Copyright © 2002 the Canadian Journal of Sociology

Note on the Discipline/Note sociologique

Puritans and Jews:
Weber, Sombart and the Transvaluators of Modern Society [1]
Colin Loader

Canadian Journal of Sociology 26, 4 (Fall 2001): 635-653.

Abstract: This essay contrasts Werner Sombart’s “Jew” with Max Weber’s “Puritan,” places them in a historical context and examines the roles of the types within the structures of the thinkers’ presentations of modern capitalism. Both men envisioned a Nietzschean transvaluator, who emerged out of traditional society to usher in the new modern world. Eventually the values of this transvaluator became reified into the iron cage; nevertheless, he served as an ethical model for the modern age. Although Sombart assigned a causal role to the Jew that was comparable to that of Weber’s Puritan, he denied his type a similar ethical one. Thus the Jew was identified not with the early heroic stage of capitalism but with the late reified stage. Because of this denial Sombart’s Jew was never central to his work in the way Weber’s Puritan was.

Résumé: Cet article met en contraste le “Juif” de Werner Sombart et le “Puritain” de Max Weber tout en les situant dans leur contexte historique. Il examine le rôle que jouent ces deux types dans la présentation du capitalisme moderne faite par les deux auteurs. Ceux-ci ont créé le “transvaluator” nieztschien, issu de la société traditionelle, qui annonçait la naissance du monde moderne. Les valeurs de ce “transvaluator” ont fini par être réifié dans l’image de la “cage de fer;” il a néanmoins servi de modèle éthique pour l’âge moderne. Sur le plan causal, il est vrai qui Sombart attribue un rôle comparable au Puritain de Weber, mais ce rôle ne s’étend pas à l’éthique. En effet, le Juif ne s’assimile pas à l’image d’une époque précoce et héroïque du capitalisme, mais plutôt à son développement tardif et réifié. Aussi, l’oeuvre de Sombart ne tourne-t-elle pas autour du Juif comme elle le fait chez Weber.


In 1904, Max Weber and Werner Sombart became part of a group of German academics who, at the invitation of Hugo Münsterberg, participated in the Congress of Arts and Sciences at the Universal Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri (Rollmann, 1993; Scaff, 1998). The Congress offered the members of the group the opportunity to make their own individual excursions across America, which modified or reinforced the presuppositions they brought with them. Weber’s ideas concerning the Protestant ethic were strengthened by his American sojourn, as he demonstrated upon his return in a 1906 essay entitled “‘Churches’ and ‘Sects’ in North America” (Weber, 1985).

Sombart, who had written little on America before the trip, drew a much more pessimistic picture of the new land. “Greetings from this ghastly cultural Hell” read one of his postcards back to Germany. To another colleague he wrote that America was the land of the “Götterdämmerung of culture” (Lenger, 1994: 148). Like Weber’s positive appraisal, this negative assessment would be tied to an investigation of the relationship between capitalism and religion. Although Sombart’s first writings on America after 1904 concerned the proletariat, within seven years he would describe the United States as “a land of Jews” (Sombart, 1962: 50).

That attribution occurred in Sombart’s major work on the Jews, The Jews and Modern Capitalism (Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben). There Sombart wrote that he was responding to Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

Max Weber’s researches are responsible for this book. For any one who followed them could not but ask himself whether all that Weber ascribes to Puritanism might not with equal justice be referred to Judaism, and probably in a greater degree; nay, it might well be suggested that that which is called Puritanism is in reality Judaism (Sombart, 1962: 187 [1920: 226]).

Sombart argued that his “Jew” could be substituted for Weber’s “Puritan” with better results in depicting the origins of capitalism. As presented here this would seem to be a straightforward substitution of one religious group for another. Yet such a substitution appears at odds with the perception today of Sombart’s work as antisemitic and Weber’s work as favoring the Puritan ethic. To clarify this discrepancy I will examine the roles of the Jew and the Puritan in the respective interpretive systems of Sombart and Weber and then show how these two structural places contrast with one another, allowing for Sombart’s increasingly negative characterization of the Jew and Weber’s positive characterization of the Puritan. I will begin with a brief discussion of the context in which those two works appeared.

