Quakers, rather than of the Church of England; some were members of the Dutch Reformed Church, and quite a few, especially in Pennsylvania, were German Sectarians, Methodists, Old Order Amish, and Moravian Brethren. Federal union required that all these creeds and denominations should feel protected. As a steadily enlarging stream of immigrants reached the country in the course of the nineteenth century, many were Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Jews. For all of them, religion served as the canopy of ethnicity. Ever since Bishop John Hughes arrived in New York, if not earlier, the Irish Catholic church spoke for the Irish immigrants against the Protestant establishment in general and especially in matters of education, first against the Protestant-influenced Public School Society and then against the law of 1842 that prohibited the teaching of religion in the public schools of New York. Until this day, the majority of American bishops are of Irish descent, with some German admixtures, with the result that the 280

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Irish became a dominant majority and ethnic Italian, Polish, and Hispanic parishes had to be established in violation of the parish principle. Still more significant, almost paradigmatic, is the story of the Norwegian Americans. When the need was felt in the new environment to provide guidance to the Norwegian immigrants who had settled on the plains and in the country towns of the American Northwest, the first thought was to establish Lutheran congregations with an American-trained Norwegian clergy. But the affiliation that was effected with Concordia College in St. Louis had to be dissolved, not so much because of the theological differences that were emphasized at the time, but because of the German-Lutheran character of the Missouri Synod, the organization that was sponsoring Concordia College. Norwegian-Lutheran seminaries had to be formed in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and other places. With the establishment of the United Norwegian Lutheran Church in 1890, the process of integration was completed. Under the banner of freedom of worship the Norwegian immigrants had become an American ethnic group, even if Norwegian speech was largely lost. The same applies to other ethnic churches. For instance, the Armenian church is the gathering ground for Armenian ethnicity, the Greek church for Greek ethnicity. The central role of the synagogue, besides charities, in American Jewish life is well-known; Yiddish and Hebrew linguistic elements are secondary in nature. The meaning of St. Patrick’s Day is more complex. Is St. Patrick a Catholic saint or an Irish folk hero? Or is he a contribution of the Irish to American life? The role of the Baptist and other fundamentalist churches in providing cohesion for the American black, especially in the South, is less well-known than other aspects of black life. The black preacher was, and to a large extent still is, the spokesman for his people. In many parts of the country, the black church, until recently, has been the only independent black institution. Disintegration sets is wherever the black minister loses influence, as in the slum areas of large cities. The African black went through the same purgatory in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries that the majority of immigrants went through in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even if the Negro’s case was aggravated by slavery. The linguistic Americanization of immigrants, African, Asian, or European, results in the loss of their native speech; and since speech is the carrier of thought, the loss renders them almost inarticulate. Though they still may use the words of their old language, they have lost connection with the surrounding world. Immigrants are likely to lose their cultural anchorage, but they are likelier still to be unable to express their innermost thoughts in the new language, which serves merely as a lingua franca in the daily rounds. They become estranged from their own children who may wander far afield. In this situation religion provides a potent cure for the ills of the melting pot. A separate language appears as the badge of nonconformity, but to worship in one’s own fashion is a constitutional right. No wonder, therefore, 281

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that the column of the ethnic church provides a firmer reliance if the column of language fails to sustain a people’s link with the past and to uphold their expectations for the future. In other words, while the religious affiliation is the American thing to adhere to, what is actually effected is the preservation of ethnicity. We say religion and we mean the home folks. Whoever adheres to the ancestral religion, whether it is in the Southern Baptist Church, the storefront church of the urban black, the ethnic parish church, or the synagogue, belongs to the folk whose spirit expresses itself in a particular religion; those who leave the religion of their people, cut themselves off from the people itself. Conversely, whoever wants to be united with kith and kin joins the church wherein they worship. However, with the coming of the second generation, the services are being conducted in English; so churches, along with newspapers and other immigrant institutions, are becoming agents of Americanization, simultaneously with their function as remaining repositories of ethnicity. With all that, the idea that the connection of people over time with their ancestors is integrative and functional receives no official sanction in America. What is recognized is the freedom of association, which is current in context and voluntaristic in character. Cultural and Structural Pluralism We are arriving here at an important point, namely the distinction between cultural and structural assimilation—concepts developed by Milton M. Gordon (1964). It is difficult to say what is required for a society to be designated as culturally pluralistic. Separate languages and literatures, religious cults, educational practices, manners of dress, food habits, and the like in varied strengths and combinations may be of importance. We have described the situations in India and in the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. In other countries, for instance Belgium, Finland, and especially Switzerland, these separate ethnic-linguistic entities within a common political framework are publicly recognized and protected in their own rights. In Canada, Frenchspeaking Quebec belongs in this category, although recognition is unsatisfactory and incomplete in the opinion of the Quebecois. In the United States, the German-Americans attempted throughout the nineteenth century to establish themselves as a distinct linguistic entity, until the effort was vitiated in the wake of World War I. At the present time, cultural pluralism in the strict sense exists only residually. We have in the United States white Anglo-Saxon ethnicities that are individualistic in living style, as befits the descendants of frontiersmen, for instance, the Appalachian mountaineers, the country folks of the Ozarks, the hill people of northern Louisiana. They have no organization, yet they feel uneasy with strangers and they congregate among themselves, even if they come to settle in Chicago or Detroit. We have the scattered remnants of American Indian ethnicities all over the country. They continue to exist, even 282

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if the administrative approach to them has never been clearly established. Periods during which absorption was the goal and periods during which preservation was embraced have followed each other. The Indians might be thought of as being organized in quasimillet-like fashion, if it were not for their utter economic dependency. We further have such ethnicities as the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Louisiana Cajuns, and the New Mexico Hispanos who have maintained themselves defensively in rural retreats, again chiefly within the stockade of religion. Whether the Lubavitcher and Satmarer Chassidim can maintain themselves as quasi-corporate bodies in an urban habitat remains to be seen. However, the role of the ethnically accentuated religion in America is not to be equated with the role of religion in such areas as the Ottoman Empire. Religion in America is an American religion, assimilated in its cultural expression, merely associationally differentiated. To use Parsonian terminology, one might say that American churches are frequently ethnic in the social system, but American in the cultural system. Associational differentiation is a halfway house between pluralism and assimilation. America is a country of association, and Americans constantly affiliate and disaffiliate. We are affiliated with churches, with lodges, with unions, with all kinds of professional organizations, to mention only major associational categories that form the structural pattern of American life. Many of us belong to various organizations, but it turns out upon closer inspection that the differentiations between some of the most important of them, such as churches, lodges, and unions, are chiefly ethnic in character, in conjunction, to be sure, with differentiations of social class. So are blacks, Jews, Italians, and the descendants of Anglo-Saxons in the United States associated with people of their own kind, both in ethnicity and in social class. The combination of both is what Milton Gordon has called “ethclass” (1975). But whatever the class differentiation, the ethnic association remains. The majority of the blacks, Jews, Italians, and Puerto Ricans in New York are “culturally Americans, but socially in the ghetto,” to use the quasi-Parsonian expression employed in my Brownsville study. It should be obvious that the “ghetto” is not a Lithuanian “Yiddish Gass” or a Sicilian hilltown, but an American ghetto where only the sheer fact of association, deprived of content, is ethnic in nature. So are in New York the sanitation men and truckers largely Italian, the teachers, druggists and real estate operators largely Jewish, the police largely Irish, the Transit Authority employees largely black, the managers of corporations largely AngloSaxon, although there are exceptions to the rule and transitional stages when one ethnic group replaces another. Some Americans are members of B’nai B’rith, others of the Knights of Columbus, the Exalted Order of the Elks, the Rotarians, the Kiwanians, and many other lodge-like associations. When the members are assembled, they do not differ from others in behavior patterns, in rituals, in proposed ideals, in activities of all sorts, except for one very significant thing, namely that 283

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they prefer to associate among themselves. People work side by side with people of many derivations, but they associate with their own kind. They have daytime friends and nighttime friends. Already among the daytime friends an observable differentiation occurs between those persons with whom they have lunch in the cafeteria during the rest period. The cafeteria is in common, but not the tables at which one sits. Yet the food people eat and their topics of conversation may be largely identical. Thus, ethnic cohesion is maintained on an ecological basis in the face of cultural attrition and behavioral uniformity. The nighttime friends extend into the weekend friends and telephone friends. When we come home from work we meet relatives and friends; in large metropolitan areas, like New York or Chicago, we call over the phone those of our relatives and friends with whom we wish to communicate, whose advice we seek, whose assistance we require. There are those who are far away, with whom we correspond frequently, still others with whom we exchange at least Christmas or New Year’s greetings. As a last resort, there are those with whom contact is resumed in an emergency. I owe my rescue from mortal danger during the Nazi period to the daughter of a cousin of my great-grandmother in Chicago. In the hour of peril even remote relatives will hear the call to rescue. The role of kin and hence of ethnicity in the social network (Bott 1957), never to be overlooked, is of overwhelming importance in the social relations of working-class families, as a variety of studies have shown. In the middle and upper classes, the social network reaches farther, to those we meet in associational gatherings. The differentiating question here is whether the gatherings are in instrumental or in expressive groups, that is, in those groups in which we associate with persons who are acting together, as in a parent-teachers’ association or in a library committee, or in groups in which we enjoy merely being with others. Are you driving to the country club or the lodge meeting or are you cooperating in the work of the Community Chest or the ambulance corps? That makes a difference. Sometimes intimacy and purpose are mixed, but one or the other type of association usually prevails. Those contacts, even in the larger circle, of which intimacy sets the tone, are frequently ethnic or semi-ethnic in character and composition. If a considerable amount of ethnic intermixture occurs, as on college and university campuses, the problem of intermarriage is raised, about which concern and controversy are unavoidable. The question arises whether ethnicity is maintaining itself in the face of intermarriage or whether it is being dissolved in the melting pot. Intermarriage and Intermixture The following considerations about intermarriage and intermixture are conceptual, not statistical, in nature. No case is known in history of ethnically divergent populations having lived side by side for any length of time without the occurrence of miscegenation. Populations may have totally intermingled, 284

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for example, Greeks and Phoenicians in Sicily, Latins and Normans, Saracens and Jews. Individuals may have been absorbed, voluntarily or under force, while groups were maintained, as in the Ottoman Empire. Intermixture, not intermarriage, has modified the appearance of the southern Negro. Generally, in the United States, many individuals abandon ties to their ancestral groups, through intermarriage or otherwise, and the process has a tendency to accelerate in subsequent generations. However, the question is not whether individuals are eliminated from ethnic association, as statistical figures seem to indicate, but whether the group continues or disappears. Some groups compensate losses through immigration, such as Spanish-speaking groups, the French in the Northeast, the Chinese, and to some extent the Jews. Some groups lose and other groups gain through intermarriage. There is a dialectic relationship between melting pot and pluralism, not as concepts but as realities; that is, there is such a thing as a melting pot actually operating and there is pluralism at the same time. What we call melting pot is a process of individuation and multiple affiliation, permitting ethnic affiliation among others. Thereby, ethnic affiliation becomes part of a larger process. However, in order to analyze that process it would be misleading to collapse structural and marital association and assimilation, as Alba (1976) has done. A black man with a white wife can be a member of a black lodge and a Jewish man with a black spouse can be a congregant in a Jewish temple, certainly if the spouse is converted. The wife of Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, was a Christian woman from my home town of Munich, and she was an ardent Zionist. The question is whether the social network of a person bears a predominantly ethnic character, one way or another. Paula Buber was Jewish, as far as her social network was concerned. Within the network, we feel that we move in a familiar atmosphere, that is, within a group the membership in which we “somehow haven’t to deserve,” like Frost’s hired man. There are differentiations regarding intermarriage and intermixture among ethnic groups, depending chiefly on the length of residence in this country. Thus, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Dutch, German, and Scandinavian strains have intermingled rather freely, but Poles, Czechs, Italians, Japanese, and Jews are somewhat behind, yet catching up rapidly. French and Hispanics, the latter of numerous divergent derivations, show a low rate of intermarriage, partly because they came late, but also for the opposite reason, because they were first settlers, especially in the Southwest. At any rate, both the Hispanic peoples and the Quebecois are genuine American ethnics inasmuch as their homelands are in the Americas. Contacts with these homelands are frequent and help to maintain ethnicity. All in all, a threefold process seems to be unfolding. Immigrant affiliations among compatriots from Calabria or Naples or among people from the Bialystock or Krakow regions yielded to more inclusive loyalties, that is, to Italian or Polish ethnicities; and as these appear to be eroding, new distinguishing 285

