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article

Max Weber and the Social EJPT

Sciences in America
Lawrence A. Scaff
European Journal
of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
Wayne State University in Detroit London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 3(2) 121–132
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885104041042]

a b s t r a c t : Weber and his work functioned in two ways: both as a bridge to the
new, to the world of capitalist modernity, as well as a road to an acceptable
cosmopolitan ‘liberal’ historical past. It was Weber the cosmopolitan and outsider
who could give legitimacy and weight to the intellectual orientations and problems
thought to be significant for the community in exile. It was this Weber who could
cushion the ‘negative shock’ of what was often perceived as America’s ‘intellectual and
cultural provincialism’ and establish for the emigre scholar and intellectual the
historical task of assisting in the development of American intellectual and cultural
life. At the same time, the presence of a different Weber in America, already an
established interest of several scholars emerging into prominence, such as Talcott
Parsons and Edward Shils, created difficulties as well as opportunities for the emigre
scholars. Because of such variety the field for the transmission, reception, and
influence of Weber’s work must be approached as a complicated, multilayered, and
contested patchwork of disparate and sometimes partially overlapping social and
professional networks.

k e y w o r d s : American exceptionalism, American social science, exile studies, German

immigrants, Max Weber, New School for Social Research, political economy, reception of
Weber’s work, Weber’s trip to the US

I
On 19 April 1950, two days before what would have been Max Weber’s 86th
birthday, Karl Jaspers had a dream at his home in exile in Basel. He recorded it in
a letter to Hannah Arendt:
I had a remarkable dream last night. We were together at Max Weber’s. You, Hannah,
arrived late, were warmly welcomed. The stairway led through a ravine. The apartment
was Weber’s old one. He had just returned from a world trip, had brought back political
documents and artworks, particularly from the Far East. He gave us some of them, you the
best ones because you understood more of politics than I.