The Historical Context
Sombart and Weber were both members of the “youngest generation” of the German school of National Economy and were the leaders in that generation’s challenge to the previous one, which was led by Gustav Schmoller. Their assumption of coeditorship, along with Edgar Jaffé, of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in 1903 provided them with a strong instrument for countering the position of Schmoller. What characterized the youngest generation above all was their insistence that their epoch be characterized as “capitalistic,” a designation that most of Schmoller’s generation rejected (Lindenlaub, 1967: 291–365). Schmoller wrote: “That which Sombart calls capitalism I would much rather designate as the modern monetary form of economic organization which developed under the liberal system of unrestricted occupational mobility, free competition and the unlimited desire for gain” (Sombart, 1909: 696).

Schmoller objected to the assertion that capitalism defined the modern era, because this claim challenged the hierarchical world view of German historicism that had become dominant in the nineteenth century, from the abstract formulations of Hegel to the concrete histories of Ranke. The established interpretation subordinated the economic sphere (civil society) to the ethical-cultural institutions of the national community, the most important of which was the state. Accordingly officials (including university professors), as part of the state, acted as the ethical and cultural mediators for the nation. To define the modern epoch as capitalistic meant to raise the subordinate sphere of civil society above the state or at best to make it independent of the state. It also meant challenging the ethical role that the professoriat ascribed to itself. Schmoller judged such an elevation of civil society to be “party political” and, hence, anarchistic. Accordingly the writings of Karl Marx, in which this reversal took its fullest form, were designated as merely propagandistic and not the object of serious scientific discussion.

In placing such an emphasis on capitalism as the defining element of the modern era, the youngest generation engaged not only in an academic controversy but also in a general cultural-political one. For this reason, discussions of the origins of capitalism played a larger role then than they do today. This is not to say that the youngest generation was thoroughly optimistic in its view of capitalism and modernity. In most cases they adopted, in varying degrees, the dualistic and largely pessimistic model of Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft, first outlined in 1887 by Ferdinand Tönnies, as their strategy of attack. This model took the hierarchical structure of the previous generation and turned it into a successional one. Thus, rather than having an atomistic, materialistic sphere that, as civil society, was subordinated to the national community (especially the state), they postulated that this sphere, as the Gesellschaft, followed and was a product of the dissolution of that community. In other words, the amoral sphere of capitalist economics was no longer seen as subjected to the moral guidance of the state. While they did not go so far as Marx and define the state as merely epiphenomenal, they did place the state on the Gesellschaft side of the dualism. Rather than standing above the dehumanizing process of rationalization, the state contributed to it.

In borrowing from Marx to depict the increasingly reified world of the capitalist Gesellschaft, the youngest generation faced a crisis of morality. They had successfully (in their minds) undercut the moral formulations of Schmoller’s generation and now they needed a replacement. They did not believe they could find this in the Marxian corpus, for Marx provided a useful analytical structural model, but not an acceptable ethical one. Faced with this moral-ethical dilemma, some, like Tönnies, hoped for a rebirth of the spirit of Gemeinschaft among modern institutions. Both Weber and Sombart held no such hopes.

Instead, like many outside of academia, they turned to a second “counter-cultural” source of inspiration, Friedrich Nietzsche, in seeking an ethical model. [2] Marx provided the model for an analysis of the current reified world; Nietzsche provided the model for its ethical transformation. Weber has been quoted as saying:

The honesty of a scholar in our day, and even more of a philosopher of our day, can be judged on the grounds of how he defines his relationship to Nietzsche and Marx. He who denies that he would have been unable to achieve the work of both of them, belies himself just as much as the others. The world in which we live in as intellectual beings bears largely the imprint of Marx and Nietzsche (In Aschheim, 1994: 311).