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associations are about to arise. Years before the Greely-Alba controversy, Ruby J. R. Kennedy and Will Herberg suggested that a “Triple Melting Pot” system of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews was emerging (Alba 1976; Greely 1971; Herberg 1955; Kennedy 1944). Indeed, a trend in this direction is in evidence, especially if one adds a few more melting pots to the ensemble: those of the Hispanics, the adherents of the Greek and Oriental churches, the Blacks of various derivations, including the West Indians, the Chinese, and other Asiatics. In this fashion, one would arrive at seven or eight ethnic or semiethnic groups—quite a number. To be sure, there is a large general American group, yet one or two provisos and one addendum need to be affixed to a statement of this kind. Frequently, one meets in the Midwest people who may not bear German names and who hardly know a few words of German, but who tell you of their excitement at having seen, or planning to see, the Heidelberg Schloss. Mrs. Kelly knows no more about the Heidelberg Schloss than what she remembers from her grandmother, yet she remains attached to the image. One of these submerged ethnicities has been researched in Lorenzo Turner’s (1969) study of Africanism in the Gullah dialect in South Carolina. A negatively related phenomenon is the hidden ethnicity of the “anti-tribal tribe” that is being encountered among academicians and artists of Jewish or part-Jewish derivation. They do not associate much with Gentiles, but rather, as one says, with those Jews who do not associate with Jews, meaning those who are not associated with things Jewish. They are frustrated escapists because they wish to shed their ethnicity but are unable to do so. The addendum needed goes one step further. The rapid social change experienced in America has led to the formation of numerous large and small subcultures, besides the appearance of a vaguely defined general American group. These subcultural gatherings are meant to build Gemeinschaft in the fleeting sands of momentary emotional attachments, substituting, as it were, for the more durable rock of ethnicity. The substitution will not be permanent. Congregation and Segregation In the liberal climate of social science writing in the United States, the distinction between congregation and segregation has been blurred. Congregation is voluntary; segregation is legally or socially enforced. But the phenomenon of congregation has been disregarded. In a mood of sociologistic optimism, it was assumed that nothing but stark discrimination, based on prejudice, was preventing the coming of universal brotherhood, that is, of a society where only individual worth and the nature of interpersonal relations would count. The time is not far back when blacks could not work side by side with white workers, could not send their children to school with white children, and could not live in the same residential neighborhoods, ride in the same railroad cars, or drink from the same public fountains as whites. Remnants of these socially 286

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as well as legally enforced segregative restrictions are still with us, but insofar as they are gone the result has not been a general mingling of blacks and whites in public entertainment and social gatherings. Few blacks and whites are nighttime friends. In housing the dividing line is still fairly sharp, but it is hard to say to what extent coercive factors remain entrenched and to what extent the general tendency of ethnic groups in urban areas throughout the United States to seek residence near their own people and in the proximity of ethnic institutions is operating. Inasmuch as residential areas are ethnically different school populations will differ also—a situation that busing is supposed to remedy. But in schools with a mixed student body, a look into the school cafeteria or the observation of groups of youngsters leaving school will show that the congregation in the majority of instances is between white and white and black and black and not between white and black. By the same token, Chinese and Chinese, Hispanics and Hispanics, Jews and Jews will easily find each other. So will Asian Indians, although owing to their smaller numbers the statistical probability of intermingling is enhanced. Surely the places of worship are separate. A black clergyman once expressed the matter in the following way: “We might wish to be among our own, but we do not want to be forced to do so.” The conclusion is that congregation will remain even where segregation falters. This chapter does not refer in extenso to the Asian Indians in America, and especially in new York, because the study by Parmatma Saran is devoted to them. The Asian Indians in New York are a group of a special kind because they are a group neither of menial laborers nor of traders—the two types of minority ethnics that are usually distinguished—but largely of white-collar employees, professionals and academics. They share with other immigrants a twofold experience: the various ethnicities of the Indian subcontinent being fused in America, although the present stage only reluctantly so, into one encompassing Indian ethnicity, and the problem arising out of the attraction that the American environment exerts on the behavior patterns of the younger generation. The complicating factor is color: Asian Indians are dissimilar to blacks, yet dark-complexioned and not likely to mix with white Caucasians; hence, they are more resistant to marital assimilation than other immigrants. Conclusion: Ethnicity in a Civilizational Context We must be aware that we live in an inclusive civilization. We participate in a world civilization but it is remarkable that the novus ordo saeclorum has made its appearance first in America. America is a civilization, that is, a culture of cultures, where many loyalties, even conflicting loyalties, are permitted to exist side by side, competing as well as cooperating with each other. But the fact that the competition is largely for political and institutional power and economic advantage is significant. As an ethnic or economic group, or a combination of both, gains access to public office and influence on legislation or has a say 287

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in such important institutions as education, the danger of a mad scramble for position and the resulting confusion of values cannot be disregarded. The common purpose may be lost sight of in the din of contending factions. In a civilizational constellation, however, what unites us must take precedence over what divides us. We are united in a territorially organized, or demotic, society and in ever-growing large-scale organizations within that society by the requirement of rational procedures to keep the machinery going that maintains the public order and turns out the gross national product. The requirement is inherent in the size and complexity of the institutional framework. Yet a more subtly inclusive unity of mutual understanding is required. In the midst of the material interests prevailing in the marketplace, the intimate forces typified by familial bonds and finding their expression chiefly in the ethnicity are not dead. They may be alienated from their meaning in the political arena and distorted for purposes of private gain, but they will continue to assert themselves in personal relations because they are bound up with human nature. To emphasize these particularistic forces to the point of exclusivity would destroy the cohesion of the whole. To neglect them would be equivalent to planting explosive charges of much greater destructive power. As we cannot do without ethnicity, we might as well live with it.

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22 The Mediterranean and Caribbean Regions: A Comparison in Race and Culture Contacts I Our interest in the comparative study of race and culture contacts in the Mediterranean and Caribbean regions is predominantly an interest in the comparison of race relations in the Anglo-Saxon and Latin subregions of the Caribbean region. That this is so becomes clear from a definition of what we understand by Mediterranean and Caribbean regions or, in other words, the European and the American Mediterraneans. In both cases, a centrally located, that is to say, a truly Mediterranean Sea unites rather than separates the surrounding coastal rimlands. Sicily is nearer to Tunisia than to Savoy, as recent events have taught us anew, and Morocco is facing Spain across the narrow Straits of Gibraltar while it is separated from the Sudan by the desert belt of the Sahara. Likewise, Louisiana is closer to Cuba than to Massachusetts, as Colombia is closer to Puerto Rico than to the republics of La Plata from which it is separated by the Amazonas jungles. Mediterranean civilization may be said to reach as far as the olive tree is grown while its outer frontiers are marked by the northernmost and southernmost extension of vine cultivation. It should be noted that this coincides with the extension of ancient roman penetration. The Caribbean region, in turn, although known as the world’s sugar bowl and coffee pot, with cotton fields, tobacco crops, and banana plantations of probably equal importance, is best defined by the prevailing human factor connected with it. Sociologically speaking, the Caribbean region may be said to extend as far as dense rural settlement of former African slaves is found; and the settlement of Africans, again, coincides with the lowland area of plantation economy. The Negro has become the leading phenomenon of the Caribbean region as the olive tree has always been the leading phenomenon of the Mediterranean region.1 289

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This definition would put the highland areas of Mexico, sociologically as well as geographically and historically, closer to the highlands areas of Peru than to the lowland areas of Costa Rica. Mexico belongs to the Pacific region of America, so much so that even the Philippines were at some time subjected to the viceroyalty of New Spain. The same is true of the highland areas of Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica. Neither the Indians nor the Mestizos, nor the Spaniards moved in any appreciable numbers into the humid lowland regions on the Atlantic coast of Central America, so that these regions finally were settled by a mixture of Indians and runaway black slaves on the Mosquito Coast and by black Jamaican workers on the plantations of the United Fruit Company.2 On the other hand, the definition that we have presented would include the southern regions of the United States, as far as the lowland region of plantation economy is extended, along with the British, Dutch, and French possessions in the West Indies.3 About the same way as Cross and Crescent are facing each other in the Mediterranean, so Latin and Anglo-Saxon civilization are interlocking in the Caribbean.4 Moreover, the definition that we have offered would seem to indicate that the problem of race relations in the Caribbean region is intrinsically the problem of colonialism, brought about by the needs of economic exploitation, in short, of an economic rather than a biological nature. Under this aspect, the apparent difference in race relations between Bahia and Alabama would shrink considerably. The actual social position of a dark skin laborer in Bahia, although he is separated from both his white and mulatto compatriots “only” by barriers of class, is not basically different from the social position of a dark-skin cotton-picker in Alabama who is lumped together with a light-skin city black and along with him separated from the white folks in terms of race.5 However, the very fact that the black is participating in the common interAmerican class pattern of society in Latin American countries while he is still a segregated segment of the total population in the countries dominated by Anglo-Saxon civilization, shows that economic considerations alone are not capable of explaining the complexities of cultural differentiation. It is the thesis of this paper, that only a comparative study of race and culture contacts in the European and the American Mediterranean will furnish the key to our problem and that Spain is the link that forges not only Orient and Occident but also the old world and the colonial world together. II To understand Spain, we must understand the Mediterranean. In another paper,6 I have tried to explain that East and West in Mediterranean and European history stand for tribalism and territorialism respectively; that jus sanguinis and the pattern where family, religion, and nationality are inextricably intertwined are peculiar to the East as Robertson Smith in his Religion of the Semites and Emile Durkheim in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 290

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although the latter somewhat oddly escaping to the antipodes, had already indicated; while jus soli, together with unified law within a wide empire, where Roman citizenship, finally was bestowed upon non-Roman provincials, and lastly the emergence of the territorially conceived nation-state circumscribe the contributions of the West. The antagonism of the East is the antagonism of believers and disbelievers while the antagonism of the West is the antagonism of the civilized world and the barbarians. Spain combines the aspects of both East and West.7 It has often been remarked that Spanish national consciousness is passionately religious in its origin; but the idea of the unity of faith, characteristic of the universal church of Rome, covered uncompromisingly the whole territory of Spain and prevented the symbiotic relationships of various religious nationalities, which marked racial and cultural relationships within Islamic civilization and found classical expression in the Turkish “millet” system, from becoming the enduring pattern of Spanish life. Jews and Moors were not tolerated in Christian Spain while settled communities of disbelievers, if submissive, were tolerated and utilized under a grant of self-government in Islamic law. Moreover, converts rose to the highest ranks in Islamic society so that it has been well said that “one of the chief reasons why the Turks were so dangerous to Europe was because they were so successful in employing Europeans against her.”8 In Spain, however, religious suspicion against Moors and Jews remained alive, even after they had been converted, and hardened into a social antagonism of peculiar persistence.9 The principle of limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, had all the aspects that we associate with a color bar, only that “bad blood” did not so much refer to biological features as to the obstinacy inherent in heretical descent. It required that no one should be admitted to many of the colleges and universities, to benefices in numerous cathedrals, to most of the religious and to all of the military orders, and, in some places, also to municipal office, if he had in him Moorish or Jewish blood or even if he, although a Spaniard of pure extraction, had been publicly penanced by the Inquisition. Black blood, on the other hand, seemed not to be equally contaminated by the obstinacy of previous religious convictions; actually, numerous black slaves were easily absorbed into the population at large under the classification of “Ladinos” as soon as they had ceased to be “barbarians” and acquired the Spanish language along with the habits of Spanish civilization.10 The final expulsion of them by the almost entirely Christianized Moors took place in 1609, after many conflicts had ensued and more than a century after the fall of Granada and the discovery of America. The bitterest phase in the struggle against the Moors, then, does not precede but coincide with the first century of Spanish overseas colonization so that the traits acquired there must have been of the most far-reaching impact here. The connection between the two worlds cannot be seen personally enough. Most of the early immigrants were people from Andalusia where the influence 291

