hanke_the genesis of the max weber-gesamtausgabe and the contribution of wolfgang j. mommsen

[MWS 12.1 (2012) 59-94]ISSN 1470-8078

© Max Weber Studies 2012, Clifton House, 17 Malvern Road, London, E8 3LP.

The Genesis of the Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe and the Contribution of Wolfgang J. Mommsen

Edith Hanke, Gangolf Hübinger and Wolfgang Schwentker

AbstractThe start of the MWG lies in the early 1970s. The idea of founding the MWG should be seen in the context of the socio-critical debates and those on academic policies, which took place in West Germany when the 68-movement was on the ebb. The MWG was opposed to western Marxism and was not a ‘counter-edition’ to the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe—as is often suggested. The instituting of MWG was furthered politically by the liberal-conservative camp. The cooperation between the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the publisher Mohr Siebeck in Tübingen and the editors responsible has been, and remains, of decisive importance. This article focusses on the merits of Wolfgang J. Mommsen, who died in August 2004 and who would have celebrated his 80th birthday in November 2010. The origins of the MWG is presented up to the publishing of the first volume in 1984. During this phase, the editorial principles were laid down, which made the MWG an internationally respected classic edition.

Keywords: Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe, modern social sciences classic, historical-critical principles, western Marxism, Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, MWG editorial board, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Mohr Siebeck.

In 1972, with the sounds of the ’68 movement and its intellectual controversies still ringing in our ears, the planning of a Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe (MWG) got underway. The first volumes appeared in 1984. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, who had just completed the second and substantially enlarged edition of his study Max Weber and Ger-man Politics,1 was involved from the beginning—‘leading and exe-cuting, criticizing and coordinating’.2 He edited, up to his death,

1. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2nd edn, 1974), foreword signed 23 September 1973 (translated as Max Weber and German Politics [Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press], 1984). 2. M. Rainer Lepsius, ‘Wolfgang J. Mommsen und die Max Weber-Gesamtaus-gabe’, in Karl-Ludwig Ay and Knut Borchardt (eds.), Das Faszinosum Max Weber. Die Geschichte seiner Geltung (Constance: UVK, 2006), p. 12.

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© Max Weber Studies 2012.

ten volumes either as sole editor or joint editor. One volume—far advanced in manuscript—was published posthumously.3 Over the course of 30 years Mommsen dedicated easily the greatest part of his academic energy and working time to the successful progress of MWG. Our article deals with the place MWG holds in the history of sci-ence, relating it to the difficult early stages between 1972 and 1984. It concentrates, in six steps, on: (1) the exaggerated polarization of ‘Marx or Weber’ in the crisis of the social and historical sciences after 1968; (2) the initial impetus given by the sociologist, Horst Baier; (3) the formation of an initiating group, the interests of the editors and the institutional anchor-point; (4) the thumb print of Wolfgang J. Mommsen as an editor and Weber interpreter; (5) the selection of the type of edition on historical-critical principles; 6) conclusions about Weber and MWG in the wider academic discourse.

1. The crisis of the social and historical sciences after 1968

Anyone researching on Weber in the late 1960s and early 70s did so very much on their own and met with considerable hostility. Even the high-profile sociology conference of 1964 in Heidelberg, on the occa-sion of the centenary of Weber’s birth, failed to recognize that in ‘the close intertwining of science and the cultural self-ascertainment of modern society’ a return to Max Weber was of central importance.4

3. Listed by date of appearance, Mommsen edited: MWG I/15 Zur Politik im Weltkrieg, in collaboration with Gangolf Hübinger, 1984; I/16 Zur Neuordnung Deutschlands, in collaboration with Wolfgang Schwentker, 1988; I/10 Zur Russis-chen Revolution von 1905, in collaboration with Dittmar Dahlmann, 1989; II/5 Briefe 1906–1908, with M. Rainer Lepsius and in collaboration with Birgit Rudhard and Manfred Schön, 1990 (this edition of the letters received the Amalfi Prize); I/17 Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917/1919—Politik als Beruf 1919, with Wolfgang Schluchter in collaboration with Birgitt Morgenbrod, 1992; I/4 Landarbeiterfrage, Nationalstaat und Volkswirtschaftspolitik, in collaboration with Rita Aldenhoff, 1993; II/6 Briefe 1909–1910, with M. Rainer Lepsius in collaboration with Birgit Rudhard and Manfred Schön, 1994; II/7 Briefe 1911–1912, with M. Rainer Lepsius in collaboration with Birgit Rudhard and Manfred Schön, 1998; I/22-1 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft—separate volume—Gemeinschaften, in collaboration with Michael Meyer, 2001; II/8 Briefe 1913–1914, with M. Rainer Lepsius in collaboration with Birgit Rudhard and Manfred Schön, 2003; postum: III/1 Allgemeine (‘theoretische’) Nationalökonomie, in collaboration with Cristof Judenau, Heino H. Nau, Klaus Scharfen and Marcus Tiefel, 2009. 4. Paul Nolte, ‘Soziologie als kulturelle Selbstvergewisserung. Die Demokrat-isierung der deutschen Gesellschaft nach 1945’, in Steffen Sigmund et al. (ed.), Soziale

Hanke et al. The Genesis of the Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe 61


Weber did not rank highly in the political philosophy of the con-servative intellectual milieu; he suffered for his contentious separa-tion of ethics and politics. Little was to be expected from reading Weber’s writings in respect to the most pressing problems: a sci-entific legitimation of the democratic order and a solution to the ‘ungovernability of the state’.5 In a lecture ‘Max Weber and German political science’, on Weber’s centenary, Hans Maier laid down clear guidelines and declared Weber a monument to an outworn aca-demic tradition; though, he later went on to support an edition of his work from a political viewpoint.6 And in the Historische Wörterbuch der Philosophie, founded by the Münster philosopher, Joachim Ritter, Weber is listed as someone who only transferred a style of thinking conditioned by its time to ‘highly reflected upon theoretical mod-els’.7 Also Wilhelm Hennis, who so vigorously engaged with Weber interpreters after his New Yorker ‘discovery’ of Weber, previously assumed an attitude close to that of disinterest.8 In the theories of society of the leftwing milieu the engagement with Weber was much more intensive and the hostility decidedly more radical. Weber served as the opposite pole in the then prevail-ing disputes over ‘critical social theory or affirmative social technol-ogy’. Prominent representatives of ‘critical theory’ honed their profile with an explicit rejection of Weberian positivism. Herbert Marcuse, the great authority of the sixty-eighters, saw in Weber’s universal-historical concept of western ‘rationalism’, and in the demand of a value free science of reality with ‘formal’ concept construction, a bourgeois class position that had to be critically overcome.9 In a more precisely argued exposition, Jürgen Habermas stated that Weber’s

Konstellation und historische Perspektive. Festschrift für M. Rainer Lepsius (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), pp. 18-40 (19). 5. See Jens Hacke, ‘Der Staat in Gefahr. Die Bundesrepublik der 1970er Jahre zwischen Legitimationskrise und Unregierbarkeit’, in J. Hacke and D. Geppert (eds.), Streit um den Staat. Intellektuelle Debatten in der Bundesrepublik 1960–1980 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), pp. 188-206. 6. Hans Maier, ‘Max Weber und die deutsche politische Wissenschaft’, in K. Engisch, B. Pfister and J. Winckelmann (eds.), Max Weber. Gedächtnisschrift der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München zur 100. Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1966), pp. 163-83. 7. Ernst Vollrath, ‘Politik’, article in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 7 (Basel: Schwabe, 1989), p. 1063. 8. See Stephan Schlak, Wilhelm Hennis. Szenen einer Ideengeschichte der Bundesre-publik (Munich: Beck, 2008). 9. For more detail see Johannes Weiss, ‘Max Weber und die Kritik der Kritischen Theorie’, in Ay and Borchardt (eds.), Faszinosum Max Weber, pp. 301-12.



scientistically bisected rationalism was, in important respects, insuf-ficient to master the legitimation problems of late capitalist social orders and to enable practical action through insights into the social process. Weber’s basic sociology was incapable of providing the means whereby it would be possible to orientate the legitimation of the social and political order ‘on basic norms of reasoned discourse derived from a universal-moral’.10

The key concept ‘legitimation problems in late capitalism’ ap-peared with the publisher, Suhrkamp, which developed it into a distribution centre of Weber controversies. Authors assem-bled here in order to refine or to enlarge Weber critique. Sev-eral debates were merely reduced to the alternative ‘Marx versus Weber’.11 Suhrkamp, however, also published a reply in the form of Wolfgang J. Mommsen’s collection of essays, Max Weber. Gesell-schaft, Politik und Geschichte. It contained the chapter, ‘Capitalism and Socialism. The Debate with Karl Marx’. This was based on the lecture ‘Max Weber as a critic of Marxism’ in which Mommsen en-tered the controversy, proposing Weber be an antipode to Marx as far as the conception of the dynamic and ‘nature of capitalist soci-ety’ is concerned.12

Wolfgang Schluchter’s Aspekte bürokratischer Herrschaft had already appeared with the publisher, List, in 1972, at first relatively little noticed, but offering a systematic critic of Marcuse. Opposing Marcuse’s one-dimensional interpretation of Weber, it was possible to demonstrate more pithily in Weber’s own work how the absolu-tization of formal bureaucratic rationality led to the ‘dominance of technological ideals of life’, resulting in ‘the end of cultural human-ity’. In the debate with neo-marxist currents, this was a justifiable plea to understand Weberian issues as contributing to the analysis of advanced industrial societies and once again to ascertain their historical pre-conditions.13

10. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 131, 137. 11. Wolfgang Lefèvre, Zum historischen Charakter und zur historischen Funktion der Methode bürgerlicher Soziologie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1971). 12. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Kapitalismus und Sozialismus’, in Mommsen, Max Weber. Gesellschaft, Politik und Geschichte (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 144-81 (160, 181). This was first published under the title ‘Max Weber als Kritiker des Marxismus’, Zeitschrift für Soziologie 3 (1974): 256-78. The lecture was reported in the Münchner Merkur under the heading ‘Der Kapitalismus ist eine revolutionäre Macht. Prof. Wolfgang Mommsen über Max Weber als Kritiker der Moderne’. 13. Wolfgang Schluchter, Aspekte bürokratischer Herrschaft. Studien zur Interpretation