As Wolfgang Schluchter (1996: 30) notes, Weber’s description of his own era in The Protestant Ethic — “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart” — could have been attributed without question to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The same was true of Sombart’s language — “We Tired Souls” (1907e) — from this period, which caused Friedrich Naumann to point out his similarity to Nietzsche (1907: 384). Nietzsche’s heroic individualism postulated the ideal of the “overman,” who “bears his own standards of morality and reason and attempts to vanquish the hitherto reigning traditions and values” (Thiele, 1990: 12). The result would be a “transvaluation of all values.” Weber and Sombart both added a Nietzschean element to the basic dualism of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Both identified a transvaluator of values, a dynamic, ideal typical individual who broke up the old traditionally routinized world and provided the groundwork for shaping a new world. By designating a transvaluator, Weber and Sombart offered an ethical model for the transformation of the present. True, the dynamic creation of the transvaluator, capitalism, had rigidified into an “iron cage,” and there was no going back to his particular type of transvaluation. However, as the destroyer of a routinized system, he could serve as a model for the transvaluation of the modern process of rationalization. The transvaluator, then, served two functions. First, he provided a causal (although ideal typical) explanation of the origins of the spirit of capitalism. Second, he provided an ethical model for action in the present. Weber’s transvaluator was the Puritan; Sombart’s was the entrepreneur (Unternehmer). [3] Although Sombart did partially substitute the Jew for the Puritan in the first, causal, function, he never did so for the second and, hence, the Jew never filled the role of transvaluator. I will argue that this was due in part to the timing of the appearance of his transvaluator.

Weber’s Puritan
According to his wife Marianne (1975: 299), Weber uncovered in the sects that he encountered in his American travels a “moral kernel” beneath what appeared to be that land’s shallow materialism. In doing so, he reversed the formula by which most German academics, including Sombart, viewed America. The American “sect,” for him, demonstrated that in the midst of modern capitalism the personal ethic of individual responsibility, about which he was writing in The Protestant Ethic, had survived and was the basis for social action. To this positive phenomenon he contrasted the bureaucratic structure of the European “church,” which offered no hope for the future (Weber, 1985; Loader and Alexander, 1985: 2; Scaff, 1998).

This 1906 comparison of churches and sects offers evidence that Weber was less interested in explaining the causal relation between Calvinism and capitalism than he was in “positing the existence and action of a new type of ‘self’ or ‘character’” (Goldman, 1988: 18; also see Scaff, 1989: 89; Hennis, 1988: 44–45). Weber depicted how the Puritan, driven by an inner conviction that was realized rationally in the material world, became a force that challenged the traditionally routinized world (Goldman, 1988: 31–32). In such a role the Puritan was portrayed as a transvaluator of values in a Nietzschean sense (Scaff, 1989: 128–133).

Central here was the idea of the “calling,” or vocation (Beruf), which demanded that the Puritan fulfill the “task” presented to him by God. The Puritan rejected his “natural” self and assumed an ascetic attitude in order to make everything else subordinate to his calling. For the Puritan businessman, this meant denying oneself the fruits of labour so that they might be put back into the business. Profits were not a means to increased consumption, nor were they an end in themselves. Rather they provided a demonstration of success in one’s calling. Weber contrasted this asceticism with the simple lust of the freebooter, who strove for the benefits of riches. Capitalism, in fact, was characterized by the rational restraint of such a lust. Acquisition by force differed considerably from modern capitalism (Weber, 1958: 17–21 [1922: 4–7]). In contrast, Sombart’s entrepreneur would be identified with, rather than juxtaposed to, the freebooter.

Thus, Weber postulated a new type of individual — “the special character type that contains within itself the seeds of innovation, rational methodological action, and a new self” (Goldman 1988: 35). For him, Puritanism was “the last of our heroisms” (Weber, 1958: 37 [1922: 20–21]), the preferred model for action in the modern world, not only in the economic sphere but also especially in the political arena. Weber believed that the kind of individual responsibility and complex rationality produced by the sect would become the cornerstone of democracy, because sect-like organization allowed these ideals to be inculcated in larger numbers of people (Loader and Alexander, 1985).