Contact address: Lawrence A Scaff, Department of Political Science, Wayne State

University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA.
Email: L.Scaff@wayne.edu 121
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About to complete The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt replied:
‘Prompted by your dream I’ve read a lot of Max Weber. I felt so idiotically flat-
tered by it that I was ashamed of myself. Weber’s intellectual sobriety [Nüchtern-
heit] is impossible to match, at least for me’. She added the self-reflection, ‘With
me there’s always something dogmatic left hanging around somewhere’, and then
‘(That’s what you get when Jews start writing history)’.1
In ways he may not have appreciated, Jaspers’s intuition expressed through the
dream-sequence is remarkable for a number of reasons. It answers the question,
why Weber? It reveals the most essential reasons for Weber’s significance for the
emigre scholars, a significance that cannot simply be tracked down, as a detective
might look for material clues, by checking for paraphrases, explicit borrowings,
biographical reports, references, or footnotes. It lies much deeper in the intel-
lectual milieu of the emigre community and what we might call the social-
psychology of the refugee scholar, the immigrant, and the exile in America.
Jaspers’s dream announces the image of Weber the mythic scholar-theoros,
traveling to foreign lands (including the United States) like the emigres them-
selves, documenting what he has seen, then reporting back as guide, mentor,
observer of the previously unknown. Weber and his work functioned in two ways:
both as a bridge to the new, to the world of capitalist modernity, as well as a road
to an acceptable cosmopolitan ‘liberal’ historical past, to the intellectual world
Jaspers and many others experienced in the Weber residence on the Ziegelhäuser
Landstrasse in Heidelberg, the home built by Weber’s grandfather Fallenstein,
the meeting place for Gervinus and the 1848 Frankfurt liberals, by 1933 the
outsiders and exiles of modern German history.
It was Weber the cosmopolitan and outsider2 who could give legitimacy and
weight to the intellectual orientations and problems thought to be significant for
the community in exile: the relations between politics and culture, the moral
foundations of the social and economic order, the problem of ‘rationality’ and the
irrationality of action, the place for historical thinking or the ‘historical sensi-
bility’,3 the ‘value’ problem, the meaning of science as a vocation, the fate of the
intellectual and the Jewish scholar. It was this Weber who could cushion the
‘negative shock’ of what was often perceived as America’s ‘intellectual and cultural
provincialism’4 and establish for the emigre scholar and intellectual the historical
task of assisting in the development of American intellectual and cultural life. At
the same time, the presence of a different Weber in America, already an estab-
lished interest of several scholars emerging into prominence, such as Talcott
Parsons and Edward Shils, created difficulties as well as opportunities for the
emigre scholars. The previous American reception of Weber’s work had
abstracted it from the contextualized and political Weber so important to the
newcomers, not to mention the lionizing of Weber as an ‘intellectual desperado’.5
The contributions of the emigre intellectuals were not welcomed unconditionally
and could be met with resistance.6
122 As in Jaspers’s dream, Hannah Arendt did indeed arrive late. She never met
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Max Weber, only attending a few of the Heidelberg jours Marianne Weber con-
tinued to host into the 1920s and 1930s. There were of course those from an older
generation in this strikingly diverse community of emigre scholars in the 1930s
and 1940s who knew Weber personally, such as Emil Lederer, Paul Honigsheim,
and Karl Loewenstein,7 who often acknowledged their intellectual indebtedness.
Honigsheim’s sociology of music, for example, is quite explicitly an extension of
ideas generated in conversations with Weber. Others, such as Franz Neumann,
Arnold Brecht (1959), and Alfred Schutz (1959), had read Weber’s work and then
used it for their own purposes, Brecht in political theory and Schutz in phe-
nomenology.8 Still others in the social sciences, such as Paul Lazarsfeld, knew
Weber’s empirical studies and reputation, but cannot be said to have built impor-
tantly upon his scholarship.9 And there were those philosophers on the margins
of the social sciences, from Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss to Herbert Marcuse,
critics drawn to Weber for quite different reasons as a worthy opponent.10
In addition, in the 1920s and 1930s the scientific terrain featured American
scholars themselves – principally Talcott Parsons and Frank Knight – who were
already in contact with Marianne Weber and other German scholars, including
Karl Jaspers, Alfred Weber, and Alexander von Schelting, and sought to introduce
Weber’s work to colleagues, students, and a larger public. They also sought to
bring Weber’s empirical studies and essays in the philosophy of science to bear on
the definition of the social sciences.11 Because of such variety the field for the
transmission, reception, and influence of Weber’s work must be approached as a
complicated, multilayered, and contested patchwork of disparate and sometimes
partially overlapping social and professional networks.

II
I begin with this brief postwar exchange between Jaspers and Arendt because it
suggests the possibilities and difficulties of my theme, a theme that involves
memory, imagination, and an uncertain effort to trace the transmission, recep-
tion, influence, and significance of ideas. It is not only diversity within the com-
munity of scholars that is at issue, but also the controversies and uncertainties
swirling around Weber and his legacy for inquiry into social life.
Interpretations of any apparent ‘legacy’ have tended to play off the specific
origins of Weber’s thought against the liberating effects of a recontextualized
reception, a tendency revealed in the following two comments, nearly 50 years
apart:

Weber’s influence in Germany was very limited. It is characteristic of German social

science that it virtually destroyed Weber by an almost exclusive concentration upon the
discussion of his methodology. Neither his demand for empirical studies nor his insistence
upon the responsibility of the scholar to society were heeded. It is here, in the United
States, that Weber really came to life.12
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Stated in this way, Neumann really means to point out that it was only when the
scholars in exile were in the US that Weber actually came to life for them. Why
was this the case? Did it have to do with the content of Weber’s work, the American
experience of the emigres, or a particular interaction between the work and the
experience?
Elaborating recently on the same theme, Guenther Roth has noted:
Max Weber became one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century in large
measure because of the intellectual interests and professional needs of successive
generations of social scientists. A great many misreadings, that is, readings out of context
and more or less ‘creative misinterpretations,’ were necessary for an international success
that he never anticipated.13

