SOMBART, WERNER

(1863–1941)

Werner Friedrich Wilhelm Carl Sombart was a German economist and sociologist. He was born in the Harz mountains and studied law and economics from 1882 to 1888 in Pisa, Rome, and Berlin, together with Adolph Wagner and Gustav Schmoller. In his dissertation on The Roman Campagna (1888), he discussed the relationship between landowners and agrarian labor in Italy. He became an expert on Italian economics; his studies were rich in statistical and historical detail. At the age of 27 he was appointed professor at Breslau University in Silesia. His studies of Fredrick Engels and Karl Marx, together with a widely-read collection of his lectures, Socialism and Social Movements during the Nineteenth Century (1896), were seen as endorsements of Marxism and delayed further advancement in his academic career until 1916, when he became a full professor at Berlin University. His later work became more nationalist and, in a 1934 tract, A New Social Philosophy, even sympathetic to the then new Nazi regime. Sombart was a colleague of Max Weber and participated with him in the Verein für Socialpolitik as well as in founding the German Society for Sociology in 1909. Sombart's major work, the three-volume treatise, Modern Capitalism (1902–1927), traced capitalism's origins to Enlightenment ideas rather than, as Weber did, to Protestantism.

Sombart's historical and economic studies on population are contained in the third (1927) volume of Modern Capitalism and in a later book, Humanistic Anthropology (Vom Menschen [1938]). In the former work, the main population-related question he tackled, like Marx, was how early capitalist development recruited the masses of workers that were needed, and how this population surplus developed in agrarian societies. Marx had famously asserted that there cannot be a general theory of population but only a theory specific to each period of economic development and structure; Sombart's sociological theory of population applied to the conditions of early and high capitalism. Humanistic Anthropology proposed another theory of population. There his main argument was that all action, including all demographically relevant action, was founded in mental concepts and motives, and thus cannot be explained in biological terms. In 1938 such a stance was in explicit opposition to the racial, eugenic, and Volk-theories of the Nazi regime. The book was banned during the Third Reich and was almost forgotten afterwards, but it deserves a secure place in the history of population thought.

See also: Population Thought, Contemporary.

bibliography

selected works by werner sombart. Sombart, Werner. 1896. Sozialismus und Soziale Bewegung. Jena: Fischer. (Translated as: Socialism and the Social Movement. New York: Putnam, 1898.)

——. 1915. The Quintessence of Capitalism. London: Unwin.

——. 1927: Der Moderne Kapitalismus. Vol. 3: Das Wirtschaftsleben im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus. München u. Leipzig: Duncker u. Humblot.

——. 1933. History of the Economic Institutions of Modern Europe: An Introduction to Der Moderne Kapitalismus of Werner Sombart, ed. Frederick L. Nussbaum. New York: Crofts.

——. 1938. Vom Menschen. Versuch einer geistwissenschaftlichen Anthropologie. Berlin: Buchholz & Weisswange.

——. 2001. Economic Life in the Modern Age. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Rainer Mackensen