Weber understood that transvaluation in the form of the calling faced the same danger as that which took place with the routinization of charisma. But like Nietzsche, he did not believe that this process of routinization invalidated the original will to action. Rather, it reinforced the need for transvaluation to always be carried on anew. While the nature of the calling might be different for the modern person, the importance of it was not diminished. “The Puritan wanted to be a person with a calling; we must be one” (Weber, 1958: 181 [1922: 203], trans. modified).

The Protestant Ethic, Weber’s first and major treatise on capitalism, can be read as a genealogy in the Nietzschean sense, an uncovering of origins in order to produce an ethical model that was always dominant over the role of the Puritan as an ideal typical explanation for the origins of capitalism. In so doing he had to address issues concerning the capitalist spirit raised by his co-editor Sombart.


Sombart’s Capitalism
Weber’s book has been viewed by some as a response to one published two years earlier by Sombart (Brocke, 1987: 36), the latter’s first major work on capitalism, Modern Capitalism (1902). This pioneering contribution to the generational revolt combined the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft dualism with a depiction of the “capitalist spirit,” which Sombart saw as the most important element of the modern economy. Weber greatly transformed Sombart’s concept of the capitalist spirit by first, ascribing the primary motivation to an ascetic calling rather than avarice, second, locating the spirit in a personal type rather than the system in general, and third, and most importantly, adding the idea of the transvaluator. Sombart would, in turn, respond with his own versions of these changes. But despite this ongoing dialogue between the two, they were in essence talking past one another. In 1908, Weber recognized this when he commented that a major difference between his conception of the spirit of capitalism and that of Sombart was that the latter was characterized by technical calculation, while his involved an ethical style of life (Lenger, 1994: 130; Scaff, 1989: 89).

In Modern Capitalism Sombart presented the differences between the precapitalist artisanal economy and high capitalism without reference to a Nietzschean transvaluator. Rather, the two economic systems were simply juxtaposed to one another. This juxtaposition remained even after the Nietzschean element was added. Each system was characterized by a set of principles, which were the product of a spirit (Geist). Thus, spirit was the primary causal agency in bringing forth modern capitalism, in contrast to secondary factors such as technology, which provided the conditions under which this spirit could become actualized.

Sombart wrote that in the process of systematic economic change, a new spirit arose within an already existing system with whose principles it stood in conflict. If successful, this spirit would give rise to new principles that would become the basis of a new system (Sombart, 1902: I, 71). The principle of “enterprise” first arose within the preindustrial crafts system as something in conflict with the old system’s principles. As conditions changed, the ability of the new spirit to grow was increased. The primary conditions were the increase of precious metals and the surplus rents from agricultural and urban property, which promoted the move toward a money economy. Here one can see the influence of Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft as well as Marx’s Capital and Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. What these three works, and especially the latter two, have in common is their presentation of an abstract system.

The juxtaposition of the precapitalist and capitalist systems was described by Sombart as that of a personal and communal ethic dedicated to security and the meeting of real needs (use values) versus the increasingly abstract drive for increased profits, which divorced the process of production from the personality of the owner. Like Weber, Sombart emphasized bookkeeping as an important force in the emancipation of capitalism from the person (Sombart, 1902: I, 394). While he did discuss the entrepreneur in this work, he emphasized the abstract force of enterprise.

Sombart showed little sympathy for the old forms, arguing in the second volume of the work that the old artisanal system could not be preserved and so should not be protected. However, his rejection of the old system did not mean that he enthusiastically embraced modern capitalism. Rather he simply recognized the reality that capitalism had become the prevailing economic system and that this could not be reversed (Sombart, 1902: II, 544–560; Appel, 1992: 139). To a certain extent Sombart adhered to the principle of value neutrality, which he shared with Weber (Sombart, 1897; Mitzman, 1973: 170; Lenger, 1994: 95–96). Yet, within a year Sombart offered a more critical appraisal of the capitalist system in his The German National Economy in the Nineteenth Century, the work in which he first discussed significantly the economic role of the Jews (Sombart, 1903: 128–134). In fact, Sombart would become increasingly negative in his discussions of modern capitalism as the years went on. This change in attitude would significantly affect his view of the Jews.