We must ask what these intellectual interests and professional needs actually
were. The answer to that question has to do not just with Weber’s reputation, but
also in large measure with the formation of the social sciences, especially in
America.
With respect to the strength of ‘influence’ that both authors mention, the
legacy has then paradoxically included both the view that Weber has held a
powerful grip on the images we have formed of modern social life – think of dis-
cussions that invoke terms like ‘charisma’ and ‘bureaucracy’ – and the view that
Weber has had little positive effect on the actual social sciences in North America.
Paul Honigsheim already remarked in 1950 that there has been ‘American eclec-
ticism regarding Weber’ and only ‘partial acceptance’.14 Closer to the present,
scholars may be tempted to say that for academic sociology Weber’s version of the
field appears to have remained ‘essentially without results’,15 or that his reported
influence has consisted of a kind of misreading and misapplication of ideas, with
some emerging over time as more ‘creatively useful’ than others – think of the
seemingly inexhaustible discussions invoking the ‘Protestant ethic’ or a similar
‘functional equivalent’ as a precondition for ‘modernization’.16
In either instance one must stress that the theme of Weber’s effect on the
American scientific scene, mediated by at least two generations of emigre
scholars, may be even less interesting than the effect of Anglo-American culture
and images on Weber and that by-product often referred to as ‘Weberian theory’
or the ‘Weberian perspective’. This double theme, noted elsewhere among those
driven into exile,17 seems especially apt for understanding the case of Weber. It
was signaled early on even by Franz Neumann, who conceived of Weber as the
great ‘exception’ to the comparative absence in the German universities of his
time, where scholarship was steeped in a comprehensive world-view, such as
historicism, idealism, or Marxism. Weber stood for an alternative kind of inquiry
more characteristic of his new home that came to grips, as Neumann stated, with
‘social and political reality’ and the responsibilities of the scholar, teacher, and
intellectual.18 Over the last decade several lines of investigation have begun to
explore the cultural-historical underpinnings of this Anglo-American remaking of
124 Weber.19
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III
Let us recall, then, as an appropriate point of departure for understanding
Weber’s ‘presence’ for the emigre community, that like Freud, he did travel to the
US, arriving four years before his Austrian counterpart in New York harbor in
August 1904, journeying by train up the Hudson within a few miles of Bard
College and on to Niagara Falls, the required stop for European travelers, and
then west to Chicago, the Universal Exposition and Congress of Arts and Sciences
in St Louis, to Indian Territory, through the South, up the eastern seaboard, end-
ing with two weeks in November in New York City – a journey of nearly three
months. During his travels Weber was interested in a wide variety of social
phenomena, including immigration and the fate of German emigres and their
communities, some of which he visited: notably North Tonawanda near Buffalo,
the locations of his own relatives in Tennessee and North Carolina, the German-
born financier August Gehner in St Louis, and scholars like Hugo Münsterberg
in Cambridge. Weber even commented on the tendency toward rapid assimila-
tion among German immigrants, the tensions between first and second genera-
tions, and the powerful socialization exerted by American civic institutions,
including the settlement movement and the religious sects.
Using the language of the emigres, Weber was emphatically not one of the
‘bei-unskis’ – those who sacralized the departed homeland, where ‘bei uns’ every-
thing was better than it is here20 – a stance identified with Ferdinand Kürnberger’s
Portrait of American Culture and Nicolaus Lenau’s Amerikamüde in The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Instead, Weber registered considerable enthusi-
asm and fascination for the dynamism of a young civilization and the vigor of its
voluntaristic social life, an exuberance clearly in evidence in the one full-length
piece he published on the US after his return.21 Weber did not exhibit the
romantic’s nostalgia and regret at the apparent loss of Gemeinschaft in the modern
American social order, but instead was attracted to what he saw as new forms of
civic engagement promoted in his phrasing by the ‘cool objectivity of sociation’.22
Historians of American thought and social science have pointed out the special
appeal of Weberian thought in the American context, as it appears to share a
broadly progressive philosophical and social perspective, while holding sceptical
and pessimistic views about progress through science, the promise of ‘rationality’,
and the prospects for progressive historical development. Weber can even seem
to be a ‘progressive manqué’,23 a stance with critical appeal for the refugee intel-
lectual. But if Weber’s world is disenchanted, it is also a world that opens onto a
kind of ‘history’ and historical knowledge that holds in check any claim to the
‘exceptionalism’ of the American experience – an important qualification for the
emigre social scientist. Furthermore, Weber’s own work offered a commentary
on social science as a secularized view of the world with roots in the religious expe-
rience, and especially in the United States in the inner-worldly asceticism of the
Protestant sects that demanded mastery of self and world.24 This ‘concatenation 125
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of circumstances’ is precisely what Weber had studied in The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism, providing the newcomer and outsider with powerful
diagnostic and explanatory tools for making sense of American life.