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of Moorish civilization had been greatest.11 Many of them were soldiers who had been left without occupation by the cessation of the war or rather the wars.12 When Quesada, the conquistador of Colombia, entered the plain of Cundinamarca, he was reminded, so it is told, by the outlines of the mountains around the great plain of the summits of the Sierra Nevada, below which he had passed his boyhood years. The name of Nueva Granada, however, with which the region was christened by the Spaniards, carries more than a mere geographical reminiscence. “The Conquistadores,” says Merriman, in his History of the Spanish Empire, “lost few opportunities to remind themselves that the progress of the vast empire which they were winning in the New World, was in some of its aspects but a prolongation of the Crusades.”13 Moreover, the very administrative methods that were applied in the conquered territories were shaped according to Spanish and Portuguese precedents. Souza, colonizer of Brazil, in setting up the so-called capitaneos as feudal fiefs of the Portuguese Crown, utilized experiences that had been won in the reconquest against the Moors back in the old country.14 Even more striking is the case of Antonio de Mendoza, the first viceroy of New Spain.15 Mendoza was the son of the first Marquis de Mondéjar, who had done brilliant service in the Granadan war and subsequently in the administration of the conquered kingdom; his whole family had enjoyed wide experience in the problems of the frontier, one of his brothers, for instance, having been president of the Council of the Indies and of Castile and another one captain of the galleys in the Mediterranean fighting against the Turkish Corsairs. Closer investigation into the antecedents of Spanish administrators in America might well disclose still more amazing facts. Finally, there might be quoted one instance of later times that illuminates the landscape of the Latin American mind like a flash in the dark. An English globetrotter, Colonel J. P. Hamilton, traveling through Colombia in 1827, describes a comedy performed by the nuns of the Incarnation on the occasion of the re-election of the former Lady Abbess. Here is what he tells:16 The servants and slavers were all gaudily dressed. These were to perform a play first, in the square of the convent, which was to represent a battle between the Spaniards and the Moors. At two o’clock the performance commenced with the servants in the square, who were drawn up in two lines, each having their general in front, the Moorish army being commanded by the Mulatto girl who played so well on the organ. After a number of speeches and bitter reproaches between the contending armies, a desperate fight took place with wooden swords, and of course the Christians gained a complete victory over the infidels. In this flash, we see, 400 years after Quesada’s conquest, the pattern all set upon which Nueva Granada was founded.17 It is the pattern of the unity of faith that overrides the patterns of disunity otherwise prevailing in colonial society. The Church, although continuously supported by the Crown, could not blot out the greed for gold, reckless exploitation, and petty haughtiness, but it could keep them in check. 292

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True to Mediterranean tradition, cultural distinctions remained more important than racial differentiations. Nor was this situation altogether unwarranted by the nature of the situation at hand. Spanish and Portuguese immigration, weak in numbers and almost exclusively male in character, took willingly to native wives and concubines, and their numerous mixed-blood offspring were not only a welcome addition to the army of occupation, as it were, but served also as a corroding force within native serf and imported slave societies, depriving them of a leadership, which, if thrust back upon them, would have proved even more ambitious and unruly than it actually was under the Spanish wing.18 Considerations of church policies as well as of raison d’etat flowed together into one powerful stream which gained further support from the hatred of foreigners, be it because they were ravaging British and Dutch buccaneers or because they were devilish, commercially-minded protestant heretics.19 In our day the same stream carries the attitudes which are directed against “American Imperialism” and “Dollar Diplomacy.” The black workers who struck against the United Fruit Company in the Santa Marta district of Colombia in 1928 enjoyed the sympathies of the landowners and the merchants of the region, regardless of color, and of the local newspapers in addition.20 A strike against white, foreign, and protestant capitalists, as is almost invariably the case in Latin America, must of necessity lose its racial or class-war tinge in favor of a powerful upsurge of nationalistic sentiment. To summarize the words of Lord Bryce: “Religion has been in the past as powerful a dissevering force as has racial antagonism. In the case of Spaniards and Portuguese, religion, as soon as the Indians had been baptized, made race differences seem insignificant. Islam has always done this in the East and in Africa.”21 Religion, then, is paramount in Spanish colonization and tends to mitigate economic antagonism arising out of the plantation system. Church and state promote policies of peaceful, and sometimes of forceful, assimilation. Half-breeds are enlisted as quasi-white allies with the effect that colored populations are deprived of potential leadership. But racial antagonisms shining through social and cultural patterns of intergroup relationships are not entirely excluded, as the history of the Central American republics and their more recent attitude toward black Jamaican immigration proves. III English colonization must be understood by way of contrast. Englishmen are different.22 No Englishman has ever acquired a colony in honor of Christ, or the king, or the nation, or any suchlike impracticability. English empire builders have striven to make their acquisitions paying propositions. One of the oldest colonies, the plantation of Virginia, and many other colonies afterward, were organized as commercial companies whose stockholders expected a fair return for their investments.23 Commercialism, however, and all the antagonisms that arose out of the plantation system, was enforced and 293

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supported by racialism. Both have their common root in the practical sense for cooperation and compromise, which are embodied in British institutions such as the competitive-cooperative games played on the famous playing fields of England and the rules of parliamentary routine. Successful cooperation, however, requires a homogeneous group with a vigorous group spirit suited for teamwork and it is believed that such a spirit is hardly to be found outside the British isles and among populations not of British descent. The failure of parliamentary regimes almost everywhere outside the English-speaking world at large and Great Britain in particular would lend strong support to this analysis. Spanish authoritarianism, on the other hand, because it was not based on the principle of nationality and the consent of the governed, could weld together heterogeneous populations. As a result of all this, British policy has early refused to follow in the footsteps of Spanish assimilationism and evolved not so much a theory but a practice of their own. Where the Spaniards appointed Indian Chieftains as alcaldes and made them part of their administrative system, English representatives crowned them kings and shoved their people back into reservations, so as to minimize friction between them and white settlers. Racial intermarriage with Indians, and later with blacks, was frowned upon in early Virginia, and white women were imported from England.24 This attitude cannot simply be labeled “prejudice.” It precedes prejudice so much that it may be called an article of faith. In a sermon, preached in Southwarke and printed in London in 1609 “in the presence of many honourable and worshipful adventurers and planters for Virginia,” reference is made to Abram whom the Lord had promised to make into a great nation in which all the generations of the earth will be blessed. The preacher continues: Then must Abram’s posteritie keep them to themselves. They may not marrie nor give in marriage to the heathen, that are uncircumcised. And this is so plaine, that out of this foundation arose the law of marriage among themselves. The breaking of this rule may break the necke of all good successe of this Voyage, whereas by keeping the fear of God, the planters, in shorte time, by the blessing of God, may grow into a Nation formidable to all the enemies of Christ.25 If this document shows English racialism at home preceding actual racial contacts, another one, little more than 100 years later, reveals the same force in full operation in the West Indies. It is the Anniversary Sermon held for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1711. The society became in 1710 trustee of the plantation in Barbados on which, under the terms of the trust, at least 300 blacks had to be continually employed. Having thus joined the ranks of the slave owners, it at once pronounced, through the mouth of Bishop Fleetwood, its attitude toward its black slaves, which was passive in so far as their condition of slavery was concerned but 294

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active in its determination, “that if all the slaves in America in every island in those seas, were to continue infidels for ever, yet ours alone must needs to Christian.” The bishop did not admit the automatic enfranchisement of the baptized, not because the blacks were inferior, for they were “equally the workmanship of God, endued with the same faculties and intellectual powers, bodies of the same flesh and blood and souls certainly as immortal,” but because Christianity enjoys no advantages or privileges to distinguish it from any other sect or party, and therefore “whatever liberties the laws indulge to us, they do it to us as Englishmen and not as Christians.”26 Thus, English attitudes of racialism and policies of abstentionism have conquered the North American continent for the white man and for British institutions, but they have also, by fostering refusal to accept half-breeds into white society, provided colored populations with an educated and ambitious leadership that has produced, in the United States, an amount of black consciousness and black achievement that is unrivaled elsewhere. They have made the British West Indies from century to century and from decade to decade more and more black while the Spanish islands, at the same time, through assimilationist practices, have become more and more white.27 Racialist attitudes and abstentionist policies have widened the rifts and gaps that are inherent in plantation economy—irrespective of whether it operates with bond-slaves or wage-slaves or, for that matter, with share-tenants.28 A study of the race policies of the big sugar corporations and, even more so, of the United Fruit Company in Jamaica, Colombia, and Central America should be highly revealing. The United Fruit Company has introduced East Indian labor to Jamaica and Jamaican labor to Costa Rica because of the recognition that the uprooted laborer is so much more dependent, docile, and hardworking than the peasant freeholder who can retire to his plot of land if he feels that he is treated unjustly.29 Such a study would be likely to point to one way out of the present impasse in race relations that has already been tested to success in the West Indies, at least if we are to believe such an outstanding and negrophile authority as Lord Olivier. Lord Olivier tells how Jamaicans, in the face of 1001 objections on the part of British authorities who could not free themselves from the shackles imposed on their own thinking by the feudal social and economic history of Great Britain, have succeed in establishing upon their island a peasant society whose members do only intermittent work on the remaining plantations;30 while in other West Indian colonies “estate monopoly of the land has remained unbroken so that the workers have to buy their food out of wages that they can only earn from employers. Economically, in consequence, the black population are far worse off in those islands than in Jamaica; and, at the same time, colour prejudice remains exceedingly strong.”31 How could it be otherwise? How could dependent slave laborers command respect from their masters or be inspired by self-respect? On the other hand, the question is posed: how one does take into account the historically defined 295

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tendency of people of Anglo-Celtic stock toward racial exclusiveness and yet overcome racial discrimination? The example of Jamaica, where attenuated (not abolished) color prejudice and relative independence of agricultural laborers through the personal possession of land for food supply stand in close correlation to each other, seems to point to an eminently English, that is to say abstentionist and at the same time economically oriented, counter-poison to the frictions that are involved in racialism: withdrawal, and be it only partial withdrawal, from plantation economy. In this sense, the Jamaican example is now being applied in the land distribution policies of the Autoridad de Tierras in Puerto Rico.32 Under what conditions and to what extent, however, the device of withdrawal from monocultural, absentee-owned plantation economy could be utilized more widely within the Caribbean region, would be a subject for another study. Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

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The Caribbean region may be called the “life-space” of the “Negro in America,” in accordance with Friedrich Ratzel’s formulation in his essay “Der Lebensraum” in Festgaben fuer Albert Schaeffle (Tuebingen, 1901), pp. 104–189. However, Ratzel’s examples are taken almost entirely from plant and animal ecology and the detailed application to, and correlation with, the phenomena of human ecology are still lacking. A. Greenfell Price, While Settlers in the Tropics, American Geographical Society, Special Publication No. 23 (New York: 1939; Charles David Kepner, Social Aspects of the Banana Industry, Diss. Columbia University (New York, 1936); Leo Waibel, “White Settlement in Costa Rica,” The Geographical Review, 24 (1939): 529–560; Robert Cushman Murphy, “Racial Succession in the Colombian Choco,” The Geographical Review, 24 (1939): 461–47. The American black has become indigenous to the cotton areas of Western Tennessee, not to the mountain areas of Eastern Tennessee. He has also not become indigenous in the American North, despite large-scale migration after the turn of the present century; he forms there an immigrant minority, which is not rooted in the soil and does not reproduce itself, except by continued immigration. See Rupert B. Vance, Human Factors in Cotton Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929), pp. 7, 30, 32, 36, 41, and literature mentioned there. Alexander von Humboldt spoke already about the “American Mediterranean” as a region wherein “a concert is established between men of the same color, although separated by difference of language and inhabiting opposite coasts”: Alexander Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, During the Years 1799–1804, trans. into English Helen M. Williams (London: 1818). Donald Pierson, Negroes in Brazil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942). Pierson’s book stands for a type of literature on South America which is most revealing if read between the lines. It reveals that the main practical difference between Anglo-American and Latin-American race attitudes is in the position of the mulatto rather than the black. In the predominantly Indian countries, “mestizo” is to be substituted for “mulatto”.

