Sam Whimster on Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy, 25 years later
By Sam Whimster
Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy is a book that came out of the circumstances of the 1990s. Under Gorbachev, Russia pursued glasnost and released Eastern bloc countries from Soviet hegemony. In 1990 the German Democratic Republic and the Federal German Republic were re-united (Wiedervereinigung). A call went out to academics internationally to come and teach in the universities, East of the Elbe. Over the summer of 1992, I gave a course on modern and postmodern social theory in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism at Leipzig University, my underlying idea being to convey to students the weirdness of the culture of western capitalism.
The Prussian State Archive was a coach ride away -through the moonscape of the Leuna works- at Merseburg, known to Weber scholars through Wolfgang Mommsen’s Max Weber und die deutsche Politik [Max Weber and German Politics]. The catalogue of Weber files in the archive was rudimentary and I ordered the files labelled ‘Max Weber an Frieda Gross’ more out of curiosity than anything else.
All roads, and all personal relationships, led to Ascona in Switzerland on the edge of Lago Maggiore. As the Countess Franziska zur Reventlow said: Na ja, Franzl, Ascona gehoert entschied zur Biographie. Hers was a lighthearted Nietzschean anarchism. For others it was more structured: Lebensreform, Lebensphilosophie, anarcho-syndicalism, veganism, naturism, and every variety of creative lifestyle in between.
The surprise was that such variety of lives were pursued both within and without what Mina Tobler called the dour Bismarckstaat. Max Weber was usually presented in the stern image of the German academic bourgeois. Heidelberg residence lightened the image in a liberal direction, but nobody imagined that the great Max Weber with his inflated superego consorted with risqué ladies, anarchists, bomb-throwers, alternative life-styles. Anglophone Weberianism debated Marx versus Weber, which were ideologically policed, but this was something entirely different.
There was an anarchist moment in the 1990s. Scott Lash and I had picked up on that with reference to the community-directed social philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty in the US – with Wilhelm Hennis advocating a philosophical anthropology. Modernity, we suggested, could not hold. Ethics and conviviality are generated not just from below but between people themselves. Phenomenological intersubjectivism became shared and created lifestyles. Around this time I did an urban lifestyle conference on London’s East End, then being colonised by artists. Housing should be open to self-builders, a forgotten anarchist practice. After the Cold War, what was the purpose of the state other than the discredited territorial organization of violence between states? Ulrich Linse probed me on my shaky anarchist credentials I remember. History, it seemed, could end in any number of ways.
Germany enjoyed that anarchist moment in the Freideutsche Jugendbewegung which met on the Hohen Meissner in October 1913. The anarchist currents go back to Erich Landauer’s ethical pacificism and communal socialism (which Martin Buber took to the kibbutzim movement in Israel); Kropotkin the anarchist-terror bomb-throwing tradition that surfaces in Ernst Frick, whom Weber defended in 1914. Ernst Toller, also defended by Weber, works through the ethical dilemmas as a playwright in his Masse Mensch. The First World War kills off the sense of anarchist possibility, though it is still an option with Kurt Eisner in Munich in 1919. The higher sense of culture is also present in the Burg Lauenstein conference in 1917 organised by the publisher Diedrichs. The syndicalist trade union movement led by Raphael Friedeberg -also in Ascona- represents another socialist tradition. Edith Hanke has written on Tolstoy as has Martin Green – how are we to lead our lives? becoming Lenin’s What is to be done? The novelist D. H. Lawrence imbibes these currents through his marriage to Frieda von Richthofen, working out the dilemmas of violence, eroticism, and working-class authenticity. Not least in this kaleidoscope (of what, one has to say, might have been) are the psychiatrists: Otto Gross, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Bleuler, Kraepelin. Weber knew them all in his search for cures for himself and others.
The Ascona Weber is the extra-curricular Weber, the search for validity beyond faith and beyond the state.
Reading
Ascona itself is the source of Bezauberung. Martin Green’s Monte Verità. Robert Landmann Ascona – Monte Verità. Auf der Suche nach dem Paradies (I think there’s an Italian version too). An exhibition catalogue from Ascona 1980, curated by Harald Szeeman, Berg der Wahrheit.
Raimond Dehmlow and Gottfired Heuer founded the Otto Gross Gesellschaft in 1998 in Berlin and a number of notable conferences were published, and archived.
Ulrich Linse is the professional historian of anarchism, Organisierter Anarchismus in Deutschen Kaiserreich von 1871.
Emanuel Hurwitz did a great case study on Otto Gross. Otto Gross. Paradies-Sucher zwischen Freud und Jung.
Many of these cultural, political, and anarchist threads were brought together at a Weber study group in 1998. Out of that came the collection I edited, Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy. Carl Levy gives a great overview of the politics of anarchism and socialism; Edith Hanke of the Russian authors and Tolstoy; Charles Turner on Dostoyevsky, Linse on Erich Muehsam. Gangolf Huebinger’s Max Weber. Stationen und Impulse einer intellektuellen Biographie covers much of the rich complexity of the overlapping political and cultural circles and the anthropological topography of central Europe – alas now buried!
Sam Whimster, February 2024