IV
When Weber arrived in the US at the age of 40, the paper he presented in the
Social Science section of the Congress of Arts and Science at St Louis, ‘Capitalism
and Rural Society in Germany’, was addressed to themes drawn from his early
work as a political economist on agrarian economies and their transformation by
technological change and capitalist competition, enlivened with Europe–America
comparisons. The first part of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
appeared only while he was still in New York, and the second part with its com-
ments on the American experience buried in footnotes well after his return to
Germany. It is a telling comment on intellectual fashions that this early Weber
of the ‘historical school’ of economics has been rediscovered again recently by
economic sociology.
But we should remember that Weber’s work in economics and political econ-
omy first received serious attention in the 1920s and 1930s, not only for the
English-language readership in translated form, but also among the emigres who
had access to the original German. Indeed, Frank Knight’s 1927 translation and
publication of Weber’s General Economic History, a posthumous compilation of
lecture notes, preceded Parsons’s well-known translation of The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism by three years, the only two Weber texts available to
the Anglophone world until the appearance of the reader prepared by Hans Gerth
and C. Wright Mills in 1946, notwithstanding repeated early efforts to publish
more complete texts.
Among the faculty of the New School for Social Research the political–
economic dimension of Weber’s work was taken for granted. Well before his
arrival in the United States, for example, Albert Salomon had already character-
ized Weber as the ‘bourgeois Marx’, a phrase that resonated in certain quarters for
decades.25 The characterization was important, because it provided a kind of intel-
lectual connection to Weber for those, such as Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and
even Emil Lederer, whose critical neo-Marxist outlook traveled with them across
the Atlantic, typically becoming modified during the exile years.26 In the United
States Salomon’s authoritative introductory essays on Weber, published in the
first two volumes of Social Research, reveal his earlier command of the philosophi-
cal and sociological underpinnings of Weber’s work, but now expand the scope to
the entire range of issues confronting the social sciences – as if to say, if one wants
to participate in the discourse of the social sciences, Weber is the place to begin.27
In the empirical studies of the New School faculty it is characteristic that when
Weber is actually cited, it tends to be the Weber of political economy or political
126 sociology who is credited with an insight. This is no less true of Franz Neumann
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in his masterwork, Behemoth, although his affiliation with the Institute of Social
Research often put him at odds with the New School scholars.28 Even emigre
scholars as far apart in basic orientation as Paul Lazarsfeld and Theodor Adorno
allow similar parts of Weber’s work as an ‘influence’ or inspiration.29 Among the
faculty’s larger monograph-length research projects, Frieda Wunderlich’s late
publication on the German agrarian economy shows its debt to Weber’s earliest
studies on the 19th-century agrarian economy of Germany east of the Elbe.30
But as an ‘institutional’ political economist working with ‘ideal types’ and a
typology of ‘rational action’, instead of formal models of marginal utility or
mathematical models of choice, Weber had little effect on the emerging field of
economic theory and the work of the professional economists – figures like
Ludwig von Mises, Albert Hirschman, or Oskar Morgenstern. By the mid-1930s
economics as a scientific discipline was headed in other directions, as both Knight
and Parsons discovered and revealed to each other in their correspondence at the
time. In the US, where disciplinary boundaries were more tightly drawn than in
Germany (as is still the case), it was rather Weber’s complex conception of
‘rationality’ and the orientation toward ‘social action’ that pushed the construc-
tive reading of his work toward sociology, political science, and the wide-ranging
discussion of the methodological and epistemological ‘foundations’ of the social
sciences.

