Sombart, Werner
Sombart, Werner
Werner Sombart, economist, was born in 1863 in Ermsleben, Germany, and died in 1941 in Berlin. His father, Anton Ludwig Sombart, was a landowner, industrial entrepreneur, a National Liberal member of the Prussian diet and of the Reichstag, and one of the charter members of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik. As the son of a well-to-do and cultured member of the middle class, Sombart was able to study law at the universities of Pisa and Berlin and economics, history, and philosophy in Berlin and Rome. His studies in Berlin included the seminars of Gustav Schmoller and Adolph Wagner, the leading economists of the German historical school and prominent Katheder-socialists. He received his PH.D. from the University of Berlin in 1888, with a dissertation entitled “Uber Pacht- und Lohnverhaltnisse in der romischen Campagna.”
In 1888 his father‘s influence enabled Sombart to obtain the position of syndic with the Bremen chamber of commerce. Two years later, he went as associate professor of political economy to the University of Breslau; in 1906 he became a full professor at the Handelshochschule in Berlin and in 1918 he was appointed to the University of Berlin as a full professor.
It is difficult to describe Sombart‘s Weltan- schauung—his political views, social theories, and religious attitudes—because all aspects of his thought underwent repeated changes. In several instances, he approached a social or economic problem initially from the point of view of a Marxist and gradually moved toward a far more conservative position.
When in 1894 the third volume of Marx‘s Capital appeared, Sombart acclaimed its publication as an intellectual event and himself published a study of the Marxist system (1894) that was in turn praised by Engels. Two years later Sombart published a pamphlet that consisted of a series of lectures on socialism and social movements in the nineteenth century (1896), written from the point of view of an advanced advocate of reform. This pamphlet went through ten successively enlarged editions and was translated into 24 languages; the tenth edition, which appeared in 1924 and consists of two volumes (about 1,000 pages), is violently antisocialist, in general, and violently anti-Marxist, in particular. Three years after these wild diatribes of 1924 against Marx and Marxism, Sombart explained in the preface to the third volume of Der moderne Kapitalismus (see below) that this later work constitutes for the most part “nothing but a continuation and in a certain sense a completion of the work of Marx”—a claim that was rejected by representatives of all shades of socialist and social-democratic opinion (see [1902] 1924-1927).
Sombart‘s views on social classes were also un-stable. In 1903 he published Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, which was revised and brought up to date seven times during his lifetime. In this historical exposition of great erudition, Sombart tried to describe the emergence of the various classes in German society. This was a subject that was to interest him for many years: he returned again and again to his studies of the character and function of classes, undaunted by the fact that his conclusions kept changing. In the belief that he was following Marx, Sombart began by defining classes partly on the basis of their formal position in the economy—for example, Junkers and small peasants were located in the same class because both are representatives of “the original owner-economy” (urwüchsige Eigenwirtschaft), and partly on the basis of their members‘ aims—for example, the proletariat was characterized as a class because of its “tendency towards socialization and democratization” (1897, p. 7). Finally, however, he came to the conclusion that Marx‘s approach to the problem of classes led nowhere and that, in fact, it was not Marx‘s illness and death that had pre-vented him from completing the last chapter of Capital, which dealt with this problem, but the inadequacy of his theory. One of Sombart‘s later conclusions was that classes are a phenomenon peculiar to the “economic age,” which he identified with “our epoch” (1934, p. 23).
Sombart‘s best-known work is on the subject of capitalism. Der moderne Kapitalismus (1902) deals with the history, the structure, and “the philosophy of the spirit” of capitalism. To a certain extent the work was influenced by Marx, by Max Weber, by Wilhelm Dilthey, and by Eduard Bernstein. It is an exciting and challenging book; valid facts and unreliable information stand side by side, and liaisons dangereuses between the most varied ideas demand critical attention.
The subtitle of Der moderne Kapitalismus shows how broadly it was conceived: Historisch-systematische Darstellung des gesamteuropäischen Wirtschaftslebens von seinen Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. The first book deals with the transition from feudal society to capitalism, and the last book treats conditions in the twentieth century. The development of capitalism is divided into three stages: early capitalism (Frühkapitalis-raws), ending before the industrial revolution; high capitalism (Hochkapitalismus), beginning about 1760; and finally, late capitalism (Spätkapitalis-raws), beginning with World War i (discussed only briefly). The moving force during the first stage of capitalism was “a small number of enterprising businessmen, emerging from all groups of the population: noblemen, adventurers, merchants, and artisans” (.[1902] 1924-1927, vol. 3, part 1, p. 11). In the second stage, the capitalist entrepreneur was in command and was “the sole organizer of the economic process.” The third stage of capitalism is, according to Sombart, not a stage of decay; on the contrary, Sombart asserts that this stage represents capitalism in its “prime” (die besten Jahre des Mannes\ even though economic motives are in his opinion no longer paramount, having been replaced by “the principle of agreement.”
In connection with his magnum opus, Sombart published a number of special studies, among them The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911), The Quintessence of Capitalism (1913a), and Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des modernen Kapitalismus (1913k). In these studies his interpretations of capitalism still tended to be idealistic, although they did not exclude materialist conceptions, and, in Luxus und Kapitalismus (1913b, vol. 1), he even found explanations in the area of the erotic for the emergence and development of capitalism.