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6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

“Religion and Nationality.” Unpublished paper, read at the 14th Annual Festival of Music and Fine Arts, Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, April 1943. Roger Bigelow Merriman, The Rise of the Spanish Empire in the Old World and in the New. vols. 2, 3, and 4 (New York: 1925); Rafael Altamira, A History of Spanish Civilization, trans. from the Spanish P. Volkov. (London: 1930); Salvador de Madariaga, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards. An Essay in Comparative Psychology (London: 1927); J. Fred Rippy. Crusaders of the Jungle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936). Merriman, Rise of the Spanish Empire., vol. 4, p. 100. H. C. Lea, The Moriscos of Spain (Philadelphia: 1901); Cecil Roth, A History of the Marannos (Philadelphia: 1941). H. A. Wyndham, The Atlantic and Slavery. Issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London: 1935), pp. 242–249. Charles Edward Chapman, Colonial Hispanic America: A History (New York: 1930), p. 128. As to continued slave imports into Portugal, see the literature quoted in Robert R. Kuczynski, Population Movements (Oxford: 1936), pp. 13–14. Chapman, Colonial Hispanic America, pp. 32–33. Dana G. Munro, The Five Republics of Central America (New York: 1918), pp. 191–192. Merriman, Rise of the Spanish Empire, vol. 3, p. 582, and the literature mentioned there, especially Aguado, Restrepo Tirado, and Moses. Chapman, Colonial Hispanic America, p. 72. Merriman, Rise of the Spanish Empire, vol. 3, p. 679. Col. J. P. Hamilton, Travels through the Interior Provinces of Colombia (London: 1827), p. 103. Nueva Granada stands here for Latin America as a whole. For instance, Professor Luis Leal of the University of Chicago informs me that the performance representing the battle between the Spaniards and the Moors is given year after year all over Mexico and that, in many places, it has ceased to be a purely ecclesiastical performance and has become a popular festivity. This writer has, however, not found any allusion to this in literature other than Hamilton. Bernhard Moses, The Spanish Dependencies in South America, vol. 1, ( London: 1914), p. 396ff.; Chapman, Colonial Hispanic America, pp. 117–119; 239. G. Mollien, Travels in the Republic of Colombia, trans. from the French (London: 1824), pp. 340, 353, 354. Chapman, Colonial, p. 110: “Prohibitions were soon raised against the entry of any foreigners whatsoever, and the few who drifted in were ever in danger of being denounced as heretics or witches.” See also J. Steuart, Bogota in 1836–37 (New York: 1838), pp. 177–181. J. Fred Rippy. The Capitalists and Colombia (New York: 1930), pp. 179–193; Charles David Kepner, “Social Aspects,” pp. 192–195. James Bryce. South America; Observations and Impressions (New York: 1912), p. 482. Salvador de Madariaga, Englishmen, esp. pp. 17–24, 176–178. Madariaga presents the most illuminating, although somewhat too dogmatically conceived, social psychology of English civilization. Ewarts Boutell Greene, The Foundation of American Nationality (New York: 1922), pp. 45–65. Vance, Human Factors, p. 36. Wyndham, The Atlanic, pp. 164–179. 297

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24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

298

Wyndham, The Atlantic, p. 294. Virginea Britannica. A sermon preached at White Chappel by William Symonds, preacher at Saint Saviours in Southwarke, London 1609. In: Alexander Brown, ed., The Genesis of the United States, vol.1 (New York: 1897), pp. 282 ff. The editor remarks that “This sermon . . . was probably the first sermon published for the advancement of the American enterprise.” Wyndham, The Atlantic, pp. 235–236. The (statistical) black and mixed population of Cuba and Puerto Rico respectively declined from 58.5 percent in Cuba (1841) and 52 percent in Puerto Rico (1802) to 27 percent and 24 percent in the latest population estimates, while Jamaica and Barbados had colored populations of between 80 and 90 percent already in the 18th century; in the latest population estimates the white population has further declined to 2 percent and 7 percent respectively. According to prevailing race attitudes, the offspring of mixed marriages (and concubinages) has swelled the colored population in the British possessions while it has been added to the “white” population element in the former Spanish Colonies. White immigration, or lack of it, accounts for the rest. Vance, Human Factors, pp. 7, 63–69, 79. Lord Olivier, Jamaica—The Blessed Island (London: 1931), pp. 300–32. See also: H. M. Macmillan, Warning from the West Indies (London 1935), pp. 160–203; and Amy Oakley, Behold the West Indies (New York: 1941), p. 420. Lord Olivier, Jamaica, pp. 313–13; 317. Ibid., pp. 431–436. Richard Pattee, The Puerto Ricans (Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Sept. 1942.), pp. 49–54. S. Burton Heath, “Our American Slum, Puerto Rico,” in Harper’s (June, 1943).

Appendix: Rudolf Hess; or, An Introduction to the Emergence of German Geopolitics: An Autobiographical Account1 Based on an autobiographical account of my own, this paper on Rudolf Hess’s personality and career may serve as an introduction to German geopolitics. Rudolf Hess can be regarded as a symbol of the direction of German youth in the 1920s. He is representative of a cohort whose normal career had been nipped in the bud by the Great War. Like many of his peers, Hess joined the army before he was able to obtain a proper education, and Germany’s unexpected defeat signified a deep frustration of his hopes. He and his fellows were led to believe that their country had become the victim of a devilish plot. The city of Munich was the focal point of the violent disappointment of the nation. Propaganda for rearmament began there and inflation added another shock wave to the traumatic experience of defeat; the uprooted youth from middle-class families became the foremost agent of a nationalist revolution. Rudolf Hess belongs to this war-torn generation, although, after the Bierkeller-Putsch of 1923, he tried seriously to complete his interrupted education. He took courses in economics, political science, and geography and participated in the seminars of Professors von Zwiedineck and Haushofer2 at the University of Munich. He was imbued with the spirit of Pareto and was a follower of the Viennese neo-Romanticist sociologist, Othmar Spann.3 The catchword of Spann was “universalism,” stressing the “whole” as opposed to the “sum” and propounding the theme of a Gemeinschafts-type of social philosophy in the place of “societal disintegration.” Richard Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk with its “infinite melody” is seen as this kind of thinking. The core of Spann’s social philosophy is the biological catchword of a “struggle 299

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for life” as the counterpart of romantic escapism. This catchword has been translated into a philosophy of imperialism by Oswald Spengler. The Nazis, however, resented his pessimistic undertone; they had no positive beliefs whatsoever and hungered only for action. The man who trained eager students for intelligent staff work for “world conquest” was Karl Haushofer. He sought to base imperialist dreams on solid geographical knowledge, and by such reconceptualization, he, in fact, updated them. In due time, Rudolf Hess became his assistant and his move toward Haushofer symbolized a circuitous route from a “vitalistic blood-and-soil philosophy” to a global, “intercontinental and interoceanic” plot, completed years before the National-Socialist movement actually took over the reins of power in 1933. Sometimes a flash of light in the dark of an African jungle catches a beast of prey peacefully bowing down at a well; then, in a single instance, we have a wealth of life. It is in this sense that the following remarks on Rudolf Hess are to be understood. We shall catch him at the one brief moment in his adult life when he seemed to be at rest: when he was attending classes in economics and political science at the University of Munich and preparing for future duties on a stage where many beside himself acted in a confused performance. His state of mind unfolds itself in the light of the period between the November Putsch of 1923 and Hitler’s release from imprisonment in Landsberg, that is to say, between the climax of an inflationary crisis and the full development of a deflationary crisis in Germany. However, no consideration of individual psychology or party politics shall arrest our interest: we shall take him as the significant symbol of a war-torn generation, which dipped into age-old romantics and emerged with an imperialist dream. We hope, in this way, to throw some new light upon the convulsions of post-World War I German society and to more fully understand the forces that were propelling Germany toward a catastrophe. The personality structure of Rudolf Hess is interesting in a twofold sense—in terms of a history of thought as well as in a sociological setting. Sociologically, he is emblematic of a sizable portion of Germany’s youth whose life and expectations were rudely altered by the war.4 During the war, they had no opportunity to be trained in some civilian trade or profession and they were filled with the ambitious aims of the military instead. What they had learned to the fullest was the use of force, and it was therefore only natural that they had resorted to force when their expectations were ultimately frustrated. It was force that restored their shaken self-respect and became a means and an end at the same time. In the case of Rudolf Hess, as with many other Nazi leaders, foremost among whom are Hitler himself and Alfred Rosenberg, this state of mind was accentuated by the fact that Hess was an Auslandsdeutscher, meaning a German by descent born outside the borders of the Reich. These Germans 300

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abroad, looking at the mighty German Empire of their time from a distance, were more German, as it were, than native Germans; they were proud of the status the Reich’s achievements gave to them, resentful of foreign domination under which they lived, and ardently nationalistic. Such was Rudolf Hess’s family background: he was born on April 26, 1896, in Alexandria, Egypt; his father, Friedrich Hess, was a German businessman. This fact must be taken into account in explaining his personality structure, though he came to Germany when he was thirteen years of age. After having graduated from a Gymnasium in Bad Godesberg on the Rhine, near Bonn, he wanted to study mathematics, but instead, at his father’s wish, planned to take up a business career. The plan, however, was never realized; after all, he was little more than eighteen years of age when the First World War broke out. Hess served with the Bavarian Infantry Regiment List, a unit largely composed of volunteers, from 1914 to 1916; Adolf Hitler was a corporal in the same regiment, and it was there that the two men who seemed to destined for each other first met. Hess was wounded twice. He passed the pilot’s test in 1918, too late, however, to see active service again. He may have thought of staying in the army as a professional officer once the war was over; but it happened otherwise. Germany met with utter defeat and humiliation, the common people were disgusted with war, and wherever former army officers appeared publicly in uniform, they were sneered at; on some occasion, their epaulettes were torn from their uniforms. They were dismissed and had to become civilians overnight. One can only guess what this must have meant to a man who had fanatically believed in the splendor of the Reich and the invincibility of its armies. It also meant a farewell to personal hopes, to be sure, but it was more than that. It was a deep and far-reaching shock to a fundamental belief. Hess and many of his generation felt that something unbelievable had happened, a devilish crime had been committed. For some reason or other, many Germans, have suffered from a persecution complex and tried to compensate for it by being aggressive. It was not different this time around and the feeling was accentuated by defeat. One should not forget that treachery and traitors play a great role in German folklore. The misshapen Loki kills Baldur, the God of spring. Grim Hagen slays young Sigfried. We find a repetition of this one theme over and over again: darkness against light. Richard Wagner, the key figure to an understanding of modern Germany, had tapped these hidden sources and revived them.5 Treachery, no doubt, had been at work again—this was the contention. Dark forces had stabbed the German soldier in the back; weaklings, Judases, materialists, their mouths filled with humanitarian phrases, had done their dirty job. They called themselves Democrats and Socialists, but what they did was simply underwrite slavishly the demands of a heartless plutocratic oligarchy, a capitalistic leadership that had covered up its unrelenting rule with a phony 301

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parliamentary routine. The Jews, quite evidently, pulled the strings—and there you have it again: Had they not betrayed our Lord? Were they not a ghost people, as it were, without a proper body, an eternal curse? They were only a symbol, to be sure, of a greater evil, but a significant symbol at that. They were a symbol of dissolution and decomposition. A gigantic literary forgery, called “The Secrets of the Elders of Zion,” hinting at a secret Jewish plot to rule the world by Machiavellian means and to dissolve popular government wherever it was found, was being widely circulated throughout Germany at this time. A devilish onslaught that could only be overcome by the same weapons seemed to be exposed. The argumentative circle was completed.6 Many a young man arrived at a similar conclusion in those fateful years following the armistice, and Munich soon became their meeting place. Ernst Roehm was in charge of the intelligence service of the Munich Reichswehr Kommando at that time, and it was as his employee that Adolf Hitler had started out on his career as a propagandist of a vast rearmament program. Willi Frick, who later became Reichsminister of the Interior, was in charge of the passport office at police headquarters; another sympathizer, Ernst Poehner, was, before his accidental death, police president. Both of them were quite prolific in falsifying passports for professional killers in case they were political friends. After the Kapp-Putsch, General von Ludendorff and a number of his followers moved to Bavaria and established a sanctuary for their hysterical Nordic creed. All in all, Munich in the 1920s was teeming with secret patriotic societies, their members ranging all the way from vague mystics to resolved gangsters. Hess was a member of the Thule Society, which, under the guise of studying the “Saga of the Ancient North,” planned to assassinate the prime minister and other members of the then ruling party of Bavaria. The plan was discovered and several of the members, but not Hess, were tried and executed. Munich looked like the focal point of the violent disappointment of a whole nation. This was, and still is, a puzzle to many observers. The Bavarian capital had been known as strongly Catholic, politically conservative, and socially democratic. It has been famous for the liberality of its kings, the easygoing ways of its burghers, and the carefreeness of its bohemians. These easygoing ways of its inhabitants, however, made possible the Communist experiment in 1919, which, though short-lived, provided opportunity to assemble large numbers of regular and irregular troops, and caused a tremendous shock to the middle classes. It convinced them that the enemy of civil liberties was on the left and not on the right. In the widespread confusion, caused by Communist and anti-Communist battle cries, the agents of the real revolution of destruction that was to follow silently seized power in the disguise of the defenders of a civic peace and order. They seized power, but they avoided responsibility. The Weimar coalition was flowering at the nation’s capital; Berlin’s “gay twenties,” with upstart 302