V
In the world of the universities, the main forum for the reception of Weber’s work
was sociology and political science, and indeed, more explicitly six areas of inquiry
that to a certain extent reached across the social sciences, including anthropology
and history: social action theory, historical sociology, sociology of religion,
organization studies, sociology of ‘culture’, and ‘methodology’ or the philosophy
of science and logic of inquiry. In the 1930s the main institutional settings for this
Rezeptionsgeschichte were not only the New School for Social Research, but also
Harvard University and the University of Chicago.
As historians of the New School have pointed out, the graduate faculty came to
read Weber’s work as a whole as central to the general problematic of the social
sciences. Consider the following typical assessment:
Few members of the Graduate Faculty had been Max Weber’s student, but all were agreed
that he was the most important German thinker in their lifetimes. As an empirical social
scientist and as an intellectual concerned with the theoretical problems of the social
sciences, Weber had set the terms of debate for German social scientists in the first half of
the twentieth century. He, more than any other German thinker of his generation,
wrestled with questions of objectivity, the relationship between nature and society, and the
possible tensions between scientific knowledge and political action. The richness of his
writing and the complexity of his thought invited controversy. Not only were Weber’s
heirs divided over the correctness of his position in a given area of inquiry, but they often
fought for recognition as the definitive interpreter of his position.31 127
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Weber’s scepticism regarding comprehensive systems of thought, combined with
his acute observations about ‘foundational’ problems of theory and action, could
be incorporated with minimal strain in the American setting, where the dominant
intellectual climate of the social sciences tended to be pragmatic and problem-
oriented, or as Franz Neumann remarked, ‘optimistic, empirically oriented,
a-historical, but also self-righteous’.32 Even if Weber’s proposed ‘solutions’ to the
problems of the scientific and political vocations were inadequate, his work could
be seen as central to the most rigorous and important debates.
For a historian of the social sciences it is crucial to recognize that the high
evaluation of Weber’s work by the emigre scholars at the New School was shared
by key figures like Parsons in Cambridge and Knight in Chicago, though for
slightly different reasons. All agreed that Weber provided a key to understanding
‘foundational’ issues in social inquiry. But while the New School scholars seized
on Weber because of their own interest in capitalist modernity and their need for
intellectual orientation, Parsons and Knight were drawn to his work as a source of
systematic social theory and as a promising route toward establishing the author-
ity of social scientific knowledge. In addition, their surviving correspondence
shows that the tangled question of incorporating Weber’s work in the body of
social scientific knowledge was tied to pedagogical and curricular issues. In
Knight’s words to Parsons:

As you doubtless know by hearsay, the ‘talk’ hereabouts runs largely in terms of breaking
down and bridging over the departmentalization of social science. It seems obvious to me
that if the talkers mean anything of what they say, this matter of doing something about
Max Weber to make his material available for students ought to be a leading item in the
actual program.33