After the advent to power of National Socialism, many of Sombart‘s theories changed, in order that he might present “a unified view of the various social problems of the time from the point of view of the national socialist way of thinking” (1934, preface). One of the theories that Sombart clearly had to change was that of the role of the Jews in economic history. Nevertheless, official National Socialism never accepted Sombart as its interpreter, although it recognized him as a sufficiently close follower to permit him to print three pamphlets that essentially reproduced parts of A New Social Philosophy (1934).
If the number of editions and translations of his books were an index, Sombart would appear to have been one of the most successful German economists. But he had few disciples and no “school,” just as he himself had never, for any length of time, belonged to any “school.” Sombart was read all over the world but received little recognition in the way of academic or state honors. He was one of the most colorful (and chameleon-like) and interesting academic personalities that Germany produced in the decades from the 1890s to the 1930s.
JÜrgen Kuczynski
[For the historical context of Sombart‘s work, seeCAPITALISM; ECONOMIC THOUGHT, article on SOCIALIST THOUGHT; MARXISM; MARXIST SOCIOLOGY; and the biographies ofBERNSTEIN; DILTHEY; MARX; SCHMOLLER; WAGNER; WEBER, MAX.]
WORKS BY SOMBART
1888 Über Pacht- und Lohnverhältnisse in der römischen Campagna. Dissertation, University of Berlin.
1894 Zur Kritik des ökonomischen Systems von Karl Marx. Archiv fur soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik 7:555-594.
(1896) 1909 Socialism and the Social Movement. London: Dent; New York: Dutton. ? First published as Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung im 19. Jahrhundert. Title later changed to Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung. The 10th edition was published in 1924 as Der proletarische Socialismus (“Marxismus”).
1897 Ideale der Sozialpolitik. Archiv für soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik 10:1-48.
(1902) 1924-1927 Der moderne Kapitalismus: Historischsystematische Darstellung des gesamteuropdischen Wirtschaftslebens von seinen Anfängen bis zur Gegen-wart. 2d ed., 3 vols. Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. ? Volume 1: Die vorkapitalistische Wirtschaft. Volume 2: Das europäische Wirtschaftsleben im Zeitalter des Frühkapitalismus. Volume 3: Das Wirtschaftsleben im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus.
(1903) 1927 Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft im 19. Jahrhundert und im Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Einführung in die Nationalokonomie. 7th ed. Berlin: Bondi.
(1911) 1913 The Jews and Modern Capitalism. London: T. F. Unwin. ? First published as Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben. A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Collier.
(1913a) 1915 The Quintessence of Capitalism: A Study of the History and Psychology of the Modern Business Man. Translated and edited by M. Epstein. New York: Dutton. ? First published as Der Bourgeois: Zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen.
1913b Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des modernen Kapitalismus. Munich: Duncker & Humblot. ? Volume 1: Luxus und Kapitalismus. Volume 2: Krieg und Kapitalismus. Volume 1 was translated into English as a report on Project number 465-97-3-81 under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration and the Department of Social Science, Columbia University.
1930 Capitalism. Volume 3, pages 195-208 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.
(1934) 1937 A New Social Philosophy. Translated and edited by Karl F. Geiser. Princeton Univ. Press; Ox-ford Univ. Press. ? First published as Deutscher Sozialismus.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brentano, Lujo 1916 Die Anfdnge des modernen Kapitalismus. Munich: Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Commons, John R.; and Perlman, Selig 1929 [A book review of] Der moderne Kapitalismus. American Economic Review 19:78-88.
Crosser, Paul K. 1941 Werner Sombart‘s Philosophy of National-Socialism. Journal of Social Philosophy 6:263-270.
Engel, Werner 1933 Max Webers und Werner Sombarts Lehre von den Wirtschaftsgesetzen. Berlin: Collignon.
Festgabe fur Werner Sombart. Schmollers‘ Jahrbuch, Vol. 56, no. 6. 1932 Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
Krause, Werner 1962 Werner Sombarts Weg vom Kathedersozialismus zum Faschismus. Berlin: Rülten & Loening.
Kuczynski, JÜrgen 1926 Zurück zu Marx! Leipzig: Hirschfeld.
Mitchell, Wesley C. 1929 Sombart‘s Hochkapitalismus. Quarterly Journal of Economics 43:303-323.
Nussbaum, Frederick 1933 A History of the Economic Institutions of Modern Europe: An Introduction to Der moderne Kapitalismus of Werner Sombart. New York: Crofts.
Plotnik, Mortin J. 1937 Werner Sombart and His Type of Economics. New York: Eco Press.
Pollock, Frederick 1926 Sombarts “Widerlegung” des Marxismus. Leipzig: Hirschfeld.
Sutton, F. X. 1948 The Social and Economic Philosophy of Werner Sombart: The Sociology of Capitalism. Pages 316-331 in Harry E. Barnes (editor), An Introduction to the History of Sociology. Univ. of Chicago Press.