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politicians, speculators, and theater stars acting hand-in-hand, were in full swing. It was the inflationary time of ill-fated memory. The Reichsmark rose on a fantastic scale; and when the bubble finally burst, the already bewildered middle classes, the stolid backbone of German society, were left impoverished and utterly exhausted. This was another blow, completing the shock of defeat. “Things cannot stay as they are,” was a common saying, at the time, of respectable people turned desperate. The revolutionary stage seemed to be set. The foremost type of men that followed the call, however, were not respectable people; it was the uprooted youngster who could not make good in ordinary life. Edmund Heines, a friend of Rudolf Hess and Ernst Roehm, who later became Police President of Breslau and one of the bloodiest henchmen of the victorious movement, is a good example. Like Roehm, he was killed in the purge of 1934. Heines had grown up in well-to-do surroundings in Munich though he was, ironically enough, the illegitimate child of a famous beauty and a Jewish businessman. He was a good looking, somewhat sensitive, timid youth who liked to play rather than work. He joined the army in 1914 when he still was a boy in his teens and he soon became a lieutenant, got used to giving orders instead of taking them. I remember, when he was home on leave, how intensely he enjoyed giving the command to his former boy scout group to run across the fallow fields and to take cover again and again in the mud on a rainy November day. When the war was over, he was frightened by the idea of going back to school or taking some dull civilian job. He tried law and dentistry for a few weeks each, but then continued fighting and collecting booty by joining one of the volunteer units that battled the Reds in the Baltic states, in Upper Silesia, and in the Ruhrgebiet, and, on top of that, participated in the Kapp-Putsch. When all this was over, he dashed off to Morocco to fight with Abd el Krim and finally he became a leader in the S.A. His story is typical of many. It indicates the inferiority complex turned into a feeling of superiority and used as a driving force by astute leaders. Rudolf Hess is to be taken much more seriously and yet he belongs to the same war-torn generation. When he turned up at the seminars for advanced studies at the University of Munich in 1924, he, too, had already had a revolutionary career behind him. He had been a close personal follower of Hitler, though more in the sense of a disciple rather than a friend. As Hitler’s adjutant, he had joined in the unfortunate Bierkeller-Putsch that had coincided with the height of the inflation period. He had been detained, together with his master, in the state prison at Landsberg, and he had entered history as the typist of Mein Kampf. The story—Rudolf Hess at the University of Munich—starts simply enough, yet must be understood, as we shall see, in a wider perspective. For it is also the portrayal of the involved history of German romanticism on its way from an ideal conception to boundless activity. It may betray something of the secret 303

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force that lies behind the startling movements of German power politics and world conquest. Upon returning to the university, Rudolf Hess joined the seminar of Professor von Zwiedineck at the Department of Economics and Political Science (Staatswissenschaftliche Fakultaet). Teachers in the department at that time were Professors Zahn, Strieder, Lotz, Adolf Weber, and von Zwiedineck. How did the students feel about them? Zahn, president of the Bayerisches Statistisches Landesamt, had always been a stranger at the University; Strieder was a dedicated student of economic history and not interested in politics; Lotz was closely connected with the democratic tradition of the Brentano-school, and an old man besides; Adolf Weber was too much of a bureaucrat, as an economist, too much of a liberal of the old, classical school-tie, not attractive enough to minds that were searching for tools suitable for a new experience. That left only von Zwiedineck as a first rallying point for those who felt uneasy amidst a crumbling society and an outworn science; he shared this uneasiness though he himself was by no means a revolutionary in any sense of the word. He was a fine model of an Austrian aristocrat, early influenced by Karl von Vogelsang and the movement toward a Christian Socialism in Austria; a pupil of Karl Buecher; a successor of Max Weber; interested in the problems of agrarian and industrial production including labor relations rather than in questions of money and banking; and though trained in classical economics, somewhat skeptical as to its practical conclusions. As a sociologist, he was impressed by Pareto’s conception of nonlogical actions and the circulation of the elites; the latter seemed to him to furnish a somewhat valid explanation of the social forces that could be seen in action throughout Europe. Professor von Zwiedineck was ready to recognize these forces rather than overlook them, though his evaluation of their activities was likely to be tinged with a sarcastic melancholy—as might have been expected from a romantic turned realist.7 Bolder spirits, however, were turning up among his pupils, and Rudolf Hess was one of the strangest figures among them. He sat immobile during the seminars, with the stiff bearing of a military man; his receding forehead ended in a bushy crop of dark eyebrows which, in turn, overshadowed piercing eyes that at times gave the impression of daggers aimed at some unseen contestant. He was then in his early thirties and kept quite aloof from the majority of his younger fellow students. He was known to be a mystic, devoted to astrology and palm reading and following an ascetic diet as if he meant to strengthen himself by magical devices.8 He would never deliver a paper, never take a grade. But on rare occasions, when he would participate in a discussion, his remarks would be brief and sharp; he would then have the air of someone omniscient. Time and again, he would, all of a sudden, burst out with argument as if a somewhat primitive mentality, pushed deep down into the subconscious by conventionalized stigmatization, was at pains to express itself in intellectual terms. At one particular session, when Professor von Zwiedineck 304

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tried to convince him that his conclusions were not in accordance with the acknowledged premises of theoretical economy, he replied that, in a case like this, we would have to change the premises rather than the conclusions. He seemed resolved to free political action from the limitations put upon it by an economics of scarcity. To the soldier, economics was to follow politics and politics represented destiny; but behind politics there stood volition as a driving force and behind volition the great mysterious God: race. Race, in turn, was conceived of as a belief rather than a fact. Romanticism lay at the roots, but the goal was an empire. The goal, in fact, was the “Third Reich.” This term had been coined only a few years before by Moeller van den Bruck, an author who was widely read among the new youth movement.9 It should be noted that the word “Reich,” to German ears, has an almost religious tone to it, designating the everlasting kingdom of the Lord as well as the universal imperial dream. Barbarossa as master of Europe crusading against the East to redeem the redeemer by slaying the red dragon of infidelity—presumably at the place that is now Moscow— was this not a grand conception? It was a conception carefully fostered by former ruling circles and eagerly seized upon by frustrated youth. But what if “Europe” did not follow? What if Europe was represented by a “Versailles,” narrow-minded and revengeful, allied to a “Moscow” westernized by Marxist devices, and assisted by blinded henchmen in the heart of Germany itself, in “Weimar”? It was reassuring indeed, that this threatening Versailles, on closer investigation, presented itself as a colossus with feet of clay foolishly believing in streamlined progress toward individual happiness, along the line of atomized science—a cobweb of syllogisms, destroyable as well as destructive. Surely, Europe would follow in time. This, however, was far afield. It was a wild, wishful dream that could not yet dare emerge from the subconscious and expose itself to full publicity. Hence, not much thought was given to particular politics, as Rudolf Hess himself remarked on some occasion; on the contrary, the opposition movement was at pains to find a rather broad rationalization that suited its own immature stage of development and appealed at the same time to age-old images within the German mind. To be sure, in the 1920s, many fads and cults, which might have lent themselves to the purpose, were flourishing; yet, Hess and those around him would quote incessantly and almost exclusively from the works of a Viennese sociologist, Othmar Spann. The catchword was “Universalism”— meaning that society was more than a mere aggregate of individuals; it was to be viewed as a single “organic” whole, a body in which individuals formed but limbs.10 Masters as well as followers would not see that a formula like this, true as it may have been in a historical context, became a fallacy in a contemporary setting. The knowledge of early community life with its intimate face-to-face relationships and undisputed loyalties was the guarded treasure of romantic 305

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thought; civilized life, however, is to be understood as proceeding from such a community toward a more consciously framed societal organization. This process had been described in masterly fashion in the work of Ferdinand Toennies with its dichotomy of “community” as opposed to “society,” and “Wesenswille” as opposed to “Kuerwille”; it had been thoroughly elaborated by Max Weber.11 Othmar Spann, however, in the very name of history, disregarded historic development. He viewed his composite urbanized society as if it still basically were, or could by voluntary action become, a “community.” Moreover, his conceptual confusion of universal life and particular science undermined every scientific approach based on critical evaluation of isolated facts. No wonder, then, that he and his followers as well as his predecessors, grossly misjudged the events of their time. It had never occurred to Spann’s early 19th-century crown-witnesses Adam Mueller and Friedrich von Hardenberg [also known as Novalis.—Eds.] that it was by no means medieval selfgovernment that was to emerge when the battle against Napoleon seemed to have been finally won, but the uniform police state of Metternich. The same mistake, only in a more aggravated way, was repeated with regard to Italian Fascism. When this movement rose to power in the 1920s, it was hailed by German romanticists as a wholesome effort to form an “organic state.” When shortly afterward, the concept of a “state corporative” failed, it was not ascribed to disregarding the inevitable trend toward a centralized government, but to “Latin formalism” as opposed to “Teutonic creativeness.” Not even a Nordic genius, however, could have revived free corporations at a time when groups as well as individuals became submerged in ever-increasing mass movements and Caesars rose as the masters of a totalitarian society. Thus, Othmar Spann’s idea of a “true state” originating from the intimacy of the “folk-mind” was gradually supplanted by a Spenglerian philosophy that realized that our Western civilization had grown into a vast world of mechanized imperialism. At first glance, a development like this seems to indicate an abandonment of romantic implications, but it only seems so. Actually, it means their fulfillment came within an all-embracing vitalistic philosophy (Lebensphilosophie). By this we mean a philosophy of life in a twofold sense: looking at life and its manifold manifestations as a whole and looking at the universe of human relationships not in terms of ideas and goals that lie beyond the boundaries of life, but in terms of life itself as the supreme idea and supreme goal. A philosophy of life in this latter sense is a general fallacy of modern thought, but, at the same time, in its romantic form, it is an eternal temptation to the German mind. This temptation has many sides, to be sure, and accordingly, an unlimited number of definitions of Romantic and Romanticism has been given, each grasping one of its aspects, but none the whole. Exactly this, however, is the essence of what Romantic and a romantic attitude designate: something transient and transparent that evades and evaporates whenever one tries to come to grips with it in terms of definite 306