Knight had in mind specifically the formation of the integrated social science
curriculum for the undergraduate college at Chicago. Both he and Parsons
struggled with the question of how to present what Parsons called the ‘three great
divisions’ of Weber’s work to the Anglophone public – the methodological or
philosophy of science essays, the collected essays in the sociology of religion, and
Economy and Society – apparently with involvement of refugee experts, such as
Albert Salomon and Melchior Palyi.
The frustrating decades-long discussions of translating Weber’s work accu-
rately, completely, and in logical sequence (discussions that continue to this day)
were in the 1930s tied directly to the effort to integrate the social sciences, estab-
lish a coherent sense of the field of inquiry, and provide students with accessible
‘model problems’ for inquiry. The pedagogical lessons for the Chicago curricu-
lum were not lost on Knight, who indeed proceeded to commission translations
of various parts of Economy and Society – the categories and definitions of Part I and
the ‘sociology of law’, as well as the obscure ‘Roscher and Knies’ essay, circulated
in mimeographed form as part of the body of knowledge essential to the social
128 sciences.34 None of this material was ever published, and only one of Parsons’s
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three great divisions of Weber’s work (Economy and Society) has ever been trans-
lated in its entirety, and then more than 30 years later.
But immigrating in the 1930s, the refugee scholars of the New School and
other university outposts found mutually supportive efforts already under way to
read Weber as a resource and guide in the struggle to form a new social science.
On such fertile ground it should not be surprising to find them ascribing to
Weber the status of ‘the most important German thinker’ of their times. Perhaps
it was precisely the unfinished and open-ended character of Weber’s work that
allowed it to serve as a common language for the often fruitful but never resolved
encounter between ‘American sociology’ and ‘German sociology’, whose comple-
mentary strengths had been noted by Karl Mannheim even before his emigra-
tion.35

VI
The century just past could well be called ‘the century of the exile’, as one
scholar has remarked,36 and perhaps for that reason alone the emigres of the 1930s
are important and deserve a hearing. They participated in essential ways in the
continuing debate over the nature of the social sciences, and thus, as well, in the
discussion of the fate and future of western culture. In this context they were
aware of the dangers lurking in the debate and the special role for the refugee
scholar and intellectual – in Franz Neumann’s formulation,37 to build on the
pragmatic American effort to temper theory with practice, while bringing to bear
the European emigres’ theoretical and historical knowledge, so necessary to
tempering the four dangers to social science in the United States: optimism about
changing the world for the better, empiricism for its own sake, the scholar
reduced to a functionary for mere data collection, and the intellectual’s inde-
pendent and critical function jeopardized by political and corporate largesse and
the high cost of large-scale research. These tasks and the need for this critical role
are still with us, and for that reason so are Weber and the perspectives, problems,
and controversies drawn from his work.