This spotlight on the culture of intellectual argument of the early 1970s outlines the characteristic feature of the ‘generation of 1945’ to which Wolfgang J. Mommsen as well as M. Rainer Lepsius, Wilhelm Hennis and Jürgen Habermas belonged. The common experience of National Socialism by the cultural elites born in the period 1926–1931 promoted a committed engagement in public issues by means of academic argument and ideals as far as ‘correct’ democratic social order is concerned. The conflict over ideas is an informative example of how a common generational experience can lead to very different reactions and intellectual positions.14

Bearing this in mind, that the Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe, in its genesis, is not primarily a political response to the major enterprise of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) and so the continua-tion of the cold war by editorial means.15 Dirk Kaesler has recently coupled the two editions in this way:

At the beginning of the 1970s a small number of West German intellec-tuals […] took the initiative to plan an enterprise, in which it was not difficult to see a parallel undertaking to the developments on the other side of the internal German border. The ideological tanker of the East Berlin MEGA should be given, also in the political sense, an answer of the western powers in the form of a proud training sailing ship.16

There is no question that the philological expenditure of a historical-critical type of edition, as pursued by MEGA and also by the Nietz-sche-Gesamtausgabe since 1972, has influenced the MWG. But the circumstances in 1973, in which the first plans for a complete edition were developed, bore the imprint of a more comprehensive western discussion about the past and present situation, and future, of modern

der fortschreitenden Industriegesellschaft (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1984 [1st edn, 1972]), p. 266. 14. On the application of generation as a category for the investigation of aca-demic and political elites and their value orientations see M. Rainer Lepsius, ‘Gen-erationen’, in Martin Greiffenhagen and Sylvia Greiffenhagen (eds.), Handwörterbuch zur politischen Kultur der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2nd edn, 2002), pp. 162-65; Lepsius, ‘Kritische Anmerkungen zur Generationen-forschung’, in Ulrike Jureit and Martin Wildt (eds.), Generationen. Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs (Hamburg: HIS Verlag, 2005), pp. 45-52. 15. It was a deliberate decision to use the abbreviation ‘MWG’ ‘so as to avoid any mirroring of MEGA’. See the protocol of the 14th meeting of the editorial board of the historical-critical Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe (MWG) of 15-16 May 1981 in the Werner Reimers Foundation Bad Homburg, Max Weber- Arbeitsstelle, BAdW Munich. 16. Dirk Kaesler, ‘Zwei Denker aus Deutschland. Eine deutsche-deutsche Edi-tionsgeschichte’, Leviathan 36 (2008): 590-96 (592).



industrial societies. The waning of Marxism in West Germany as well as its first signs in the East, was accompanied by the observation that Marxists, who had lost their faith, would now become Weberi-ans.17 The movement in search of new criteria of social self-reflection beyond an enclosed philosophy of history was combined in Germany with a ‘conservative’ impulse, and went under the label of a ‘reversal of the trend’ (‘Tendenzwende’) in public discussion. In an academic-political sense, this benefits without doubt the amalgamation of a varying spectrum of interest in a new reading and understanding of Weber. When in 1979 the 1000th edition of Suhrkamp was published and it collected ‘Key concepts of the present intellectual situation’ in two volumes, Jürgen Habermas, as editor, devoted some polemical paragraphs in his introduction to this ‘change of direction’. ‘Lübbe, Scheuch, Schelsky, H. Maier, Sontheimer and other followers of an “association for academic freedom”’ would have overcome the ideas of 1968 ‘in the manner of a paramilitary platoon in the front line of a semantic civil war’.18 As the second section of our article will show, Lübbe, Schelsky, as well as Hans Maier, played a certain role in the very first planning phase of MWG. But as little as MWG can be por-trayed as the opposite pole to East German Marxism, it can just as little be assumed that it was associated with the altered perspective of the Federal German Republic when the latter saw itself confronted with economic stagnation and political violence. That also would be an ideological blackout. It is only today that it becomes possible to see which global problems made the early 1970s a ‘period of transi-tion’ from unlimited expectations of affluence to the major crisis of industrial societies of a wholly new order.19

The description of the situation by M. Rainer Lepsius—as chair-man of the opening session of the German Sociological Society in 1974 in Kassel—is pertinent here. He confirmed the suppression of general world-views through a new sense of academic self-reflection and openness:

17. Zdzislaw Krasnodebski noted in his examination of the various phases of the Weber reception in Poland the thesis of a Marx to Weber conversion of Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory [London: Gerald Duckworth, 1981], p. 103): ‘Die Max Weber-Rezeption in Polen’, in J. Weiss (ed.), Max Weber heute (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 187-99 (196). 18. Jürgen Habermas (ed.), ‘Einleitung’ to Stichworte zur ‘Geistigen Situation der Zeit’ (2 vols.; Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1979), pp. 7-35 (21). 19. Tony Judt, Die Geschichte Europas seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2006), pp. 572ff.



A sufficient liberality in interpersonal relations between sociologists—held together more by generational community than by ideological preference—has maintained communicative context; a basic empirical orientation in research assures sufficient methodological consistency between projects of different theoretical orientation, and the establish-ing of Marxist theories within the framework of sociology meant by no means a complete change in sociological questioning.20

Also historical science considered it necessary to re-consider its the-oretical and methodological standards. The forum for this was the Werner Reimers Foundation in Bad Homburg where participants, with Wolfgang J. Mommsen at the forefront, founded a study group on the ‘theory of history’ which, between 1975 and 1988, convened six conferences and published their results.21

In this newly established process of self–understanding of basic questions and the furthering of methodological ideas in the histori-cal social science, Max Weber played a more important role than in the debates of the late 1960s. With the new turn to Weber there was an increasing number of voices who perceived the scholarship and incomplete editions of Marianne Weber and Johannes Winckelmann as an inadequate textual basis.22

2. Initial impetus

The initiative for preparing a Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe came in 1972 from the sociologist Horst Baier.23 He had turned to sociology and social philosophy after completing his medical studies and had become a member of staff at the social research centre, led by Helmut Schelsky, in Dortmund. Baier himself habilitated in 1969 at Münster with a ‘Study on Max Weber’s Foundation of Sociology’ which, as its programmatic title indicated—‘From Epistemology to the Science

20. M. Rainer Lepsius, ‘Ansprache zur Eröffnung der 17. Deutschen Soziolo-gentages: Zwischenbilanz der Soziologie’, in Verhandlungen des 17. Deutschen Soziolo-gentages. Zwischenbilanz der Soziologie (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1976), pp. 1-13 (9). 21. The first volume was published as Objektivität und Parteilichkeit in der Geschich-tswissenschaft. Beiträge zur Historik, vol. 1 (ed. R. Koselleck, W.J. Mommsen and J. Rüsen; Munich: dtv, 1977). 22. The editions and publications of Weber, including scattered texts, were com-piled by Dirk Kaesler, Einführung in das Studium Max Webers (Munich: Beck, 1979), pp. 267-71. 23. On Horst Baier’s academic works and career, see W. Bernsdorff and H. Knospe, Internationales Soziologenlexikon, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke), pp. 39-41; also see Freiheit und Solidarität im Sozialstaat. Festschrift für Horst Baier (ed. J. Bauch and R. Adler; Constance: Hartung-Gorre, 1984).



of Reality’—was really about confronting those sociologists who had brought neo-Marxism into the social sciences from the student movement.24 As the successor, in 1970, to Adorno at the University of Frankfurt, Baier had made contact with the leading Max Weber researchers in Germany and abroad in order to explore the possibili-ties of an edition of Max Weber’s writings, lectures and letters. As part of this, a preliminary conversation took place with Wolfgang J. Mom-msen on 18 October 1972 in a Düsseldorf restaurant, the Schiffchen.25 Through Niklas Luhmann an invitation was arranged in February 1973 to meet with Konrad Müller, previously Secretary of State in the Home Office of Lower Saxony and at that time Director of the Werner Reimers Foundation. In a visit to the Foundation in March, Baier outlined his plans for a Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe with the result two months later, after advice from its committee on which M. Rainer Lepsius served, that preparatory meetings of the editors—but not the editorial work itself—would be financially supported. Simultaneously the editorial plans for the edition were progress-ing. In September 1973 Horst Baier worked on a comprehensive Report in which he laid out the conclusions of his advisory conver-sations with a large circle of potential editors, but above all his own ideas for the Gesamtausgabe. In Baier’s view the reprint of the texts collected by Marianne after 1920 or the editions of Weber’s writings revised by Johannes Winckelmann served only a ‘more experimen-tal and provisional character that was neither specialist sociology nor didactic’.26 He continued that there were further reasons to proceed with a new Max Weber edition: the primary sources stored in the Central State Archive of the German Democratic Republic in Merseburg whose contents were yet to be comprehended and the widely scattered letters and lectures as well as the fact that at that time there was no reliable bibliography of the published works of Max Weber. The state of knowledge of German and international research of the published texts and the unpublished materials were, as a result, deficient.

24. Münster 1969. 25. Following a conversation with Wolfgang Schwentker (19 January 2010), Horst Baier drew up a memorandum of several pages (11 February) that included letters and other materials. See Horst Baier, ‘Wolfgang J. Mommsens Beitrag zur Entstehung der Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe’ (typewritten, Constance, 2010). 26. Horst Baier, ‘Gesamtausgabe der Werke und Briefe Max Webers, 20 Septem-ber 1973’, p. 2 (copy in Nl. Winckelmann, Nr. 321, BAdW Munich—henceforth Baier, Report).