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delineations. Only a string of expressions can build the net in which to catch its composite meaning, containing the infinite, unending, boundless, remote, fanciful, emotional, sentimental, unique, and personal aspects of things and relationships. Such a string of expressions running all the way from the infinite to the personal seems to be contradictory only if one singles out each item as a separate unit, but it becomes intrinsically meaningful if one sees it as a whole. The infinite and the personal, then, form but opposite ends in which a ring-shaped universal is joined together—a fundamental polarity, macrocosm and microcosm blending into the fullness of life.12 It is this fullness of life that the romantic mind is desperately after— desperately because the idea of life, if any, is an “infinite idea,” pitched between day and night, summer and winter, birth and death in an endless circle with no goal to promise peace and rest beyond it. It is a truly mystical idea, opposed to established institutions of any kind, but above all to established religion. No wonder, then, that Rudolf Hess and many of his friends hated the Church and wanted to abolish biblical teachings once and for all. For life in a religious setting is not independent; proceeding in the light of salvation, it has to be a “good life” or else there will be no salvation. Mysticism, on the other hand, lives only in the intoxication of the moment, does not know of any “future” or “beyond”; since in such a connotation life’s bitter strife will never come to an end, it can only be mastered by ruthlessness here and now or overcome, in a contemplative way, by a complete renunciation of action. Consequently, to Schopenhauer and all his disciples down to H. St. Chamberlain and Alfred Rosenberg, Judeo-Christian ethics had to be dismissed along with traditional metaphysics and, with many of them, a pagan mysticism, dissolving God into “Nature,” was the result. Yet, nature, as has been pointed out previously, to Darwin as well as to Schopenhauer, stands for a continuous strife in which the fittest survive while for the defeated there is one way to escape: to forget. Thus, from myth to biology and back again flows the drift of romantic thought, burying every form in oblivion lest it should lose itself in a relentless struggle for survival. Blurring over every borderline in unmistakable fashion, Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk is the truest expression of this romantic thought in a post-Darwinian setting: “infinite melody” presenting the cup of Lethe in a world of strife. We shall only note, in this connection, that Richard Wagner is H. St. Chamberlain’s, Alfred Rosenberg’s, Rudolf Hess’s, and, for that matter, Adolf Hitler’s venerated idol. Surely, there is only one step from Tristan to Siegfried, from Schopenhauer to Spengler. “Infinite melody,” then, has its counterpart in “infinite activity”— both movements being indicative of a romantic age oscillating between escape and conquest. Taking this into account, it makes sense that Oswald Spengler calls our civilization “Faustian”; it is Faustian restlessness that is set upon conquest of nature as well as conquest of the political field. Here, again, borderlines tend to disappear and it might be concluded that nationalism 307

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has not been the last word of history in terms of this particular span of time. A boundless empire will then emerge with inner necessity, but even this, being a life-unit, will meet its final destruction. Thus, a morphology rather than a philosophy of history is the outcome of political romanticism: natural history, revolving within an everlasting cycle of birth and maturity, decline and death, replaces sacred history aiming at salvation. To abandon salvation, however, as we have seen, means to forsake ethics, which paves the way for salvation: in a mere “struggle for life” force is crowned with glory and consequently the beast of prey becomes the master of a subservient society. This is the view of “infinite politics.” All this, to be sure, is implicit rather than explicit in Oswald Spengler’s work.13 He saw the beast of prey lurking around in packs and this was the reason why he wanted to stabilize state power as a rocher de bronce. At any rate, his outlook, however, foreboding a period of gigantic world wars, was so gloomy that it could hardly win its author excessive popularity. Though widely read and talked about by everyone, the prophet himself was utterly contemptuous of crowd behavior and the pursuit of happiness as exercised by the common man. On the other hand, he was not likely to gain recognition at the University of Munich either because he did not belong to any established “guild” and, hence, had no standing as a scholar; he had been a high school teacher of mathematics before he plunged into the waters of world history. Moreover, societal life in Munich has always been carried on in small groups and conventions, each swearing by its own particular prophet, but none aware of, or even interested in, what was going on outside their circle. Thus, Spengler staying like others in such a small and well-defined circle, was almost never in the public eye. Finally, he did not find favor with Nazi spokesmen; on the contrary, they pamphleteered against him. Obviously, they had no use for his paralyzing pessimism. They gladly admitted that Western civilization was sick and ill, but they resented their being part of it; they conceived of themselves as destroyers of outdated conceptions and decaying institutions and as vigorous heirs of a morbid society.14 This means that Rudolf Hess, strictly speaking, could not very well have been an adherent of Oswald Spengler. However, Pareto’s sociology, of which he had caught a glimpse at the seminar of Professor von Zwiedineck, was very close to Spenglerian thought. Both men believed in the exercise of power by the elites and their leaders; and both regarded this cumbersome society of ours as overripe for a new leadership and “contemporary” as it were, to the Byzantine Empire with its rigid officialdom superimposed upon a senile civilization. Yet, all the prophets of gloom together were not gloomy enough to see that the barbarians, destined to override this empire of our civilization, were already at the gates. A new Caesar was in the offing in the mold of Attila, and people like Rudolf Hess were fanatically convinced that they were riding the wave of this particular future. Why, then, should they feel gloomy about 308

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it? Why philosophize about it at all? Every conceivable “idea” had been tried in recent experience and proved bankrupt. The field was cleared for Nihilism and all that was left to be done was to move ahead and be trained for action.15 By chance, the man to train eager students in intelligent staff work for world conquest was close at hand. He was Major-General Karl Haushofer.16 This man, who, almost a decade later, was to become the main brain trust of Germany, had started on his career when as a young attaché he was sent by the German General Staff to Tokyo to observe the Japanese army. This was as early as 1908. He came back with a book on Japan in which he showed himself as a keen observer of political institutions and the social structure that stands behind them. Indeed, he fell in love with Japan and the study of the Pacific area became his lifework.17 In his most often quoted book, The Geopolitics of the Pacific Ocean, as in his subsequent writing, he proposed the notion that the period of what he called Anglo-Saxon domination over the wide open spaces of this globe had passed and that a tremendous race riot with its center in the Far Est was in the offing.18 This was to be Germany’s day. To Haushofer’s mind, the huge continent of Asia and the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean were going to provide the battleground for the final contest for world domination. He saw British sea power waning before German land power and “Eurasia,” combining the whole of Europe and Asia under German and Japanese leadership, as the task of the present generation. This looks now like practical Spenglerianism long before Spengler minus the Spenglerian gloom.19 It is Lebensraum ideology in the peculiar sense with which we have since become familiar: its life space is truly infinite. By 1910, Karl Haushofer had been appointed Professor of Geography at the University of Munich, but he left in 1914 to serve in the artillery during the Great War. When the war was over, Haushofer, a retired major-general, then in his fifties, resumed his duties at the university and, a little later, founded the so-called German Academy which was supposed to organize German groups abroad on a “scientific” basis, but really for political ends. Rudolf Hess was among his pupils, but his studies were interrupted by the Bierkeller-Putsch and the imprisonment that followed. After his release, however, Hess was appointed as Haushofer’s assistant, only to leave him one year later, in 1925, when he became Hitler’s private secretary and alter ego.20 It has been said that Hess had introduced Haushofer to Hitler even prior to 1923; it is certain, at any rate, that the World War I general condescended to pay frequent visits to the ex-corporal in his Landsberg prison and that he, like Roehm before him, was impressed with the possibility of using this upstart revolutionary with his shrewd psychological insight and his tremendous mass appeal for the rearmament program that the Reichswehr leaders had drafted. Thus, the rather involved course from a vitalistic blood-and-soil philosophy to intercontinental and interoceanic thinking that subsequently became known under the name of “Geopolitics” was completed long before the National 309

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Socialist movement actually took over the reins of power in the Reich in 1933. The logic of this course is truly overwhelming. Sociologically, it rests upon the combination of a vigorous, but violently disappointed and unbalanced youth with the unbroken scientific tradition of the Prussian General Staff. A combination like this provided a rejuvenated leadership for big business as well as for the middle classes and was assurance enough that the conquest of the state was not going to stop short of foreign wars. Ideologically, the course starts much earlier, with the romantic upheaval against enlightenment philosophy and proceeds toward the concept of a Nordic world domination based on geographic and biological “nature.” There were, however, two schools of thought. One, representing the army and led by Haushofer, felt hostile to Great Britain and what it stood for, and consequently was “thrown into the lap of the East,” as Haushofer explained it. The other, representing the nucleus of the National-Socialist party and led by Alfred Rosenberg, felt just as hostile to Great Britain in the long run but, because of their obsession with antibolshevist resentment, would shelve their hostility for the time being. Their scheme was that the organization of the resources of the East should be shared in equal part by Germany, which was to master the Continent, and by Great Britain, which was to rule the waves. This goal seemed to be close at hand when another “Munich” was about to promise a “Pax Nordica” to “our generation.” However, the very essence of “infinite politics” turned this promise—or shall we say compromise—into a passing phase in a battle that is now being fought [at the time of the writing, in the early 1940s.—Eds.] on a gigantic scale throughout the European Continent and the oceans of this planet. This battle, to be sure, will not come to an end until “infinite politics” has met with failure. Editorial note: Joseph B. Maier, coeditor of this volume, was chief of the Analysis Section, Interrogation Division, Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major Nazi War Criminals. In that capacity, he worked closely with Sender Jaari, deputy chief of the Briefing Section, Interrogation Division, Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel, interrogating Goering, von Ribbentrop as well as Rudolf Hess. As recounted a year later, the “interrogators at the Nuremberg trials, . . . talked intimately to all the top Nazis,” and found each of them a “distinct personality,” a “fascinating psychological problem.” They found themselves mentally grouping the defendants into various categories, such as “the killers” (Kaltenbrunner, Frank), “the thinkers” (Rosenberg, Schacht), and “the aristocrats” (von Papen, Neurath). Hess seemed to have defied classification. As recounted, he walked into the interrogation room in October 1945 as a “ghastly walking corpse.” Hess claimed amnesia and

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practically every answer he made was “I am sorry. I don’t remember.” What was Hess like then? Hugging himself with his arms as if to avoid bodily evidences of emotion, Hess sat across the table from us, his gaunt, unshaven face brutally illuminated. . . . His dark, deep-set eyes were partly closed. He kept them on the table, the walls, the floor, anywhere but on us, his interrogators. His voice, once so resonant when he spoke at Party rallies before the war, was now low, monotonous, dead. Old Nazi friends were paraded in front of Hess, like Goering, Karl Haushofer, von Papen, who mentioned incidents in order to trigger his memory. “But Hess ‘remembered nothing’. ” He had “no recollection of his arrival in England; he remembered nothing of the famous 1941 flight in a new Messerschmidt to the estate of the Duke of Hamilton in an attempt to win a British alliance in a projected war against Russia.” All the interrogators concluded that he was “the most difficult and the most boring witness” they encountered. They realized only much later, “what a great actor Hess was. He would let his weird moods range from sudden flashes of fanatical fire at the mention of Hitler, to equally sudden moments of childlike pathos” when he was “treated unfairly.” Maier and Jaari remember the day Hess was confronted with the idea that his amnesia was feigned by U.S. Colonel John H. Amen: Amen: “You remember Haushofer in here yesterday, don’t you? Your old friend, Haushofer?” The reference was to Dr. Karl Haushofer, noted Nazi professor of geopolitics, who committed suicide several months later. Hess: “I do remember the old gentleman who was here yesterday. I was told that he was an old friend, but I don’t remember that.” Hess even claimed in his “amnesia period” to have only the haziest idea of who Hitler was: it stuck in his mind that Hitler had once been the head of the German State. After the masquerade of amnesia had ended, Maier remembers how his true feelings about Hitler surfaced: Hess claimed that Hitler was “the greatest son my people produced in their history of a thousand years.” He recalled “in an odd mixture of humility and pride,” to have helped Hitler with Mein Kampf. Said Hess: I wrote much of it myself, but it was always the thoughts of the Fuehrer I expressed. I stand for everything in ‘Mein Kampf.’ My only regret is that Hitler’s plan to cooperate with the British went haywire. . . . If the plans had been carried out as the Fuehrer and I outlined them. . . . Maier’s and Jaari’s recollections compliment those of Cahnman’s. Hess undoubtedly had a “certain basic intelligence,” as he kept all Nuremberg

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guessing about his “amnesia” for some time. “But beyond that he was a weakling. Like so many of Hitler’s henchmen, Hess once had dreamed of greatness as a Boy Scout dreams of becoming a Scoutmaster. Then Hitler had, surprisingly, made the dream come true.” Once Hitler’s powerful personality and the “great days” of the Reich vanished, the “feeble boy-scout re-emerged.” Maier and Jaari remember Hess watching courtroom showings of German films, softly beating time with his feet as the ghosts of German legions goose-stepped across the screen. Seeking moral support, he sat beside the massive Goering whenever possible, looking to him eagerly for strength. Sometimes, as during the showing of concentration camp horrors on the screen, Hess would giggle like a school-girl. He never had the courage to take the witness stand throughout the trial. Occasionally, he would scribble notes to his defense council, but usually he sat hunched and apathetic, lifting his head at a mention of his own or Hitler’s name. As soon as he could, he tottered . . . back to his cell and his little dog-eared collection of love-novels. [Maier’s and Jaari’s recollection was first published in Joseph Maier and Sender Jaari, “These were the Supermen,” in Art and Action (New York: Twice a Year Press, 1948), pp. 137–156.—Eds.] Notes 1.