Notes
1. Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers (1992) Correspondence 1926–1969, ed. L Kohler and H.
Saner, tr. Robert and Rita Kimber, pp. 148–50. New York: Harcourt Brace. This
compelling anecdote has also captured the attention of other writers, who have used it
for different purposes: see e.g. Peter Baehr, ‘The Grammar of Prudence: Arendt, Jaspers,
and the Appraisal of Max Weber’, in Steven E. Aschheim (2001) Hannah Arendt in
Jerusalem, pp. 306–24. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2. Weber occasionally referred to himself as an ‘outsider’, and he enjoyed characterizing the
German Sociological Society formed in 1909 as a salon des refusés. Peter Gay confirms
that professional historians and Weber’s contemporaries, such as Georg von Below,
tended to dismiss Weber as an ‘outsider’, just as they dismissed any kind of ‘sociology’.
129
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Peter Gay, ‘Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider’, in D. Fleming and B. Bailyn (eds)
(1969) The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960, pp. 11–93, 62.
Cambridge: Belknap Press.
3. James T. Kloppenberg (1986) Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in
European and American Thought, 1870–1920. New York: Oxford University Press,
pp. 107–14, 442 n. 68.
4. Leo Lowenthal (1987) An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo
Lowenthal, ed. Martin Jay, p. 148. Berkeley: University of California Press.
5. Rolf Wiggershaus (1994) The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political
Significance, tr. M. Robertson, p. 69. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
6. Especially revealing is the rejection of Albert Salomon’s chapter on Weber for a standard
sociological theory textbook as too ‘philosophical’, notwithstanding his high standing
among the emigres as an early authoritative interpreter of Weber’s social theory.
Salomon’s subsequent articles in Social Research (1934, 1935a, b, all listed in n. 27 below)
presented a rather different Weber from the one presented previously in Die Gesellschaft
(1926), though the New School’s periodical had a rather specialized readership among
sociologists. See Ulf Matthiesen, ‘“Im Schatten einer endlosen großen Zeit”: Etappen der
intellektuellen Biographie Albert Salomons’, in Ilja Srubar (ed.) (1988) Exil. Wissenschaft.
Identität: Die Emigration deutscher Wissenschaftler, 1933–1945, pp. 299–350. Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp.
7. Emil Lederer (1934) ‘Freedom and Science’, Social Research 1(2) (May): 219–30. Paul
Honigsheim (1968) On Max Weber, tr. Joan Rytina. New York: Free Press. Paul
Honigsheim (2000) The Unknown Max Weber, ed. Alan Sica. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction. Karl Loewenstein (1966) Max Weber’s Political Ideas in the Perspective of Our
Time, tr. Richard and Clara Winston. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
8. Franz L. Neumann (1944) Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn. Arnold Brecht (1959) Political Theory: The
Foundations of Twentieth-Century Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Alfred Schutz (1959) The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
9. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, ‘An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir’, in D.
Fleming and B. Bailyn (eds) (1969) The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America,
1930–1960, pp. 270–337. Cambridge: Belknap Press. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Anthony R.
Oberschall (1965) ‘Max Weber and Empirical Social Research’, American Sociological
Review 30(2): 185–99.
10. Erich Voegelin (1925) ‘Über Max Weber’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissen-
schaft und Geistesgeschichte 3(2): 177–93. Eric Voegelin (1989) Autobiographical Reflections,
ed. Ellis Sandoz. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Leo Strauss (1953).
Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herbert Marcuse,
‘Industrialization and Capitalism’, in Otto Stammer (ed.) (1971) Max Weber and Sociology
Today, tr. K. Morris, pp. 133–51. New York: Harper.
11. A more complete account would have to include even younger generations of emigre
scholars, among them particularly Reinhard Bendix, who emigrated from Berlin to the
US in 1938 at age 22, and became a major interpreter of Weber’s work and proponent of
a Weberian historical sociology, as well as his student and Weber-Kenner, Guenther
Roth, who arrived in his elective homeland in the early 1950s. See Reinhard Bendix
(1986) From Berlin to Berkeley: German-Jewish Identities. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Guenther Roth (2001) Max Webers deutsch-englische Familiengeschichte 1800–1950, pp. xx,
23. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
12. Franz L. Neumann, ‘The Social Sciences’, in Neumann et al. (1953) The Cultural
130
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Migration: The European Scholar in America, p. 22. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
13. Guenther Roth (2002) ‘Max Weber: Family History, Economic Policy, Exchange
Reform’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 15(3): 509–20, 509.
14. Honigsheim (2000: n. 7), 269.
15. David Zaret ‘Max Weber und die Entwicklung der theoretischen Soziologie in den
USA’, in G. Wagner and H. Zipprian (eds) (1994) Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre:
Interpretation und Kritik, pp. 332–66, 332. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