For Horst Baier it was not just the applicability of these arguments to the work of Max Weber that made a new edition a matter of urgent necessity but also on academic-political grounds, which arose from the crisis of sociology as an empirical, value-free science. He stated from his direct experience at Frankfurt that there was a legitima-tion crisis in the discipline as a result of ‘aggressive politicizing and the advance of a socialist worldview into social science faculties and disciplines’.27 A new historical-critical edition of the works and letters of Max Weber presented an opportunity to strengthen ‘the sort of sociology as a strictly value-free science of empirical social action of people in the historical course of cultures’ in opposition to the forces in the discipline critical of a liberal society and hostile to the capitalist system. Max Weber’s ‘new actuality’ derived from his sci-entifically theoretical and fundamental reflections combined with detailed social-empirical and social-historical research. With a new edition of his writings, it would therefore also be possible, according to Baier, to envisage ‘innovative impulses’ in the neighbouring dis-ciplines to sociology. In this regard he named scientific theory and empirical related methodology, research into comparative cultures and development, the analysis of systems of domination and legiti-macy, research into elites, the sociology of law and the comparative academic study of religions. Not least, Weber in his analyses of the contemporary political situation as well as being a ‘key figure of his time’, and so the study of contemporary history and the history of ideas, was a source of the first order. With the respect to the later institutionalization of MWG, the organizational outlines are already sketched out in Horst Baier’s Report of September 1973 and they remain recognizable to this day in the edition. Preparatory meetings in the Werner Reimers Founda-tion were to clarify the situation on copyright and the programme of work for access to the textual materials and the state of the letters. Final support for this research was to be sought from the German Research Council (DFG). The planning of the edition was to be central, the editorial work decentralized to specific universities. Accordingly, Baier thought, firstly, of the ‘Max Weber Institute at the University of Munich’ under the leadership of Johannes Winck-elmann with its focus on the edition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, the history seminar at the University of Düsseldorf under the leadership of Wolfgang J. Mommsen would work on the political writings and

27. Baier, Report, p. 5.



letters, and a research unit at the University of Frankfurt under his own leadership would be in charge of the writings on the methodol-ogy of the social and cultural sciences—‘insofar as this was possible under Hessian conditions’.28

His Report left open to discussion two important issues: (1) where, from whom, and with what means should the central editorial work be coordinated, and (2) who should take over central editorial respon-sibilities? For Baier it was indispensable that Johannes Winckelmann and Wolfgang J. Mommsen should cooperate—despite their repre-senting completely opposing standpoints in their assessment of the political views of Max Weber and in core-matters of editorial presen-tation and exegesis. Baier, in the same month, made progress on the first issue. On 21 September 1973 he sent his Report to Helmut Schelsky and asked him for his assessment. At that time Schelsky chaired the Policy Commission of the CSU (Christlich-Soziale Union) and was invited to the Party Conference, which was taking place on 27-30 September 1973 in Munich, to present the results of the deliberations and to give a presentation.29 Baier had registered as a ‘non-member’ of the Party for the conference, and Schelsky suggested that he use the occasion to seek a meeting with the CSU party chairman (and later the Prime Minister of Bavaria) Franz Josef Strauss, in order to get his support for the setting up of a coordination centre in Munich, possibly at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Through Armin Mohler, whom Baier knew well and who had access to Strauss, Baier made his attendance known. So, during a gap in the proceedings at the Party Conference in Munich, a meeting took place with Strauss which Schelsky attended as well as the then Bavarian Minister of Culture, Hans Maier.30 Strauss knew some of Weber’s writings and was ‘very approving’ of the Report. What he took from the Report was the anti-Marxist tenor of the memorandum and Baier’s critique of the state of the social sciences following 1968. Strauss then asked Hans Maier to further the plan. And, in a letter dated 1 October 1973, Maier assured Baier of his support ‘without reservation—scientifically and

28. Baier, Report, p. 9. 29. The paper, given 28 September 1973, was entitled, ‘The independent person in modern society. Individual or collective responsibility’, reprinted in Helmut Schelsky, Der selbständige Mensch und der betreute Mensch (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1976). 30. The conversation of the Baier-Schelsky-Strauss-Maier meeting is not minuted in the Party records.



academically-politically’.31 On account of the Max Weber Institute, he himself wanted to speak with Emerich K. Francis and Karl Martin Bolte who held the chairs for sociology at the University of Munich. As it turned out his first conversation was with Hans Raupach, the President of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, with the intention of setting up a research centre on their premises. The second issue, that of the overall editorial responsibility, was much harder to resolve because it was overlaid by substantive differ-ences and personal resentments between possible editors. Johannes Winckelmann, in particular, showed little enthusiasm for Horst Bai-er’s initiative and sent him a critical analysis of his Report.32 Winckel-mann thought that a ‘historical-critical edition’ was not feasible in the absence of handwritten original manuscripts. He wanted something quite different:

An edition collated on the basis of textual criticism and, above all, freed of textual errata, a reliable edition of the complete oeuvre that was usable for both research and study, that comments on the history of the work and its realization and is accompanied by an explanatory apparatus.33

Above all it should proceed so that ‘the academic investigation and particularity’ of Max Weber—the synthesis of systematic and historical approaches—is presented, and his work, after the crisis of 1897–1902, be handled ‘as a self-contained and coherent totality in appearance, systematic in all its branches and methodologically refined’.34 Winckelmann did not agree with Baier’s assumption that a new complete edition would bring to light a surprisingly new and different picture of the work and person; and, finally, all the relevant texts of scientific importance were already known. He did, however, agree with Baier on the academic-political objective of the enterprise in promoting sociology ‘as a value-free empirical science of the cul-tural and social’. To this end, the Gesamtausgabe should make vis-ible the systematic, historical and empirically investigative approach of Max Weber as an ‘epistemological unity’. In addition to these matters, Johannes Winckelmann saw him-self as being more closely involved with the edition of the texts on

31. Baier, ‘Wolfgang J. Mommsens Beitrag’, p. 4. 32. Johannes Winckelmann, Stellungnahme zu dem Exposé Horst Baier betr. Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe vom 20.9.1973, as copy Nl. Winckelmann. 33. Winckelmann, Stellungnahme, p. 1. 34. Winckelmann, Stellungnahme, p. 4.



the methodology of the social and cultural sciences than had been envisioned by Horst Baier, who had allotted to Winckelmann edito-rial responsibility solely for Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Furthermore, Winckelmann attempted to discourage Baier from bringing Wolf-gang J. Mommsen onto the editorial board. It would be best for him to have responsibility for the ‘political writings and letters’ as a col-laborative editor; on account of fundamental differences of views with regard to the existing editions of the work, his inclusion in the ‘executive team’ would be a source of continuous controversy.35 Winckelmann expressed himself even more sharply against Momms-en’s involvement in a further letter to Horst Baier, 18 December 1973, saying Mommsen ‘has presented to the world in a wanton and false manner a completely distorted Max Weber and these ‘youthful sins’ (as Weber would say) he would reduplicate in a second edition’.36 Since Baier did not wish to be part of this affront to Mommsen and firmly believed in Mommsen as a main editor, Winckelmann more or less gave up his opposition to Mommsen’s involvement, so that on 29 December 1973 Baier could inform Mommsen that ‘after some trying toing and froing he had the agreement of Herr Winckelmann, together with you and me, to take on the historical-critical complete edition of the writings and letters’.37 Mommsen himself agreed a few days later to work on the enterprise with the personal constellation of those concerned and ‘to bring about a historical-critical complete edition of Weber’.38 The difficult task of getting the two most opposed rivals in German-speaking Weber research together in the same boat appeared to have been solved, initially.

3. The initiating group and the institutionalization of MWG

On 24-25 May 1974 a ten member group met before the gates of Frankfurt for preparatory deliberations for ‘a complete edition of the writings and letters of Max Weber’.39 The discussion to set up the editorial board took place in the munificent ambiance of the

35. Letter of Johannes Winckelmann to Horst Baier, 29 November 1973, cited in Baier, Wolfgang J. Mommsens Beitrag, p. 3; as copy in Nl. Winckelmann. 36. Letter of Johannes Winckelmann to Horst Baier, 18 December 1973, as copy in Nl. Winckelmann. 37. Cited by Baier, Wolfgang J. Mommsens Beitrag, p. 2. 38. Baier, Mommsens Beitrag, p. 2. 39. See the letter of invitation of Horst Baier, 28 April 1974, Nl. Winckelmann, Nr. 322.



Werner Reimers Foundation in Bad Homburg. In succeeding years the Foundation became the home for the often lively sessions of the so-called ‘working group’. According to the statutes of the Founda-tion the initial task was to support the launch of a historical-critical complete edition of the works of Max Weber by taking over the travel and accommodation costs. After a total of six meetings in the years 1974 to 1976 the ‘setting-up phase’ was concluded.40 It was in this period that the guidelines for personnel and the organization were laid down and have left their imprint on the work of MWG over the decades. Of course, as section 5 will show, the working out of editorial principles required further deliberations. Those invited to the meeting of potential editors were Johannes Winckelmann—and on account of his service to the work of Max Weber named first in the list—Hermann Lübbe, Wolfgang J. Mom-msen, Gerhard Oestreich, Guenther Roth and Horst Baier himself, including also ‘as guests’ Eduard Baumgarten, M. Rainer Lepsius, Wolfgang Schluchter and Hans Henrik Bruun.41 What marked out this initiating group? Let us start with Johannes Winckelmann, the passionately enthusiastic Weber editor and collector. As a ‘self-confessed academic outsider’,42 the seventy-four year old had estab-lished a strong position in international research through his new editions of Weber’s writings in the post-war years, and the founding of a Weber Archive and then the Max Weber Institute in Munich. Already in the run-up to the Homburg meeting, this professional administrator and trained lawyer had made clear that he had a lead-ing position in the new undertaking and pulled the strings in the background. Hermann Lübbe was a selection of Baier and Winckel-mann; as philosopher and politician he was seen as ‘left-conservative’ and in the Werner Reimers Foundation he was networked through membership to several study groups.43 As a one-time Secretary of

40. See the Report of Werner Reimers Foundation, Tätigkeitsbericht 1972–1976, Bad Homburg v.d.H., 1977, p. 52. The MWG editors went to Bad Homburg 34 times until the conclusion of the Foundation in 2001. 41. See the letter of invitation from Horst Baier, 28 April 1974, Nl. Winckelmann. 42. M. Rainer Lepsius, ‘In memoriam Johannes Winckelmann (29 March 1900– 21 November 1985)’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (KZfSS) 38 (1986): 414-16 (414). 43. See Jens Hacke, Philosophie der Bürgerlichkeit. Die liberalkonsevative Begründ-ung der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), especially p. 14. Lübbe belonged to the study group ‘Poetik und Hermeneutik’ and, with Mommsen, to the study group ‘Theorie der Geschichte’ and, together with Lepsius, to the ‘Arbeitskreis für moderne Sozialgeschichte’ which was supported by the Reimers