This basic dualism using the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft model continued in Sombart’s work through the next few years, changing only in that the element of economic analysis became subordinate to that of cultural critique. The epitome of this critique was the series of articles Sombart wrote for the popular journal Morgen in 1907 and 1908, where he depicted an organic and personal sphere of culture that became increasingly separated from and subordinated to an abstract, mechanistic sphere (Sombart, 1907a; 1907d). In an article contrasting Berlin and Vienna, the former was described as a centre of the modern capitalistic culture in central Europe with its overestimation of mass man. In fact Berlin was nothing but a suburb of New York, which in turn was a desert, a graveyard for culture. Sombart and his fellow Berliners lived in a desert of modern technical culture, where people were proud of the increasing volume of traffic, and where Vienna was decried as lacking progress. To that claim, Sombart responded with a positive “yes!” Vienna’s lack of technical and economic progress enabled it to preserve its rich culture. As a result, the culture of the Schönbrunn Palace alone was greater than that of Berlin in its entirety (Sombart, 1907c: 172–174). Sombart also investigated cultural objects, such as the advertisement and the exposition, which were held to be purely economic, i.e. American, and hence devoid of cultural value (Sombart, 1908a: 249; 1908b: 284).

Sombart’s treatment of the exposition is especially revealing. He contrasted it with the old trade fair of the early capitalistic period, the main purpose of which was to display the products of the crafts. The old fair had strong vocational ties. The modern exposition tried to maintain this productive aspect, but at the same time attempted to bring in the masses of the public by means of attractions such as amusement parks. Thus the intimacy and organic personal valuation of the products was lost. The example Sombart gave of the modern exposition was the one in St. Louis where he and Weber had attended the Congress of Arts and Sciences (Sombart, 1908a: 251–255).

In this cultural criticism one sees the continuation of themes from the American travels. America was portrayed as the land of high capitalism, the abstract, depersonalized Gesellschaft. It was a land with a mass Asphaltkultur [4] and not a real organic culture. Rather than representing the earlier, transvaluative stage of capitalism, as it had for Weber, America was the epitome of the reified iron cage and the future of Germany should it continue along its present course.

In these essays Sombart did posit a Nietzschean transvaluator, but limited his sphere to that of culture (1907b: 68–70). Above all else, Sombart’s cultivated man (Mensch der Bildung) developed his own vital personality free from social and cultural restraints, especially those of a technological nature. He feared modern science, especially its specialization, which threatened to kill the vital in him. He

knows that the basis of everything personal is the mastery of instinctual life. … Because he places personal freedom above all else, he is continually conscious of the fact that the man who frees himself from the power that binds all living things is the one who overcomes himself (69).

Sombart’s Transvaluator
In 1909, in an article titled “The Capitalistic Entrepreneur,” Sombart returned to more strictly economic themes, but with an important difference, namely the introduction of an actor, the entrepreneur. The latter combined the notion of a transvaluator, vaguely depicted in purely cultural terms in Morgen, with the early economic approach. The works of 1902 and 1903 (prior to the trip to America and Weber’s Protestant Ethic) emphasized the spirit of capitalism rather than the psyche of capitalists. The concept of enterprise took prominence over that of the entrepreneur. By 1909, although the earlier general characteristics of the capitalist spirit remained (Sombart, 1909: 715; also 1962: 162; 1928: 1, 320), they were now attributed to personal types. [5]