2.

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The first version of this paper was written in the early 1940s. Many versions of Cahnman’s unpublished manuscript were found in his literary estate. The most complete version was entitled, “Rudolf Hess as a Symbol” and was intended as a contribution to the “understanding of German geopolitics.” In using Rudolf Hess as a prototype of a war-torn generation, Cahnman wanted to expose the forces that were operating in Germany after the defeat of WWI and during the Weimar Republic, foreshadowing the catastrophe that was to follow. Some of the impressions recorded in Cahnman’s essay were voiced by him in his interview as early as May 1941 when he was a visiting research fellow at the University of Chicago. See, “Hess Honest, Says Former Fellow Student,” Daily Times, Chicago, Wednesday, May 14, 1941, p. 37. For further information see, Joseph B. Maier, Judith Marcus, Zoltán Tarr, eds. Germany Jewry. Its History and Sociology. Selected Essays of Werner J. Cahnman (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989), pp. xxiii, 110, 123, and 145. Editors’ note: Cahnman had assumed that von Zwiedineck and Haushofer did not need introduction. This is obviously not the case here and today. Originally from Austria, Otto von Zwiedineck-Suedenhorst was a wellknown professor of economics at the University of Munich; he treated in his seminars the themes and history of economic theory, including the history of socialism. He recounted in an essay how he had been helped out of a dangerous situation during the Nazi period by Rudolf Hess. See, “Erfuelltes—Erstrebtes—Erkanntes,” in Mensch und Wirtschaft (Berlin: 1955), pp. 1–37. Karl Haushofer also taught economics at the University of

Appendix

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

Munich. Cf. notes 16 and 17. For an account of Cahnman’s student days, see German Jewry, pp xxiii, 109–111. Editors’ note: Othmar Spann (1878–1950), the much maligned sociologistphilosopher who presented a “Catholic vision of society,” also came from Austria. He was first a professor of political economy at Bruenn and then at the University of Vienna (1919–1938). First the Nazis tried to recruit him; later, as the Catholic foundation of his views became apparent, he was dismissed from his university post and even imprisoned for a short time. William M. Johnson devotes a subchapter to the discussion of Othmar Spann’s ideas and the ensuing controversies. Spann revived Adam Mueller’s conception of Gemeinschaft society, that is, the conservative tradition of German romantic thought, and “asserted the Baroque-Biedermeier faith of Bolzano and Herbart in a social order built upon eternal law.” Spann’s universalism “consists of assessing all phenomena from the vantage of the whole rather than that of its constituents. . . . universalism incorporates the perspective of the individual into a larger framework.” See Johnson, The Austrian Mind. An Intellectual and Social History: 1848–1938 (Berkeley/ CA: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 311–315. Karl Polanyi called Spann a “fascist Hegel” without the revolutionary dynamic inherent in Hegel’s work. See Karl Polanyi, “The Essence of Fascism,” in John Lewis, ed. Christianity and the Social Revolution (New York: 1936), pp. 359–394. For a more recent critical evaluations see John Haag, “The Spann Circle and the Jewish Question,” in Leo Baeck Year Book, 18 (1973): 93–128. For quite a good, albeit brief, introduction, see E. Y. Hartshorne, German Youth and the Nazi Dream of Victory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). See Jaques M. Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (New York: 1941). See Maurice Samuel, The Great Hatred (New York: 1940) who in his work appears to present a valid interpretation; and yet, he has overlooked another level of anti-Semitism, marked by the legend of the “wandering Jew,” which was almost ready-made to merge with the level of a “blood-and-soil” paganism. Otto von Zwiedineck was a perfect medium. This made not only his interpretation of Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, Max Weber, Achille Loria and Eugen von Boehm-Bawerck extremely elucidating but it also made him capable of becoming a transmittal station from which many diverse trains of thought and action emanated. Editors’ note: Interestingly, there was a report in the same issue of the Daily Times, Chicago that published Cahnman’s comments on Hess, about Hess’s connections to Josef Ranald, a German-American palmist, living in New York City. Among others, Ranald stated that “Rudolf Hess had consulted him on several occasions to determine his destiny”, and added, “he struck me as the most sane of the many Nazi leaders I interviewed.” However, “he was exceedingly superstitious, was a sucker for psychic phenomena and leaned heavily upon the signs he found in his stars.” According to Ranald, he met Hess through Erik Jan Hanussen, Hitler’s personal astrologer during the “Fuehrer’s climb to power.” The paper also reported that a “Berlin spokesman yesterday ridiculed Hess’s interest in astrology and palmistry, 313

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9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

314

hinting it had much to do with the ‘hallucinations’ he was said to have.” Ranald’s characterization matches that of Cahnman’s in many respects; he stated, that “the most marked characteristic of Hess was his leaning toward the occult. His palms were marked by what we call ‘crosses of mysticism’ and these lines dominated all others.” Furthermore, “Hess stood out from other Nazi leaders . . . in that he appeared incorruptible and seemed to lack entirely any element of personal ambition. As he hated Communism and the Jews, so he was devoted to Hitler,” who, apparently, “did not measure up to the ideal Hess first attached to him.” Ranald professed not to know of “Hess’s religious faith” but he struck him as “almost ascetic in his habits and a martyr in temperament. He was a vegetarian, never smoked or drank and paid the closest attention to his health.” Ranald surmises that it was Hess’s early life in Egypt from which “he gained a sort of kismet—fatalistic belief. This almost oriental part of his life contributed a great deal too to his metaphysical leanings.” The original press clippings have been found in Cahnman’s literary estate and are now in the possession of the editors. See Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich. 3d ed. (Hamburg: 1931). For a condensed English language edition see Germany’s Third Empire (London: 1934). The influence of this book upon the German youth movement cannot be overestimated. From what we have to understand about the meaning of the term “Reich,” however, the translation of “Empire” does not even begin to convey the spell inherent in the original term. Maybe, “dominion” would be closer to the definition of “Reich.” None of the works of Othmar Spann has appeared in English. The most significant book among them is Der wahre Staat (The True State), 2d ed. (Leipzig: 1923). His Haupttheorien der Volkswirtschaftslehre auf geschichtlicher Grundlage (Main Theories of Political Economics in Historical Context) (Leipzig: 1923) has been required reading for students in the social sciences. See Ferdinand Toennies, Fundamental Concepts of Sociology (“Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft”), translated and supplemented by Charles F. Loomis (Cincinnati, 1940). See also, Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundrisse der Sozialoekonomik, vol. 3 (Tuebingen: 1925). Cf. Max Weber, General Economic History, trans. Frank Knight (New York: 1927). For a first orientation see Ricarda Huch, Bluetezeit der Romantik (Leipzig: 1901) and Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik (Muenchen: 1920). See Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. English translation (New York: 1932) and The Hour of Decision. Part 1. English translation (New York: 1934). This latter pamphlet, predicting a chain of world wars, was published in Germany in the summer of 1933. It was the last utterance of an independent public opinion under Nazi rule. Again, however, the translation seems to pass by the most essential implications inherent in the original. The German title is Jahre der Entscheidung, which means “decisive years” rather than “the hour of decision”; that is to say, the author does not deal with what we ought to do at some particular moment, but with what is presently being done by us and with us in the period at hand. Much anti-Spenglerian “literature,” written by Nazi pamphleteers, has been published in this period, including writings of the well-known propagandist, Dr. von Leers. [Needless to say, much has been written about Spengler after and since the writing of this essay, around 1940. Among the most interesting

Appendix

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

German language criticisms are the essays by Thomas Mann and Theodor W. Adorno of the Frankfurt School.—Eds.] A striking example of the kind of Nihilism referred here can be found in Christopher Steding, Das Reich und die Krankheit der europaeischen Kultur (The Empire and the Diseased State of European Civilization) (Hamburg: 1938). There was quite some personal contact between Karl Haushofer and Professor Otto von Zwiedineck though the latter was at no time engaged in political action or even a member of a political party. He derived, however, from his interest in a sociology of knowledge a further interest in the wider physical and cultural as well as in a purely economic environment, the lifespace or the so-called Lebensraum. He wanted to see inquiries made into the Lebensraum as the locus of race and class formation and separation and as the field within which ideologies materialized that were afterward to shape the destinies of individuals as well as nations. My own thesis on “Der oekonomische Pessimismus and das Ricardo’sche System,” published later (Halberstadt, 1931) was devoted to an inquiry of that sort. See Karl Haushofer, Politische Erdkunde und Geopolitik in Bausteine zur Geopolitik, ed. Karl Haushofer, Erich Obst, Hermann Lautensach, and Otto Maull (Berlin: 1928), p. 66. Haushofer’s love of Japan can be explained, apart from political and military considerations, on the ground that Japan represented to him the Gemeinschaft-type of society that has been so dear to many Germans of his generation an background. His style shows, both in sentence construction and in the choice of words, the double influence of an early training in the classical languages and of the elaborate verbiage of Richard Wagner. I intend to present something of the background of geopolitics in a paper that is soon to be published in the American Journal of Sociology. [In fact, Cahnman subsequently published three papers on the topic but not in the AJS. For “Concept of Geopolitics,” see American Sociological Review (1943): 55–59; “The Concept of Raum and the Theory of Regionalism,” in ASR, 9, 5 (1944): 455–462 and “Methods of Geopolitics,” in Social Forces ( December 1941): 147–154.—Eds.] See Karl Haushofer, Geopolitik des Pazifischen Ozeans (Berlin 1924). Only a few casual remarks on Spengler are to be found in the writings of Karl Haushofer. What he seems to resent in Spengler as well as in Othmar Spann is not so much their general run of ideas as their lack of what he calls a “geographic foundation of history” (Erdgebundenheit). See Haushofer, Grenzen (Berlin: 1927), p. 293. Among so much guesswork on Rudolf Hess is one outstanding presentation of Konrad Heiden, Hitler’s “better half,” in Foreign Affairs (October 1941). Karl Haushofer himself is quoting from an unpublished paper, written by Rudolf Hess, in his book Grenzen (Berlin: 1927), p. 293.

315

Index Buber, Martin, xii, 154 Buber, Paula, 285 Buchanan, James, 144 Buckle, Henry T., 6–7 Buecher, Karl, 11, 304 Buelow, Bernhard von, 127 Burgess, Ernest W., 111, 140 Burke, Edmund, 4–5

Abaelardus, Petrus, 90 Abd el Krim, 303 Abel, Theodore, 117 Abraham, 248, 272 Abramowsky, Edouard, 95, 128 Adams, Brooks, 224 Angell, Robert Cooley, 232 Antoni, Carlo, 18–19, 33–34 Aquinas, see Thomas Arendt, Hannah, xv Arensberg, Conrad M., 146 Aristotle, 72, 160–62, 168, 172 Baeck, Leo, xii Bagby, Philip, 226 Balandier, 233–34 Baldwin, James Mark, 105, 110, 130 Banton, Michael, 234–35 Baradaeus, see Jacobus Baron, Salo, xiv, xviii Becker, Howard, 16, 18, 30, 32, 112–13, 116, 129 Below, Georg von, 5 Bendix, Reinhard, 34, 118 Bernsdorff, Wilhelm, 127 Birnbaum, Norman, 35, 65 Bismarck, Otto von, 47 Bloch, Marc, xxiv, 138, 174, 186 Blumer, Herbert, 111 Boeckh, August, 5, 9 Booth, Charles, 13 Borenstein, A. J., 109 Boskoff, Alvin, xi, xvi, 34, 65, 181, 198 Braidwood, Robert J., 227 Brentano, Lujo, xv, 76, 304 Brunner, Edmund De S., 109 Bryce, Lord, 293 Bryson, Gladys, 118