State of the North Rhine-Westfalian Prime Minister, Heinz Kühn, the idea was that he (along with Wolfgang J. Mommsen) would open the doors to the Rhenish-Westfalian Academy of Sciences in Düsseldorf. Gerhard Oestreich, known for combining of administra-tive, legal and social history and identified through the editing of the Collected Works of Otto Hintze, was a selection of Winckelmann who was unwilling to leave the historical field to Mommsen. The German-American sociologist Guenther Roth had come in contact with the work of Max Weber through Reinhard Bendix and already had established a reputation as an exact and extremely knowl-edgeable Weber editor through his edition, with Claus Wittich, of Economy and Society.44 His attendance made a parallel English edi-tion a consideration. M. Rainer Lepsius sat at the conference table less in his function as President of the German Sociological Society nor as academic adviser to the Reimers Foundation but rather as chair of the Max Weber Gesellschaft, which had been founded to support Winckelmann’s Max Weber Institute in Munich, founded in 1965. Winckelmann had in mind that the Gesellschaft could provide the umbrella leadership of the Gesamtausgabe, so the presence of its chair was for him imperative. Wolfgang Schluchter, who since 1973 was professor of sociology at the University of Düsseldorf, was invited to the editorial meeting on the recommendation of Baier and Mommsen. Also Winckelmann welcomed him since Schluchter ‘was particularly highly esteemed of the younger generation, both academically and as a person’.45 Baier intended that he would have responsibility for the ‘editions’ of Weber’s ‘hardcore sociology’.46

Foundation since 1975. Lübbe only took part in the first two advisory meetings in 1974. 44. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (eds.), Max Weber. Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (3 vols.; New York: Bedminster, 1968); M. Rainer Lepsius, ‘Guenther Roth zum 75. Geburtstag (12. January 2006)’, KZfSS 58 (2006): 189f. Roth took part in the first three meetings, and then sporadically. Roth was also a member of the Max Weber Gesellschaft. He has remained an advisor and supporter of the MWG. 45. See the letter of Winckelmann to Baier, 20 February 1974, Nl. Winckelmann. Schluchter had already published the influential study Wertfreiheit und Verantwor-tungsethik. Zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Politik bei Max Weber (Tübingen: Siebeck, 1971). Parallel to the edition at the end of 1970s and beginning of 1980s, at the Reimers Foundation he led high-class international conferences on the compara-tive analysis of culture-religions in relation to Weber whose publication appeared in five volumes with Suhrkamp, 1981–1987. 46. Letter of Baier to Winckelmann, 8 February 1974, Nl. Winckelmann.



The Danish political scientist, Hans Henrik Bruun, had come in con-tact with Winckelmann through working on his dissertation on Max Weber’s methodology and he had gained access to Max Weber’s cor-respondence in the Central State Archive of the German Democratic Republic in Merseburg; he was therefore seen as working on the aca-demic letters.47 The final person in the round to be mentioned was the nephew of Weber, Eduard Baumgarten, who as philosopher and sociologist –and despite some differences and career diversions—remained bound to the life and work of his uncle. As a partial inheri-tor, he possessed weberiana in his so-called Ebnet Archive.48

With so many different interests and temperaments present, an underlying tension could not be avoided in the meeting. Baumgar-ten, with some irony, reported to Johannes Winckelmann after the first meeting, ‘I know how much Homburg 1 must have put you out of sorts […]. Since each of you has his own and recognizable voice: the erroneous Mommsen, the confused nephew, the cursed Baier.’49 Baumgarten, born in 1898, and therefore the eldest of the group, urged the two years younger Winckelmann to give equal right to all those attending, and in fact the group represented a mixture of the specialist, the institutional and the ‘archival’ competence. The more important issue was not what separated the participants of the first advisory meeting but what united them in spite of every specialist and personal difference. It was the will, through a historical-critical Gesamtausgabe to create an international Weber renaissance, to strengthen the liberal academic tradition of Germany and, in work-ing together and in transcending disciplines, to make a specific con-tribution to sociology as well as to history. The fourth ‘meeting of the editorial board’, 4-5 December 1975, marked an important milestone in the institutionalization of the MWG. For the first time the publisher Mohr Siebeck as well as the academic assistant Manfred Schön were present alongside the

47. Hans Henrik Bruun, Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1972), second enlarged edition (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2006). He took part in the first four advisory meetings and then departed Weber research for a diplomatic career in the Danish Foreign Office. 48. Eduard Baumgarten, Max Weber. Werk und Person (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Siebeck], 1964). For his biography see Internationales Soziologenlexikon, vol. 2, p. 53f. as well as his role in the National Socialist period, Carsten Klingemann, Soziologie im Dritten Reich (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1996), especially pp. 179ff. 49. Letter Eduard Baumgarten to Johannes Winckelmann, 18 October 1974, Nl. Winckelmann.



initiating group. A protocol signed by Rainer Lepsius reads like a statute of the MWG. For the first time the ‘organs of the MWGA’ (as the MWG was abbreviated at that time)—the editorial board, editors, assistants, redactor, advisory committee—were given names and the legal institutional functions of the editorial board were defined and fixed in relation to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.50 It was now established that Baier, Lepsius, Mommsen, Schluchter and Winck-elmann would form the editorial board. Lepsius was in charge of business for a year, and thereby he was decisive in handling the 1976 agreed contract between the publisher, the Academy and the edi-tors, and the establishment of a central administrative centre of the MWG in Munich. The 1976 contract formed, to this day, the legally binding basis for the edition of the Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe. With the establishment of the core group a generational differen-tiation became visible. The Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe became an undertaking of the middle and younger generations. The generation born after 1928 took over the helm, whereas Johannes Winckelmann (born 1900) felt his claim to leadership rebuffed. When in the summer of 1976 the leadership of the Munich administrative centre was denied to him, he was affronted threatening ‘to jam a chair in front of the door’. Guenther Roth then tried to reconcile him to a senior role and to agree to acting in an ‘advisory capacity’.51 At the end of 1974 the emeritus chair for Bavarian History in the Commission for Social and Economic History of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences passed from Karl Bosl to the economist and economic historian Knut Borchardt (born 1929). And in the publishing house of Mohr Siebeck Hans Georg Siebeck (born 1911) handed over the leadership of the firm to his son Georg (born 1946), to whom he had already given responsibility for the Gesamtausgabe. Returning to the institutional pillars of MWG—these are: the edi-torial board, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the publisher Mohr Siebeck in Tübingen, and the research centres.

50. See the protocol of the meeting of the editorial board for a Gesamtausgabe of the works of Max Weber for 4-5 December 1975 in the Werner Reimers Foundation, Bad Homburg, Max Weber-Arbeitsstelle, BAdW Munich. 51. See the letter of Johannes Winckelmann to Wolfgang Schluchter, 28 April 1978, Nl. Winckelmann, in which he dwelt upon the events in the 5th meeting in the summer of 1976; also the letter of Guenther Roth to Johannes Winckelmann, 22 June 1976, Nl. Winckelmann. The Academy concluded a contract with Winckelmann in July 1976 which appointed him an academic advisor to the Max Weber research centre in the Commission for Social and Economic History.



a. The editorial boardTo it ‘belongs overall academic and organizational responsibility’ for MWG.52 It appoints editors for the individual volumes from the board itself or identifies academics, for example, sinologists or musi-cologists. Editorial posts, whether drawn from within or outside the board, were honorific unpaid posts. The decisions of the board were reached through the principle of consensus,53 and this often led to very long (troublesome) and controversial debates, which actually—in the longer perspective—contributed importantly to ensuring the quality of the edition. This probably occurred (and occurs) because of a strong moderator, who endures the tensions, weighs up the arguments, and finally reaches a conclusion. M. Rainer Lepsius has continuously fulfilled this role with his strength of personality and intellectual presence, even while regarding it with some self-irony ‘as psychotherapeutic management’.

b. The Bavarian Academy of SciencesIt provides and guarantees the institutional framework for the func-tioning of the Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe.54 In line with the trilateral contract of 1976, the individual volumes will state on the left hand title page: ‘On behalf of the Commission for Social and Economic History of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences edited by…’. Following the so-called Academy solution, the alternative models of a Foundation or Society fell by the wayside. But the linkage to the Bavarian Academy developed into something more difficult than anyone involved antic-ipated. The then President of the Bavarian Academy, Hans Raupach, who was familiar with Weber’s writings, had promptly expressed ‘great interest’ in a Gesamtausgabe after preliminary conversations in December 1973 with Horst Baier and Johannes Winckelmann. As an economist he linked the Gesamtausgabe to the Commission on

52. Protocol of the meeting of editorial committee 4-5 December 1975, p. 2. 53. This went against the expectations of Johannes Winckelmann who had simply assumed the principle of majority decisions, and this formed the basis of his strategy of co-option for the editorial board. If it was required, positions put forward by Mommsen could be out-voted. 54. The Academy, not as initially envisaged, increasingly came to administer the financial resources and to be in charge of contracts for full-time working associates. Knut Borchardt, the chair of the Commission for Social and Economic History, took on the role of managing appointments and the posts of associates. This started in 1990 with the package of contracts from the German Research Council for the editing of ‘Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft’, Letters and Lectures, and then (from 1997–98) responsibility for the support from the Academy’s programme.



Social and Economic History of which he was a member.55 After sep-arate conversations with Winckelmann and Lepsius in early 1974, Karl Bosl (then chair of the Commission and also acquainted with Weber’s writings) declared, to the Minister of Culture Hans Maier, the readiness of the Commission ‘to take part in a complete edition of the works of Max Weber’ and also to provide the accommodation for it.56 On the rules for its institutionalization, Hans Maier invited to the Ministry for 22 July 1974: those representing the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the potential editorial board of MWG, the Max Weber Institute of Ludwig-Maximilians-University as well as the Max Weber Gesellschaft, and Messrs. Baier, Bosl, Helle, Lepsius, Lübbe, Raupach, Sieveking and Winckelmann.57 A protocol of this meeting was not taken, though the associated correspondence shows that the issue of the linkage of MWG to the Academy has been frequently mixed up with the moving of the Max Weber Institute, which had been set up by Winckelmann at the University. The transfer of the archive and research contents, gathered by him, including the per-sonal and material resources to the Academy, appeared to Winckel-mann as a good opportunity to continue his life’s work and to ensure his co-editorship of MWG as well as the leadership of the proposed Munich administrative centre. Because of this amassing of interests, the setting up of the MWG administrative centre in the Academy was blocked. Finally, at the end of 1975, through an order of the Ministry of Culture the transfer of the Max Weber Institute, both contents as well as material and personal resources, took place.58 In 1975, the year when the guiding framework was established, the close connection of Academy and Gesamtausgabe was institutionally strengthened through the co-optation of Winckelmann and Lepsius in the Commission for Social and Economic History.59 Conversely,