The ideas in this 1909 essay would be further developed in Sombart’s 1913 book, Der Bourgeois (Eng. trans. The Quintessence of Modern Capitalism). The Jews and Modern Capitalism appeared in 1911, between these two works on the entrepreneur, and contained the typology of “The Capitalist Entrepreneur” verbatim (Sombart, 1962: 162–168 [1920: 186–197]). All of these works were, as Sombart himself indicated, in some way responses to Weber’s Protestant Ethic. The entrepreneur had the same sense of calling that Weber’s Puritan had. He was “a man, who has a task to fulfill and sacrifices his life for this fulfillment” (729). However, there is a very important distinction between the Puritan and the entrepreneur. The former appeared in Weber’s writings simultaneously with the capitalist spirit that he embodied. The appearance of Sombart’s entrepreneur, on the other hand, had been preceded by an extensive discussion of that spirit in more systemic terms. Now this spirit took the form of a personal type that had “two souls,” which in turn became types themselves, those of the entrepreneur and the trader, each containing previously delineated characteristics of the capitalist spirit. [6] Because these were ideal types, Sombart stated that they could be combined in actual individuals (Sombart, 1909: 728, 734); nevertheless, the contrast to Weber’s ideal type is important. Weber’s Puritan was characterized by value-rational action. His religious values, which formed his calling, were actualized through rational, i.e. instrumental means. The iron cage formed when the instrumental means became separated from the values and the essence of the transvaluator was lost. Sombart’s two types each incorporated one element of Weber’s type, the entrepreneur had a sense of calling, the trader engaged in largely instrumental activity.

The sense of calling possessed by the entrepreneur was not solely economic and could be found the other types of people, namely the explorer, the inventor, the conqueror and the organizer (730–733). Of these four types, the conqueror, who was characterized by the spiritual freedom to make plans, the drive to carry out the plan and the ability to succeed, would be elevated in importance and become almost synonymous with the entrepreneur by 1913 (Sombart, 1988: 60–62 [1967: 52–53]). In both 1909 and 1913, this type was presented as the primary agent for change, i.e. the transvaluator. In doing so, Sombart played down the ascetic rational element that Weber emphasized for the freebooting, martial element that Weber had dismissed as a traditional form of capitalism.

Sombart described second main type, the trader, as a man who wanted to do a lucrative business and, therefore, who was totally oriented to the money value of things, seeing the world as one great market. He never thought beyond his business, which received his entire energy (1909: 729). This demanded the instrumental ability to be both a speculating calculator and a negotiator (735–736). But perhaps what is most important for us is that Sombart considered the trader to be without a true calling. “What I call a trader in this context is not a person who practices a certain calling, but rather one who fulfills certain functions in the capitalistic economic process” (734). In contrast to the conqueror, the trader was concerned primary with means rather than goals (729). [7] By definition he was denied the role of transvaluator.

In 1913, Sombart emphasized three more elements that are of interest here. First, the two types of conqueror-entrepreneur and trader were extended from being individual types to depicting national traits. Second, the conquering type of people were designated as “heroic” (1967: 210–214 [203–207]). These elements provide the transition to Sombart’s wartime polemic against England, Traders and Heroes (Sombart, 1915). Third, Sombart saw the trading function becoming more important than the heroic-conquering one in modern economic activity (180 [175]). Sombart introduced this idea in a more limited way in 1909 when he wrote that the entrepreneur began as a conquistador and ended as an official (1909: 723). Given the more positive evaluation of the conqueror-hero, this lessening of his impact followed the same pessimistic dualism that one finds to some extent in Weber. An important difference lay in the potential of Sombart’s model to become more sinister in that, although both were operating at the typological level, Weber presented the negative qualities of the modern world as a process of routinization, i.e. depersonalization, as the individual type of the Puritan gave way to the systemic iron cage. Sombart, on the other hand, beginning with systemic characteristics and then personalizing them into two types, presented the process of rationalization as the dominance of one type, the trader over the other, the conqueror-entrepreneur-hero. While he never portrayed the Jews as the enemy of the Germans the way he did the English, he came to describe the modern late capitalist system as Jewish and opposed it to a German system at the beginning of the Nazi period. Such a formulation helps clarify his designation of America, the acme of modern capitalism and the decline of culture, as a “Jewish land.” It also demonstrates the important structural difference between Sombart’s Jew and Weber’s Puritan.