16. Wolfgang Schwentker, ‘Western Impact and Asian Values in Japan’s Modernization: A
Weberian Critique’, in Ralph Schroeder (ed.) (1998) Max Weber, Democracy and
Modernization, pp. 166–81. New York: St Martin’s.
17. Peter Gay, ‘“We Miss our Jews”: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany’, in R.
Brinkmann and C. Wolff (eds) (1999) Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from
Nazi Germany to the United States, pp. 21–30. Berkeley: University of California Press.
18. Neumann (n. 12), 21.
19. Agnes Erdelyi (1992) Max Weber in Amerika: Wirkungsgeschichte und Rezeptionsgeschichte
Webers in der anglo-amerikanischen Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaft. Vienna: Passagen.
Guenther Roth, ‘Weber the Would-Be Englishman: Anglophilia and Family History’, in
H. Lehmann and G. Roth (eds) (1993) Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts,
pp. 83–121. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guenther Roth (1997) ‘The Young
Max Weber: Anglo-American Religious Influences and Protestant Social Reform in
German’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 10(4): 659–71. Roth (nn. 11,
13).
20. Gay (n. 17), 26.
21. For a new translation by Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells of the 1920 revision of the
article, ‘“Churches” and “Sects” in North America: An Ecclesiastical and Sociopolitical
Sketch’, see Max Weber (2002) The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other
Writings, ed. and tr. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells, pp. 203–19. New York: Penguin.
22. Lawrence A. Scaff (1998) ‘The “Cool Objectivity of Sociation”: Max Weber and
Marianne Weber in America’, History of the Human Sciences 11(2): 61–82. Ross misses this
side of Weber’s assessment of American social life. See Dorothy Ross (1991) The Origins
of American Social Science, pp. 234–5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
23. Kloppenberg (n. 3), 321.
24. Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford M. Lyman (1985) American Sociology: Worldly Rejections of
Religion and their Directions. New Haven: Yale University Press.
25. Albert Salomon (1926) ‘Max Weber’, Die Gesellschaft 3(2) (Feb.): 131–53, 144.
26. H. Stuart Hughes, ‘Franz Neumann between Marxism and Liberal Democracy’, in D.
Fleming and B. Bailyn (eds) (1969) The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America,
1930–1960, pp. 446–62. Cambridge: Belknap Press. John H. Herz (1969) ‘Otto
Kirchheimer’, The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals. (Salmagundi 10–11), 303–6.
27. Albert Salomon (1934) ‘Max Weber’s Methodology’, Social Research 1(2) (May): 147–68.
Albert Salomon (1935a) ‘Max Weber’s Sociology’, Social Research 2(1) (Feb.): 60–73.
Albert Salomon (1935b) ‘Max Weber’s Political Ideas’, Social Research 2(3) (Aug.):
368–84.
28. Neumann (n. 8), 6, 77–82, 387, 477. The fact that Neumann cites Weber’s little-known
essay from 1894, ‘Entwicklungstendenzen in der Lage der ostelbischen Landarbeiter’, is
an indication of the depth of his textual knowledge. This essay, an excellent summation
of Weber’s early work as an agrarian economist, has now been translated and published
by Keith Tribe (ed.) (1989) Reading Weber, pp. 158–87. London: Routledge.
29. Lazarsfeld (n. 9), 278, 292. Lazarsfeld and Oberschall (n. 9). Theodor W. Adorno,
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‘Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America’, in D. Fleming and B. Bailyn
(eds) (1969) The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960, pp. 338–70, 350.
Cambridge: Belknap Press.
30. Frieda Wunderlich (1961) Farm Labor in Germany 1810–1945. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
31. Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott (1986) New School: A History of the New School for
Social Research, p. 201. New York: Free Press. Cf. Claus-Dieter Krohn (1993) Intellectuals
in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research, tr. Rita and Robert Kimber.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts. Lewis Coser (1984) Refugee Scholars in America:
Their Impact and their Experience, pp. 102–9. New Haven: Yale University Press.
32. Neumann (n. 12), 19.
33. Knight to Parsons, 1 May 1936, a typed letter in the Talcott Parsons Papers, Harvard
University Archives; I am grateful to Professor Charles Camic for generously providing a
copy of this letter. For the best discussion of the early Parsons, see Charles Camic (1991)
‘Introduction: Talcott Parsons before The Structure of Social Action’, in Talcott Parsons:
The Early Essays, pp. ix–lxix. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
34. These mimeographed translations are in the Frank Knight Papers at the University of
Chicago. Alexander von Schelting, Edward Shils and Camilla Kample are credited with
having completed the translations.
35. Karl Mannheim ([1931] 1953) ‘American Sociology’, in Essays on Sociology and Social
Psychology, pp. 185–94. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Karl Mannheim ([1933] 1993)
‘Problems of Sociology in Germany’, in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.) From Karl Mannheim. New
Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction.
36. Lee Congdon (1991) Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and
Austria, 1919–1933, p. 305. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
37. Neumann (n. 12), 24–5.

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