Caesar, Julius, 48, 308 Calvin, John, 48 Cappannari, Stephen C., 221 Chamberlain, H. Stuart, 307 Chomsky, Noam, 172 Childe, Gordon V., 185, 226–28 Cleisthenes, 194 Cohen, Morris R., 226, 230 Collins, Randall, xxiii Comhaire, Jean L., 234 Comte, Auguste, 6, 138–39, 146, 154, 173, 257 Cooley, Charles Horton, xxii, 106–07, 110, 112, 117, 130–31, 146, 214, 278–79 Coulanges, Fuestel de, xxiv, 5, 9, 76, 157, 170, 174, 184, 193, 229–231 Cousin, Victor, 151 Croce, Benedetto, 168 Cuomo, Mario, xviii Dante, 237 Darazi, 249 Darwin, Charles, 111, 115, 262, 307 David, King, 213 Davis, Kingsley, 184 de Bonald, Louis, 5 Denis, C., 234 Descartes, Rene, 151–52 Dickinson, John K., 147

317

Weber and Toennies Dilthey, Wilhelm, xx, 3, 6–8, 13, 171 Droysen, Johann Gustav von, xx Dubin, Robert, 138 Duffy, James, 235 Dumont, Louis, 174 Durkheim, Emile, xvii, xxi, 5, 41, 60, 67–68, 72, 76, 78–79, 81–82, 89–97, 99–100, 110, 112, 117, 128, 146, 159, 170, 184, 222, 225, 247, 290–291 Eichhorn, Karl F., 5 Elgin, Lord, 201 Engels, Friedrich, 69 Eoetvoes, Jozsef, 257 Erikson, Eric, 146 Fairbanks, 105 Ferguson, Adam, 154, 173 Firey, Walter, 19, 33 Fischhof, Adolph, xxv, 255–64 Fischoff, Ephraim, 42 Fleetwood, Bishop, 294–95 Focher, Ferruccio, 167 Frank, Jacob L., 310 Frankfort, Henri, 227 Franklin, Benjamin, 65, 98 Freeman, Linton C., 118 Freyer, Hans, 112 Frick, Willi, 302 Frost, Robert, 270–71, 285 Galileo, 160 Galpin, Carl J., 107 Gandhi, Mahatma, 146 Garin, Eugenio, 167 Gentz, Friedrich, 5 George, Stefan, 48 Giddings, Franklin, 105 Goering, Hermann, 311–12 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang v., 69, 142, 151, 169 Goffman, Erving, 140, 147 Goldenweiser, Alexander, 223 Gordon, Milton M., 282–83 Grotius, Hugo, 169 Gumplowicz, Ludwig, 155 Gurwitsch, Aron, 128 Gutkind, Peter W., 234 Hamilton, Colonel J. P., 292 Hamilton, Duke of, 311 Hauser, Philip M., 114, 129 318

Haushofer, Karl, xxvii, 299–300, 309–11 Heberle, Rudolf, xvii, 91, 106–09, 111, 116, 118, 127, 162–65 Heeren, A. H. L., 9, 257 Hegel, G. W. F., 69, 73, 130, 154, 172–73 Heines, Edmund, 303 Henderson, L. J., 64 Herberg, Will, 286 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 151, 171 Herod, King, 216 Herzl, Theodor, xii Hess, Friedrich, 301 Hess, Rudolf, xii, xxvi, 299–312 Hildebrand, Bruno, 10–12 Hiller, Ernest T., 107 Hitler, Adolf, xviii, xxvi, 146, 300–303, 307, 309, 311 Hobbes, Thomas, xviii, xxiii, 3, 57, 72, 74, 91, 93, 96, 110, 116, 130–31, 152–53, 159–75 Homer, 153, 155, 171, 173, 269 Horace, 155, 173 Hughes, Bishop John, 280–81 Hughes, Everett C., xiv, xvii, 112–113, 115, 140 Humboldt, Alexander von, xxvi Humboldt, Wilhelm von, xx, 6, 8, 20, 257, 259 Husserl, Edmund, xxii, 127 Ibn Khaldun, see Khaldun Isaac, 272 Jaari, Sender, 310 Jacob, 272 Jacobs, Norman, 35 Jacobus Baradaeus, 249 Jacoby, E. G., 120, 127 James, William, 64 Janowitz, Morris, 119 Johnson, Samuel, 140, 224 Julius, see Caesar Kafka, Franz, 37 Kaltenbrunner, General, 310 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 11–12, 20, 72, 130 Keller, Albert G., 223 Kemal, 248 Kennedy, Ruby J. R., 286 Khaldun, ibn, 155 Kleist, Heinrich von, 48 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 222

Index Knapp, Professor, 111 Knies, Karl, 10–15 Koenig, René, 62, 70, 73, 127 Kolb, William L., 107, 115, 129 Kroeber, A. L., 222 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste de, 55 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 118 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 130 Le Play, Frederic, xvii, 13 Lewis, Oscar, 114, 129, 147 Liebow, Elliot, 147 Linton, Ralph, 224 Lippman, Walter, 105 List, Friedrich, xxvi Little, Kenneth L., 234 Locke, John, 280 Loomis, Charles P., xvii, xxii, 33, 91–92, 106–109, 116, 162–63 Lotz, Professor, 304 Louis XIV, 138, 219 Lucretius, 155, 173 Ludendorff, General von, 302 Lukács, Georg, xxi Luther, Martin, 48, 146 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 172 MacIver, Robert M., 106, 110–111, 117 MacPherson, C. B., 166 MacRae, Donald G., 181 Maier, Joseph B., xv, 310–12 Maine, Henry Sumner, xxiii, 9, 57, 74, 110, 147 Maistre, Joseph de, 5, 151 Mannheim, Karl, 140 Marcus, Judith, xvi Maron, 249, 272 Marshall, Alfred, 9, 19 Marsh, Robert M., 36 Marx, Karl, xvii, xxi, 48, 53–56, 127, 257 Maurer, G. L. von, 9 Mauss, Marcel, 170 McKinney, John C., 34 Mead, George Herbert, xxii, 130–32, 146 Mendoza, Antoniode, 292 Menger, Carl, 5, 10–15, 18, 20, 29, 32 Merton, Robert K., 36, 140, 174, 224 Metternich, Klemens von, 306 Michelet, Jules, 170 Milgram, Stanley, 143 Mill, John Stuart, 130

Mills, C. Wright, 146 Miller, Herbert A., xiii Miller, William, 36 Mitchell, William, 233 Mitzman, Arthur, xxi, 47–49 Moeller van den Bruck, A., 305 Mohl, Robert von, 257, 260, 262 Mondéjar, Marquis de, 292 Montesquieu, Charles de, 257, 259 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 105, 154, 173 Moses, 154, 248 Moss, Leonard W., 221 Mueller, Adam, 306 Muensterberg, Hugo, 105, 129 Mumford, Lewis, 184, 226 Myrdal, Gunnar, 278 Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte), 4, 138, 144, 201, 258, 306 Nasser, Gamal, 251 Nestorius, 249, 272 Neurath, Baron Konstantin, 310 Nicolini, Fausto, 167 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 45, 48, 151–52, 154 Nisbet, Robert, 67, 75, 119 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 4, 306 Odum, Howard, 224 Olivier, Lord, 295 Oppenheimer, Franz, xiii Orwell, George, 37 Page, Charles H., 225 Papen, Franz von, 310–311 Pareto, Vilfredo, 172, 304, 308 Park, Robert E., xiii, xxii, xxiv, xxvi, 16, 30, 106, 110, 111–116, 129, 155, 166, 228, 232, 236 Parsons, Talcott, xxi, xxii, 19, 32, 42, 45, 62, 64, 106, 108, 116–117, 138, 142, 144, 163 Pasch, Georg, 152, 167 Paulsen, Friedrich, 111 Pavlov, Ivan, 143 Philo, 44 Pirenne, Henri, xxiv, 76, 182, 184 Plato, 172 Poehner, Ernst, 302 Polybius, 172 Potocki, Count, 261 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 169 319

Weber and Toennies Quesada, 292 Ranke, Leopold von, 6, 8, 20 Redfield, Robert, xiv, 109, 112–115, 117–118, 129, 184, 224 Rehberg, A. W., 5 Reissman, Leonard, 184 Ricardo, David, 9, 12 Rickert, Heinrich, 3, 7–8, 17 Rieger, Francis Ladislas, 263 Roehm, Ernst, 302–303 Romulus, 269 Roscher, Wilhelm, 10–15 Rosenberg, Alfred, 300, 307, 310 Rosenzweig, Franz, xii, 154 Ross, Edward A., 106, 112 Roth, Guenther, 61–62, 89, 96, 99 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 73–74 Ryan, Bryce, 35 Salomon, Albert, 108, 109, 116, 127 Sanderson, Dwight, 107 Sapir, Edward, 223 Saran, Parmatma, 287 Savigny, Carl von, 4, 5, 12, 224 Schacht, Hjalmar, 310 Schachter, Stanley, 143 Schaeffle, Albert, xxv, 255, 261–64 Scheler, Max, 127 Schelling, Friedrich W., xviii–xix, 6, 130, 262 Schelting, Alexander von, 17, 31–33 Schmalenbach, 117, 163 Schmoller, Gustav, 10, 12–14, 18, 20, 32 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 74, 92, 130, 307 Schuetz, Alfred, 128 Selden, John, 169 Servius, 194 Shakespeare, William, 156 Simmel, Georg, xiii, xv, xix, 7–8, 110–112, 117, 141, 184 Simpson, Sir John Hope, 245, 250 Sjoberg, Gideon, 18, 32, 113, 129, 182, 186 Small, Albion, 105, 129, 223 Smelser, Neil J., 139 Smith, Adam, 9, 12, 75 Smith, Robertson, 247, 290 Sofer, R., 234 Sombart, Werner, 19, 34, 76 Sorokin, Pitirim A., 67–68, 89, 94, 106, 109, 110–11, 172, 222 320

Southall, A. W., 234 Souza, 292 Spann, Othmar, 299, 305–06 Spencer, Herbert, xvii, xxi, 57–60, 81, 95, 105, 110, 117, 138–39, 146, 224–225 Spengler, Oswald, 76, 172, 224, 300, 307–09 Spiethoff, Arthur, 17–18, 32, 36 Spinoza, Baruch, 128, 167 Stark, Werner, 118 Stein, Lorenz von, 257, 262 Stonequist, Everett V., xiii Strieder, Jacob, xi, 304 Sumner, William Graham, 12, 223 Szechenyi, Count Franz, 256 Talaat, 248 Tarde, Gabriel, 67, 75, 95–96, 128 Tarr, Zoltán, xvi Tax, Sol, 115 Thomas Aquinas, 168 Thomas, W. I., xxiii, 119, 140, 146, 154, 166, 278 Thucydides, 144, 160 Thurnwald, Richard, 74, 128 Tocqueville, Alexis de, xxiii, 119, 146 Toennies, Ferdinand, passim Tolstoy, Leo N., 68 Tooke, (John) Horne, 13 Tourneau, Roger Le, 195 Toynbee, Arnold J., 172, 222 Troeltsch, Ernst, 3 Trotsky, Leon, xxiv Turgot, Anne Robert J., 173 Turner, Lorenzo, 286 Tylor, Sir Edward B., 222 Vance, Rupert B., 118 Vico, Giambattista, xviii, xxiii, 146, 151–56, 159–60, 166–75 Vierkandt, Alfred, 127 Vinogradoff, Paul G., 112 Virgil, 155, 173 Vogelsang, Karl von, 304 Wagner, Richard, 299, 301, 307 Wallas, Graham, 129 Ward, Lester F., 105, 223 Weber, Alfred, 19, 224–25, 228, 304 Weber, Max, passim William of Occam, 90

Index Wilson, Monica, 230 Wilson, Warren H., 109 Winch, Robert F., 118 Windelband, Wilhelm, 7–8, 111 Wirth, Louis, xiv, 106, 110–11, 112–14, 129, 162, 182–84 Wischnitzer, Mark, xiv Wittfogel, Karl August, 35 Wittich, Klaus, 61–62, 64, 89, 96, 99 Woodward, C. Vann, xvi

Whyte, William Foote, 140 Wundt, Wilhelm, 92 Zahn, Professor, 304 Zevi, Sabbatai, 249 Zimmerman, Carle C., 107 Z naniecki, Florian, 119, 140, 166, 277–78 Zwiedineck-Suedenhorst, Otto von, xi, 299, 304, 308

321