55. This becomes clear in the letter, 9 July 1976, sent out by Lepsius to all the par-ticipants of MWG after the final negotiations in the Commission and the Academy, Nl. Winckelmann. 56. Letter from Karl Bosl to Minister of Education and culture Hans Maier, 1 July 1974, copy in Documents of Commission for Social and Economic History, BAdW, Munich. 57. Letter of invitation, 12 July 1974, copy in Commission Documents and in Nl. Winckelmann. 58. Letter of the Bavarian Minister of State for Education and Culture, 12 Decem-ber 1975, Documents of Commission and Nl. Winckelmann. 59. See Yearbook of Bavarian Academy of Sciences 1975 (Munich, 1975), p. 44. After the death of Winckelmann in 1985, Lepsius, as the managing editor represented



Knut Borchardt, the chair of the Commission, took part in 1984 in his first meeting of the editorial board.60

c. The publisher Mohr SiebeckIt took on the commercial responsibility for the Max Weber-Gesamt-ausgabe and controlled the rights to the edition. This concerned the existing copyright to the published writings and manuscripts of Max Weber. Contacts to the family and heirs were established and main-tained by the publishing house. Already in the preliminary con-versations, which Horst Baier in June 1973 and then Wolfgang J. Mommsen a year later had conducted with Hans Georg Siebeck, the publisher was keen on the undertaking. Georg Siebeck remembered his father calling him into the meetings, because the publication was a future project.61 Weber had been a house author since 1895 and he was also the author with the greatest royalties. Weber’s significance for the Japanese book market at that time was of major importance in the decision to bind energy and resource costs to a major extent to this large edition. From1984 to the collapse of the yen, around two thirds of the sales have been to Japan.62 The publishers Siebeck Sr. and Jr. have helped significantly to speed up the institutionalization of MWG since the editorial board meeting of 1975. At the outset the idea of an alliance of publishers was rejected and it was agreed that Siebeck would be the sole publisher.63 Both Siebecks energetically pursued the drawing up of the contract that, after several drafts and negotiations, was signed in September/October 1976 by the Bavar-ian Academy President Raupach, the publisher Hans Georg Siebeck

the MWG in the Commission. Gangolf Hübinger, as member of the editorial board since 2005, was co-opted to the Commission in June 2007. 60. His participation in the editorial board was at first sporadic. Borchardt became substantively active through editing MWG I/5; Max Weber, Börsenwesen. Schriften und Reden 1893–1898, in collaboration with Cornelia Meyer-Stoll (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999/2000). Since 2003 he has become increasingly involved in the checking and active support of the work on the Lectures volumes. 61. Conversation with Edith Hanke, 22 February 2010. 62. See Wolfgang Schwentker, Max Weber in Japan. Eine Untersuchung zur Wirkungsgeschichte 1905–1995 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), p. 307. 63. Hans Georg Siebeck clarified the situation with the publisher Enke and its management when taken over by Thieme Verlag. Weber’s dissertation and habilita-tion thesis were published by Ferdinand Enke. See the letter of Hans Georg Siebeck to Horst Baier, 20 November 1975, in VA Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen and, since June 2010, in Staatsbibliothek Berlin—Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nr. 675.



and the five editors.64 The publishing house greatly supported the volumes of the edition through making available its historic corre-spondence. Wolfgang Mommsen first obtained copies,65 and then the originals were deposited in June 1980 in the Bavarian State Library and made available to MWG. At the same time the publisher was able to come to a similar agreement with the adoptive son and heir, Max Weber-Schaefer.

d. The research centresThey incorporated Baier’s principle of decentralization which he had demanded at the outset. It was characteristic of Wolfgang J. Mom-msen’s will for action and strategic practicality that he had set up his Düsseldorf research centre even before the institutional form of the Gesamtausgabe enterprise was assured. On 25 July 1974 he made the first application to the German Research Council for the financ-ing of ‘the preparation of a historical-critical edition of the political letters and the political writings of Max Weber’. His student Manfred Schön was appointed to find, collect and register Max Weber letters. He had the best grasp of Weber’s handwriting and became a walk-ing encyclopaedia on Weber. Düsseldorf quickly became the largest and most efficient research centre. Parallel to this Lepsius set up the research centre at Mannheim, where from November 1975 primar-ily the private letters were transcribed. With Schluchter (1976) and Lepsius (1981) called to chairs at Heidelberg, a second important Weber centre was created close to Weber’s own place of activity. As already mentioned the Munich research centre, on account of the transfer of the library and materials established by Johannes Winck-elmann, had a special position among the research centres. Martin Riesebrodt, since 1 October 1976, had made an important contribu-tion through compilation and systematization to the professionalism of MWG.66 With the creation of the post of general redactor, 1 Feb-

64. Copy of the contract, Max Weber-Arbeitsstelle, BAdW Munich. The draft contracts with comments by Winckelmann in Nl. Winckelmann. The correspondence with Siebeck in VA Mohr Siebeck, Berlin, Nr. 685 under Lepsius. 65. See the exchange of letters between Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Georg Sie-beck in February 1976, VA Mohr Siebeck, Berlin, Nr. 685. 66. Riesebrodt established the bibliography of the works of Max Weber, which became the binding basis of assigning texts to particular volumes (see also section 5 below). He worked for a systematic filing of the MWG related correspondence and documents, contributing to the now professionally run protocol of the edito-rial board. He was an active participant in the preparation of guidelines for the editions and he edited one of the first volumes to appear: Max Weber, Die Lage der



ruary 1982,67 the Munich research centre finally became the central site for redaction, business and documentation of the Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe.

4. Wolfgang J. Mommsen as a Weber interpreter and editor

With regard to the study of Max Weber, the early 1970s were a very productive period for Wolfgang J. Mommsen. By the second half of the 1960s, following vigorous discussions of his dissertation that continued on until the Heidelberg Sociology Conference of 1964 (dedicated to Max Weber),68 Mommsen had not published on Weber, other than some reviews. Instead he had worked for sev-eral years on his habilitation thesis on Bethmann Hollweg and had written a volume on European imperialism for the Fischer series on world history.69 He only re-engaged in the German debates in 1970 with a review essay ‘Neue Max Weber Literatur’ for the Historische Zeitschrift.70 What makes this essay relevant here is his sharp critique of Johannes Winckelmann’s editing of the 3rd edition of Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, published in 1968; from this can be surmised why Winckelmann had been so outspoken about Mom-msen’s participation in the editorial board of MWG. The new edi-tion, said Mommsen, contained no really new text. Winckelmann’s thesis that the essay ‘Three pure types of legitimate domination’ was

Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland, MWG I/3, which appeared in 2 volumes (Siebeck, 1984). Following Riesebrodt (1976–1981), as academic associates and redac-tors, were Gangolf Hübinger (1982–1984), Rita Aldenhoff (1985–1991), Edith Hanke (1992–2005), Ursula Bube (from 2005 onwards). In 1981/82 Dietrich Uffhausen was also employed as ‘Redactor of the Edition’ and was based in Tübingen. 67. Karl-Ludwig Ay occupied this post until his retirement at the end of 2004, and Edith Hanke then took on the post. 68. Discussion contribution of Wolfgang J. Mommsen on Raymond Aron’s ‘Max Weber und die Machtpolitik’, in Max Weber heute. Verhandlungen des 15. Deutschen Soziologentages (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1965), pp. 130-38. ‘Mommsen has hit the nerve of German sociology’ reported the FAZ (6 May 1964) on the conference. 69. The Habilitation remained unpublished. Parts of it appeared in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Die Regierung Bethmann Hollweg und die öffentliche Meinung 1914–1917’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 17 (1969): 117-59 and his ‘Die latente Krise des Deutschen Reichs 1909–1914’, in Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, vol. 4, Section 1a (ed. Brandt, Meyer and Just; Essen: Akademie-Verlag—Ges. Athenaion, 1972), pp. 3-120. On imperialism see Mommsen, Das Zeitalter des Imperialismus (= Fischer Weltgeschichte, vol. 28; Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1969). 70. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Neue Max-Weber-Literatur’, Historische Zeitschrift 211 (1970): 616-30.



directly linked to the Logos essay ‘On some categories of interpretive sociology’ and must therefore have originated from 1913 was based on a ‘mere presumption’; the dating was ‘extremely questionable’. It was to be hoped that in the soon to appear 5th edition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Winckelmann would give up his practice of treating this torso of a work as three overlaid stages forming a unified whole. It was to be welcomed that Winckelmann as editor of the second edition of the Rechtssoziologie (1968) at least placed his own addi-tions to the text in square brackets where they could now be seen. Winckelmann as a Weber editor was thus evaluated, academically, of limited worth. The personal relationship between the two must be reckoned as destroyed. Even more surprising, in retrospect, was Horst Baier’s success in getting them to work together on the MWG editorial board. Aside from basic problems with the history of Weber’s works, Mommsen was interested at the start of the 1970s with systematic issues of political sociology and these extended far beyond the politi-cal views of Max Weber as they were more narrowly perceived in his 1959 book. An important stimulus for a renewed engagement with the work of Max Weber was the invitation to be a visiting professor at St Antony’s College, Oxford in 1971/72. During his stay in Oxford, Mommsen had the opportunity to interact with English Weber spe-cialists and to hold a seminar on Max Weber as a universal historian and politician. He also found time to bring together in a book previ-ous studies on the sociology of domination and to write new essays on Weber’s analysis of Wilhelmine and post-war society.71 Some of these studies appeared later in the collection Max Weber. Gesellschaft, Politik und Geschichte72 which appeared at about the same time as the English book, though not identical. Mommsen himself considered his essay on ‘Universal history and political thought in Max Weber’, which dated from 1965 as perhaps his most significant contribution to international Weber research since the publication of his dissertation. This argued that ‘the uni-versal process of bureaucratization […] has been the unmistakable thread in the political and sociological thinking of Max Weber’.73 Aside from this self-assessment, in the actual discussion of the 1970s it was the study on Weber and Marx, which appeared under the

71. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The Age of Bureaucracy. Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber (Oxford: Blackwells, 1974; foreword dated 1972). 72. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1974. 73. This first appeared in Historische Zeitschrift 20 (1965): 557-612.



title ‘Max Weber als Kritiker des Marxismus’ in Zeitschrift für Soziol-ogie as well as in an English collected volume, which was far more important.74 In opposition to the thematic essay of Herbert Mar-cuse that had appeared a few years earlier, Mommsen presented his own extremely down to earth interpretation.75 Against Marcuse, Mommsen argued that Weber in no ways intended ‘through the accentuation of “formal rationality” as a basic element of modern industrial capitalism to immunize it against criticism’.76 In the dis-tinction between formal and substantive rationality there was a chance for a fundamental critique of the capitalist system, which Weber himself has not taken up. Weber does not spare the individ-ual from the effects of ‘formally free labour contracts’, but he also did not believe that a socialist planned economy, in whatever form, will be less constrained in relation to the life chances and conduct of individuals in the face of the gigantic apparatus which would control the means of production. What is surprising in reading the essay on Weber and Marx some 30 years after its appearance is how little Mommsen reacted to the strengthening of neo-Marxist currents in the intellectual life of the Federal Republic. Only at the conclusion of the essay is there a rebuke of the ‘ossified communist system of our time’. Unlike Baier, there is no politically or academically motivated critique of West German neo-Marxism in Mommsen’s writings of the 1970s. Mommsen, influenced by Weber, had no trace of an ideological anti-Marxism.77 Rather, he

74. See Zeitschrift für Soziologie 3.3 (1974): 256-78. In the English and German col-lected volumes the essay appeared under a different title: ‘The Alternative to Marx: Dynamic Capitalism instead of Bureaucratic Socialism’, in The Age of Bureaucracy, pp. 47-71 and ‘Kapitalismus und Sozialismus. Die Auseinandersetzung mit Karl Marx’, in Max Weber, pp. 144-81. 75. See Herbert Marcuse, ‘Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus in Werk Max Webers’, in Marcuse, Kultur und Gesellschaft, vol. 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1965), pp. 125ff. Mommsen’s commentary was different to that of Guenther Roth: ‘Das his-torische Verhältnis der Weberschen Soziologie zum Marxismus’, in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 20 (1968): 429-47 and Jürgen Kocka, ‘Karl Marx und Max Weber. Ein methodologischer Vergleich’, in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswis-senschaft 122 (1966): 328-57. Roth agreed that the phrase ‘the bourgeois Marx’ was not particularly helpful, even though Mommsen himself used this phrase. Kocka’s position was overly limited to a methodological comparison since it concerned only the methodological early works and did not take sufficient account of Economy and Society. That was where, though, ‘the real alternative to Karl Marx was formulated’. See Mommsen, ‘Neue Max-Weber-Literatur’, p. 624. 76. Mommsen, ‘Kapitalismus und Sozialismus’, p. 174. 77. On another occasion Mommsen allowed Wolfgang Lefèvre’s critique to stand:



emphasized the methodological parallels between Marx and Weber and defined Weber’s political standpoint as that of a liberal, by which the rights and opportunities for self realization of the individual against all-powerful institutions, namely bureaucracy, were cham-pioned. This general position, which Mommsen stated from Weber, was in his view to be found in the academic-theoretical writings that offered categories for principled analysis open in their results, with which the social action in history and the present could be under-stood and causally explained. Alongside these and other particular aspects devoted to study of the work of Max Weber, on his return from England Mommsen was occupied with the re-working of his book Max Weber und die deutsche Politik, which appeared in its second edition in 1974. Compared to the first edition, it had been greatly expanded and carried much newly appeared source material as well as taking account of the comprehensive new specialist literature. Mommsen saw no occasion for a fundamentally changed interpretation, but he was concerned to bring out more clearly the chronology of Weber’s constitutional rec-ommendations. Apart from these clarifications, Mommsen adhered to the core of his thesis, whereby the concept of ‘plebiscitary leader-democracy’ contained within it an anti-parliamentary tendency that could lead to a fascistic model of order. That Weber himself would have been a convinced opponent of fascism, as in his biting condem-nation of the reactionary moves like the Kapp putsch, stood beyond question for Mommsen. In a comprehensive Afterword and in reply to his critics, Mommsen brought forward the ‘aristocratic individu-alism’ of Max Weber by which liberal ideas were bound to the Nietz-schean conception of the value-asserting personality. Weber could not have envisaged the problem of charismatic domination in totali-tarian systems; his focus was ‘the self-averring and self-realization of the personality in an administered world’. In this sense Mommsen rebutted the critique of those like Karl Loewenstein and Guenther Roth, and in his book he brought Max Weber the politician in line with the academic. This, for him, was an artificial separation, for it only served to immunize the academic writings of Max Weber from

that in the Protestant Ethic Weber did not probe the phenomenon of capitalism as such and excluded the working class from consideration, even though this was included in Weber’s thesis. Other than that he made little attempt to radicalize the criticism of Herbert Marcuse on Max Weber. On this, compare Lefèvre, Methode bürgerlicher Soziologie and Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2nd edn, 1974), pp. 464ff.



political criticism. But it was beyond question, for Mommsen, that Weber’s ‘sociological work was based on a specific intellectual and social framework, which also had a political side’.78

The plenteous quantity of works on the politics and political sociology of Max Weber formed the basis for Mommsen’s function as editor of the political writings, lectures and letters since 1975. As a member of the editorial board and leader of the Düsseldorf research centre, this was indeed fortunate for MWG. His engage-ment with conceptual questions, which touched on the edition in its entirety, as in the alignment according to the principle of pertinence vis-à-vis chronology—an area where his own ideas could not pre-vail, remained in opposition to the otherwise active involvement as editor of the individual volumes of the political writings and letters. Mommsen was sensitive to the problems of a historical-critical edi-tion of the classical thinkers of political and social thought, since he had worked on the edition of the writings of Friedrich Naumann under the direction of his academic teacher Theodor Schieder.79 The experience from working on these texts and his expertise in relation to Weber’s hard to read handwriting, which he had acquired when studying the sources in the Merseburg-located Nachlass and else-where, came in very useful for him and the edition. As a historian Mommsen combined an inclination and capacity for large synthesis; in the editions of the writings and letters of Max Weber, in con-trast, he demonstrated an inexhaustible enthusiasm for philological nuance in textual critique and the details of biographical and histori-cal commentary. In the difficult issues of Max Weber’s writings, he himself often went into the archives and on occasions argued pas-sionately with his material over the various styles of handwriting in the archive materials. From the outset, he succeeded in inspiring young academics, whom he mostly recruited for the edition direct from the seminar. The relatively quick establishment and disband-ing of the Düsseldorf research centre had the effect of speeding up the entire edition, because frequently in the course of the editions of political writings basic questions of textual presentation were thrown up whose solution became important for other, later vol-umes. Mommsen was never keen to go to the editorial meetings, after Homburg, where among the editors he vehemently argued

78. Mommsen, Deutsche Politik, p. 446. 79. See Friedrich Naumann, Werke. Vol. 4: Schriften zur Verfassungspolitik; Vol. 5: Schriften zur Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik (ed. Theodor Schieder, in collabora-tion with Wolfgang J. Mommsen; Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1964).



for his views—yet ceded in these conflicts to pragmatic solutions. Diplomatic skills were not his forte and his behavior at the Reimers Foundation was not always happy. Despite this—and often after the editorial meetings—he adapted substantial controversies to produc-tive work programmes, whose guidelines he was able to further develop in the work of those volumes for which he was responsible in the Düsseldorf research centre.

5. A documenting complete edition according to historical-critical principles

In May 1981, for the first time the overall undertaking was presented to the academic world. A detailed prospectus by the Siebeck publish-ing house (the so-called ‘green brochure’) presented the layout and structure of the Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe in three sections: ‘Writ-ings and Speeches’, ‘Letters’ and ‘Lecture Manuscripts and Lecture Notes’. Wolfgang Schluchter composed an introduction for the edi-tors, which went into the debate on theories of editions in relation to the purposes of MWG, its governing principles, its substantive structure and its institutional linkages overall. The central message was that MWG saw itself as ‘a documenting edition according to historical-critical principles’.80

This handy formula does not itself specify which guidelines were decisive in order to explain how the four central elements—an edi-tion of ‘all’ the texts, according to ‘critical’ reconstruction, in regard to ‘historical’ location and documentation—would in combination represent Weber’s work. For, in the actual definition and emphasis of these four elements lay the core editorial question: which Weber has to be read in what way? While the main overall decisions on dividing up the works were reached in the second editorial meeting at Bad Homburg in October 1974, for six years after that the editors experimentally weighed up the finer points on proceeding before finally determining, through consensus, the editorial principles. There were very many ways of realizing a project that involved assembling within an overall con-cept an intellectual life’s work of some three hundred separate titles, which until 1980 comprised the authorized editions—from the inter-nationally known Protestant Ethic in its two versions of 1904/5 and

80. Prospekt der Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1981), see within Wolfgang Schluchter, ‘Einführung’, pp. 4-15 (11).



1920, to completely unknown reviews and newspaper articles, to the reports taken down in shorthand of speeches and contributions to discussions in associations and meetings. The first draft plans with regard to structuring the work stuck closely to the principles that had guided Marianne Weber (and there-after Johannes Winckelmann) in her selection of volumes. This was the picture of Weber that was familiar to the academic world. There were 150,000 copies in circulation of the collected volumes under the supervision of the private scholar, Johannes Winckelmann.81 Wolfgang J. Mommsen voted emphatically for the assignment of the texts along thematic principles (pertinence) as opposed to a purely chronological order—in contradiction to what one might expect of a historian. What appeared to be technical questions of assignment went to the very core of the edition. What was the relationship between per-tinence and chronology, how theoretical does this have to be and how pragmatically does it have to be balanced in practice? And what does this mean for the type of ‘historical-critical’ edition, can this approach be pursued or does it have to be abandoned? Wolf-gang J. Mommsen did not at first seem to be satisfied with ‘decision criteria of general principles, or the theoretical combination of such principles’. He wanted something more pragmatic: ‘the working out of a very concrete plan on the basis of the texts’. It appeared to him

impossible to meanwhile scatter the other texts according to a purely chronological viewpoint between the substantive complexes like the Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter, the römische Agrargeschichte, the Religionssoziologie, the wartime Politische Schriften… On mature consid-eration it seems to me in principle perfectly sensible to operate with the so far agreed principle of combining pertinence and chronology rather than giving precedence to chronology.

Mommsen wrote in a long letter to M. Rainer Lepsius on his first reactions to Schluchter’s ‘Überlegungen’ dated 15 July 1977, and he added some examples on the disputed assignment of individual texts from the field of Weber’s writings on social and university policy.82

The fear of endangering the edition through a false accentuation in one or other direction was understandable when one regards the

81. M. Rainer Lepsius, ‘Münchens Beziehungen zu Max Weber und zur Pflege seines Werkes’, Faszinosum Max Weber, pp. 17-27 (25). 82. Letter to M. Rainer Lepsius, 30 June 1977, Max Weber-Arbeitsstelle Düssel-dorf; also there a copy of Schluchter’s ‘Überlegungen zu einer historisch-kritischen Ausgabe der Texte Max Webers’.



theoretical discussion, which was underway in the field of the German Literary Archive at Marbach concerning ‘texts and vari-ants’83 and with which the editors were engaged during this phase of their deliberations. The literature academic, Siegfried Scheibe, was co-author of the ‘Basis of the Goethe Edition’ at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and he listed sixteen criteria, the fulfillment of which would be decisive for the quality of ‘historical-critical’ editing. They extend from the obvious reproduction of all variants of any one par-ticular version of an ‘edited text’ to the exact historical description of the authorized versions of the text and the process of printing, and finally to questions of biography and the historical legacy of the text.84 Certainly not all the editorial possibilities from the complex list were taken on board in the MWG, but two basic insights were. Firstly, that of the complete development of the text: ‘the history of the work must be visible for all parts of the edition’. And secondly, that of the transparency of the editorial decisions: ‘the edition real-izes its specific purpose in the visibility of the historical process’.85

As a result of the interchange with this literature, the editors and the collaborative editors entered into a process of professionaliza-tion that, with hindsight, can be seen as a process of adapting to the needs of social science rather than the meticulous requirements of a literary edition. The modern academic practice of an edition tended neither to an excessive positivism, nor did it prize the editorial hand in the tradition of the nineteenth century which, though staying in the background, apparently knew better the will of the author. This opened up the space to four basic elements for a collected edition along critical, historical, and documenting lines, the content of which would be determined by its own needs, so establishing the edition-type of the MWG as a reasonable and practical approach to the texts and the framing of the individual volumes. This was then concluded in the already mentioned ‘Prospekt der Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe’ in which the Siebeck publishing house presented the organization of the edition in its Sections with the volumes in numbered series. On the basis of the bibliography assembled by Martin Riesebrodt all the Weber texts were allocated

83. Gunter Martens and Hans Zeller, Texte und Varianten (Munich: Beck, 1971). In connection to this, the MWG editors drafted the rules, see Schluchter, ‘Einfüh-rung’, p. 8. A shortened version appears in each volume of MWG. 84. Siegfried Scheibe, ‘Grundprinzipien einer historisch-kritischen Ausgabe’, in Texte und Varianten, pp. 1-43 (9-11). 85. Scheibe, ‘Grundprinzipien’, p. 7.



to the planned individual volumes; Mommsen and the Düsseldorf research centre were able to demonstrate the historical-critical prep-aration of their edition of Weber’s wartime speech ‘Deutschland unter den europäischen Weltmächten’ complete with its draft out-line and its two printed versions; Wolfgang Schluchter expressed the basis of the edition in systematic form.86 This overall situation respected Wolfgang J. Mommsen’s interests as an editor working along historical lines. On the basis of the now agreed type of edition with its express regard for the context of the work, historians could now expect a differentiated view of Weber’s academic analyses and his contemporary intellectual community in this epoch of classical ‘Moderne’. With regard to the cultural significance of MWG for the work of historians, something should now be said about the combining of the four basic elements and Mommsen’s ‘dynamic role’ for the conceptual development; in addition his rapid work on the actual volumes should be emphasized.87

MWG as a Complete Edition: With his Düsseldorf research centre Wolfgang J. Mommsen contributed considerably to fulfilling the cri-teria of a ‘complete edition’. Meticulous archival research worldwide and in remote places led to a continuous expansion of the inventory of texts of Weber’s publications and lecture activity, in particular his scientific, political and personal correspondence. All texts within any specific volume were ordered chronologically and unlike liter-ary practice it was not the creative ‘text of the first hand’ but the worked-on ‘text of the final hand’ that determined the ‘edited text’ and the earlier versions were annotated as variants. The principle of pertinence, which Mommsen wanted, was met by presenting the large themes not as a unified block but including the actual work-historical places in their internal connection and giving their con-tents clear explanatory titles. So this was the case for the titles he was responsible for, the ‘political writings’: Volumes I/4 Landarbeiterfrage, Nationalstaat und Volkswirtschaftspolitik 1892–1899; I/10 Zur Russis-chen Revolution von 1905; I/15 Zur Politik im Weltkrieg 1914–1918; I/16 Zur Neuordnung Deutschlands 1919–1920. Within these volumes there was still a significant sub-division so that under the criteria of ‘Com-plete Edition’ press reports of speeches and contributions to debates

86. See above, n. 81. 87. This point was raised once again by M. Rainer Lepsius in conversation with Edith Hanke and Gangolf Hübinger in Munich, 7 October 2009.



could then be included even though handwritten drafts were absent. Taking into account the indirect transmission in such attested cases increased the source value of the edition. As is well known, there is no ‘genuine’ Weber ‘Nachlass’. The col-lection known as ‘Weber Nachlass’—located initially in the Central State Archive in Merseburg and now in the Secret State Archive of Prussian Heritage (Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz) in Berlin—is a collection which Marianne Weber supplemented by the addition of letters and copies of letters after the death of her husband. This made the decision plausible to edit those letters that were deposited in Merseburg and the other letters to recipients found elsewhere in ‘Section II: Letters’ and to decide not to include the return correspondence. Some 3,200 letters altogether were found and transcribed, which meant that the original plan of eight letter volumes had to be extended to ten volumes. ‘Section III: Lecture Manuscripts and Lecture Notes’ was calcu-lated in 1981 to a dilatory two volumes, so that the widely dissemi-nated Munich lectures of 1919/20 ‘Outline of universal social and economic history’, known internationally as the ‘General Economic History’, could be presented. After thorough examination of all the lecture manuscripts and lecture notes by Wolfgang J. Momm-sen and his team this section was later expanded to a total seven volumes. The historical-critical presentation of the text: the uncovering of the ‘historical Weber’, in a double sense, benefitted from the close examination of the text as well as the careful presentation of the text according to historical-critical principles. ‘Critical’ means that all texts were checked for correctness of the author’s own rendition and thereby for mistakes or publisher and typesetting errors. Ever since Otto Hintze’s specialist review of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in 1926, in which he uncovered 50 simple reading errors by the first editors,88 the need for such re-reading was established beyond doubt. Depict-ing all phases of the text according to the ‘historical’ method, was less obvious. The MWG decided on detailed and specific text-critical indices and these would appear on the same page as the ‘edited text’. This allowed the study of the development of the text and of the points at which changes occurred, while possibly inhibiting the

88. Otto Hintze, ‘Max Webers Soziologie’, Schmollers Jahrbuch 50 (1926): 83-95. Hintze’s review was in respect of the 2nd edition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft of 1925, which included the sociology of music.



flow of reading. ‘Historical’ editing, so dearly loved by Mommsen, included in his opinion an ‘Editorial Report’, which proceeded each text and which went into matters of provenance, transmission and editorial decisions. Commentary on contents was provided for by substantive explanations, of which Mommsen made extensive use. Detailed research in the university archives by Manfred Schön pro-duced new insights into the academic history. Strictly speaking the Editorial Reports are more important than the actual introductions to the volumes, in which the ‘specific approach’ of the volume editor in presenting the overall scientific history and biographical features are given more emphasis. A documenting edition: Reviews of the various volumes of MWG always show that it had made sense to differentiate between the ‘documenting’ and the ‘interpreting’ type of edition. What was too much for the one, was too meager for the other. Some review-ers had expectations on the edition that it can and will not fulfill. Others expressed, solely on the basis of the selection of the editor of a volume, the suspicion of the falsification of textual materials through an overly ‘sociological’ point of view. The MWG encounters both points with the attacking remark that the shadow of the editors hand falls on each edition, and its scientific value is to be measured ‘according to the extent that verifiable results are brought forth, the editorial contours are made visible’.89 This may seem trivial, but is not if one considers that knowing the final intention of the author better than he knew it himself was once regarded as editorial mas-tery. Johannes Winckelmann remained true to this tradition when bringing together different textual pieces and constructing Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft as Weber’s posthumous main work, and when com-piling his ‘sociology of the state’. Wolfgang J. Mommsen also cast his shadow on the edition. In order to distinguish the particular status which he adjudged to the texts of Weber’s activity as member of the Peace Delegation in May 1919, he inserted, for example, in Volume I/16 his own thematic section ‘Ia Contributions to the official politics of the Versailles peace negotiations’, a decision which he justified in great detail.90 In Mommsen’s weighing up the different sorts of texts with a varying scale of Weber authorship, the scholar/intellectual Weber was no longer divided into the scientific genius of a Dr Jekyll and the remote

89. Schluchter, ‘Einführung’, p. 9. 90. MWG I/16, p. 43.



nationalistic political publicist of Mr Hyde; rather the unrelenting swing of the pendulum between the spheres of science and politics was now documented in detail. If one reviews the final text of the MWG as a complete edition according to historical-critical and documentary methods, one thing becomes clear as far as the interests of historians are concerned: it is shown far more concisely than ever before how very much Weber placed all topics continuously in a historical context and, more exactly, how he treated them as ‘universal-historical problems’. Under the aspects of the Gesamtausgabe and the way in which Wolfgang J. Mommsen helped to frame it, far more can now be revealed of ‘Max Weber, the historian’, especially if one compares the situation now with that of 1986 when a book of conference papers was published under that title.91

6. The work of Max Weber in academic knowledge

At a time when readers of renowned academic publishers praise the ‘middling book’ and professional historians complain in review ‘that many specialist historians consistently write over the heads of their audience’,92 historical-critical editions with their lavish pre-sentation are subject to especial critical scrutiny. That was the case for MWG whose pilot volume, Mommsen’s Zur Politk im Weltkrieg (MWG I/15), appeared in early 1984. All the editorial problems of the Gesamtausgabe were tested out in this volume of writings, speeches, manifestos, commentaries and lists. In September 1984 Wolfgang J. Mommsen organized an international conference at the German Historical Institute in London, entitled ‘Max Weber and his contemporaries’: ‘to determine more precisely the place of Max Weber within the intellectual and political currents at the turn of the century’.93 Among the Weber specialists who at the same time

91. Jürgen Kocka (ed.), Max Weber. Der Historiker (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986). The volume contains the papers of the Weber section of the Interna-tional Historians Conference of 1985 in Stuttgart. 92. Volker Ullrich in Die Zeit (4 May 2006) on Olaf Blaschke and Hagen Schulze (eds.), Geschichtswissenschaft und Buchhandel in der Krisenspirale?, in Historische Zeitschrift Beiheft Vol. 42 (Munich, 2006). Cf. Detlef Felken, Die Geschichtskultur und das ‘mittlere Buch’. Anmerkungen zur Lage der historischen Literatur, HZ Beiheft, pp. 211-20. 93. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schwentker (eds.), ‘Vorwort’, Max Weber und seine Zeitgenossen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), p. 9.



could gain their first impression of MWG were David Beetham, Ralf Dahrendorf, Eberhard Demm, Anthony Giddens, Wilhelm Hennis, Jürgen Kocka, Arthur Mitzman, Guy Oakes, Pietro Rossi, Edward Shils, Friedrich Tenbruck and Sam Whimster. So how has the ‘critical appropriation and the reflection of the work of Max Weber’ fared since the appearance of MWG?94 This question can only be specified by making some concluding comments on the relationship of ‘edition and audience’ and cannot be answered in depth at this point. Given the different interests in Weber and so also MWG, four ideal-typical academic parts of the audience can be distinguished. Firstly, the specialist conversation of the international ‘Weber community’; this may focus on Weber’s contribution and his lin-guistic idiosyncrasies in the collectively written texts, as in the ‘Accompanying Remarks’ (Geleitwort) of the new editors on taking over the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in early 1904.95 Or, to give another example, the exegetical treatment of his soci-ology of religion or the principles behind the construction and dating of the scattered texts of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Here the interpretation within very heterogeneous academic cultures is central. The systematic use of MWG is a conditio sine qua non for these purposes.96

Secondly, the specialist discourse on the Weber paradigm, primar-ily in the historical social sciences. The specialist audience profited from MWG and a ‘further development of Max Weber’s research programme’ has followed from the new state of text disclosure.97 Parallel to, and intertwined with, the text history of MWG a ‘strug-gle over Weber’ erupted. Wilhelm Hennis, who thought that his own interest in a new political-anthropological discovery of ‘Max

94. Mommsen, ‘Einleitung’, Max Weber und seine Zeitgenossen, p. 38. 95. Peter Ghosh demanded a historical-critical clarification in ‘Max Weber, Werner Sombart and the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft: The authorship of the “Geleitwort” (1904)’, History of European Ideas 36 (2010): 71-100. 96. For an overview see Edith Hanke, ‘Max Weber weltweit’, in Akademie Aktuell. Zeitschrift der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 3 (2009): 18-21. A good insight into the historical and philological detailed research is provided by Peter Ghosh, A Historian Reads Max Weber (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008). Cf. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft and the complex history of its origins reconstructed by Wolfgang Schluchter in MWG I/24. 97. Gert Albert et al. (eds.), Das Weber-Paradigma. Studien zur Weiterentwicklung von Max Webers Forschungsprogramm (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).



Weber’s Central Question’ was badly served by the editorial circle of MWG, mounted a flanking attack from the start of the edition: too expensive, too detailed, too sociological, a bundle of objections which could amount to the accusation of falsification.98 Friedrich H. Tenbruck made a more reserved assessment of MWG. In 1985 he wrote with reference to the increasing worldwide interpretation that

a plan of construction is still missing which makes the work in its unity, especially Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft as a whole, comprehensible to us. This then is the problem of Weber research: the timely recon-struction of this concept and its unfolding on the basis of the Wissen-schaftslehre and in regard to the purpose and arrangement of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. But, let it be said, this is only possible if we understand Weber’s questions and answers within the field of problems of aca-demic knowledge in his time.99

As can be seen, Tenbruck already had in his apodictic way a plan of construction of his own—as did (in their hearts) the many pro-tagonists of Weber. These controversies increased the legitimacy of MWG, and indeed its main contribution to the speedy reconstruc-tion of the text documents, making them available to the contenders for use in their own ‘plans of construction’. Thirdly, the open culture of intellectual dispute over ‘life and work’. This comprises the change from Weber-and-Marx of the student revolt to the Weber-and-Nietzsche of the so-called ‘Post-moderne’; or the collaboration of the Bavarian capital Munich with Bavarian Broadcasting to illuminate Munich researchers and scholars—Werner Heisenberg, Max von Pettenkofer alongside Max

98. For Hennis, an illegitimate interpreting editorial shadow had already fallen over the first volume and he elected for the continuation of the com-bined Marianne Weber and Johannes Winckelmann editions in a UTB cassette: Wilhelm Hennis, ‘Im langen Schatten einer Edition. Zum Erscheinen des ersten Bandes der Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe, in FAZ (15.9.1984), much enlarged in Zeitschrift für Politik 32 (1985): 208-217; also printed in his Max Weber und Thu-kydides. Nachträge zur Biographie des Werks (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), pp. 73-87. 99. Friedrich H. Tenbruck, ‘Das Werk Max Webers: Methodologie und Soz-ialwissenschaften’, in his Das Werk Max Webers. Gesammelte Aufsätze zu Max Weber (ed. Harald Homann; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), pp. 157-75 (173f.); English translation by S. Whimster, ‘The Problem of Thematic Unity in the Works of Max Weber’, British Journal of Sociology 31.3 (1980): 316-51.



Weber.100 Above all, MWG stimulates new biographical work on Weber101 and the cultivation of Weber as classic of sociology.102

Fourthly, the promotion of a classic author, the free circulation of his ideas and concepts in the most varied contexts, the work as a quarry. This addresses in the widest sense an open academic dis-course which, in a survey of the International Sociological Associa-tion in 1998, placed Weber’s Economy and Society (sic) at the top of the list of ‘Books of the Century’.103 Here the historian’s orientation ranging from ‘culturalist’ sciences of symbols to problems of world history will benefit from the carefully edited and contextualized texts, if they also critically relate their ‘global histories’ to Weber.104

Wolfgang J. Mommsen moved intellectually on all four levels, though not linking them in a historiographical diagonal. In a richly fac-etted obituary, in the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Hans-Ulrich Wehler discerned in Mommsen’s work a ‘peculiar ambivalence’.

Mommsen was without doubt one of the most knowledgeable experts on Weber’s writings and letters, the theoretical and methodological ideas, above all the sociology of domination, as numerous essays show. As a practicing historian, however, he never experimented in a recognizable way with Weber’s categories and ideas in order to secure a theoretical-conceptual space for the analysis of existing prob-lems; instead of this he willingly cited Weber as a sharp-minded com-mentator on contemporary problems.105

100. Ulrike Leutheusser and Heinrich Nöth, München leuchtet für die Wissenschaft. Berühmte Forscher und Gelehrte (Munich: alliteraverlag, 2007), see within M. Rainer Lepsius, ‘Max Weber (1864–1920). Begründer der modernen Sozialwissenschaften’, pp. 64-76. 101. Joachim Radkau, Max Weber. Die Leidenschaft des Denkens (Munich: Hanser, 2005; et Max Weber. A Biography [Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009]). The biography is written in a close engagement with MWG and its commentaries but could have benefited from a less nonchalant treatment of the Weber texts. 102. See Dirk Käsler, ‘Max Weber’, in Käsler (ed.), Klassiker des soziologischen Denkens, vol. 2 Von Weber bis Mannheim (Munich: Beck, 1978), pp. 40-177, 424-53, 514-20. 103. Cf. Wolfgang Schluchter, ‘Max Weber: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grun-driß der verstehenden Soziologie (1921/22)’, in Walter Erhart and Herbert Jaumann (eds.), Jahrhundertbücher. Grosse Theorien von Freud bis Luhmann (Munich: Beck, 2000), pp. 93-107 (93). 104. Cf. the report on research by Peter Kramper, ‘Warum Europa? Konturen einer geschichtlichen Forschungskontroverse’, in Neue Politische Literatur 54 (2009): 9-46; also on the ‘new world history’ see John Darwin, After Tamerlane. The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000 (London: Allen Lane, 2007); the introduction and elsewhere is structured through a classic use of Marx and Weber. 105. H-U. Wehler, ‘Wolfgang J. Mommsen 1930–2004’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 31 (2005): 138.



Mommsen did experiment on the abovementioned lines, but there remains a striking basic tension between the theory of history and historical writing. How, using Weber’s categories, whole histori-cal epochs according to current knowledge could be empirically fleshed out and the narrative graphically described, is an open question. Wolfgang J. Mommsen was always reticent to embrace theory building at the cost of the richness of historical source mate-rial, simply because he was conscious of the Weberian demand for perspectivity, the isolation of the ‘particular viewpoint’. In the essays, which accompanied the initiating process of MWG, Mom-msen emphasized ‘the multiple significance of theories in historical science’ and saw beyond historicism a not to be reconciled tension between macro-theoretical constructions and historical-empirical constellations.106 A further point can be adduced. Mommsen’s ‘paradigmatic’ epoch was that of Imperial Germany and its power relationships, in which Weber belonged to the intellectual counter-elite. Mommsen was enamoured of the conceptual idea of Wil-helmine pseudo-constitutionalism. Weber was for him, therefore, always both subject and facilitator of historiographical analysis.107 The decisive criterion for Mommsen was at all times the work at hand that was placed in competition with other works, and not the purely theoretical programme. This was the habitus in which he wrote his books and drove the MWG volumes forward. And without this pragmatic trait of the historian Mommsen, the MWG would surely not have attained its position in international aca-demic life in the advanced stage in which it now stands in 2010 with its 30 published volumes.

106. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Die Mehrdeutigkeit von Theorien in der Geschich-tswissenschaft’, in J. Kocka and T. Nipperdey (eds.), Theorie und Erzählung in der Geschichte (= Beiträge zur Historik, vol. 3; Munich: dtv, 1979), pp. 334-70. 107. Cf. Wolfgang Schwentker, ‘Geschichte schreiben mit Blick auf Max Weber: Wolfgang J. Mommsen’, Jahrbuch der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (2004), pp. 209-19 and Gangolf Hübinger, ‘Obituary: Professor Dr DLitt (h.c.) Wolfgang J. Mommsen 5 November, 1930–11 August, 2004, Max Weber Studies 5.1 (2005): 113-17.

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