Sombart’s Jew
Sombart’s Jew made his first significant appearance in 1903 in The German National Economy in the Nineteenth Century (1903: 128–134). There, he argued that the Jews were the “yeast” in the German economy, i.e. that they were an essential ingredient in promoting economic change. This claim was a departure from Modern Capitalism, in which he stated that, while the Jews had an important part in the genesis of the capitalist spirit, neither race nor religion was that rewarding in explaining capitalism, and that one should not place too much emphasis on the Jews’ influence (Sombart, 1902: I, 190, 180). Nevertheless, the pages devoted to the Jews comprised only about one percent of the entire book. Despite the generally favorable comments about the Jews — they were republished in a Jewish journal the next year (Sombart 1904) — they did not play the role of transvaluator, for that role had not yet made its appearance. And when it finally did, the Jews were not assigned to it.

The Jews did not become a central concern for Sombart until 1909, the year of his article on the capitalist entrepreneur (where he introduced the transvaluator), although they were present in that latter work. In that year he began a series of lectures on the Jews in economic life that would in 1911 become The Jews and Modern Capitalism (Lenger, 1994: 187–188). Although there would be three short pieces on the Jews in the following year (Sombart, 1912a, b, and c), The Jews and Modern Capitalism has remained the most important and most discussed expression of Sombart’s views.

Sombart indirectly addressed the structure of The Jews and Modern Capitalism in his later book, Der Bourgeois (1913), where he wrote that there were two ways to address the origins of the capitalist spirit. “The first is by reference to external facts. You may point to the external appearance of a capitalist entrepreneur in a land in which he had come to trade or where he set up business” (Sombart, 1967: 193, trans. modified [1988: 187]). The other way was to ask how a capitalistic economic conviction arose in the psyches of people. “Why in any particular period did the capitalist spirit dominate economic activities, giving men a certain aim, calling forth in them certain capacities, making them obey certain principles?” (1967: 193 [187]).

Sombart took the first approach in the first part of Jews and Modern Capitalism, titled “The Part Played by the Jews in the Modern National Economy,” which might be described as a series of historical Jew sightings. Typical of this section was the chapter on the Jews in the Americas (Sombart, 1962: 49–66 [1920: 30–48]). Sombart argued that the Jews first made their American appearance in the voyages of discovery, in which, he claimed, they played an important financial and organizational role. (He even allowed for the possibility of Columbus’s being Jewish.) “Scarcely were the doors of the New World opened to Europeans than crowds of Jews came swarming in” (52 [33]). They supposedly dominated the largest of the early colonies, Brazil; and after their expulsion from there in 1654, they and the economic centre of gravity moved northward.

Using largely Jewish sources, Sombart documented the presence of individual Jews throughout the United States and then on the basis of this anecdotal evidence asserted that there was an “early and universal admixture of Jewish elements among the first settlers” (62 [44]) and that this Jewish element largely shaped American culture. Sombart’s “factual” investigation of the impact of the Jews has been thoroughly discredited (see for example, Gutmann, 1913; Brentano, 1923; Reich, 1930). If he believed that his historical investigations would discourage criticism like that aimed at Weber’s Protestant Ethic, he was mistaken. [8] This section of his book served only to obscure the ideal typical nature of the remaining sections.

These remaining sections of The Jews and Modern Capitalism practiced the second approach, describing how the capitalist spirit was personified in a certain people, the Jews. Here Sombart reversed the emphasis of his description of the capitalist entrepreneur. True, he did call the Jew an entrepreneur and say that his description “stand[s] for the capitalist entrepreneur no less than for the Jew” (Sombart, 1962: 260 [334]). However, we are not talking about exclusion but emphasis, and clearly Sombart emphasized the identity of the Jew with the trader. “The Jew is much more qualified to be a ‘trader’ than he is to be an ‘entrepreneur.’ The Jew is downright overflowing with the attributes of a good trader” (258 [332], trans. modified). In The Jews and Modern Capitalism, Sombart mentions the conqueror only once, in the section taken verbatim from “The Capitalist Entrepreneur.” There is no attempt to in any way equate the conqueror with the Jew and implicitly the two are distinguished from one another. One can see this in Sombart’s seemingly contradictory statements that (a) the Jews were consistent in the kind of economic activities they have engaged in through the centuries (279 [362]), and that (b) the Jews were never a trading people until modern times. These statements make sense only if we follow Sombart’s distinction between “trade” as an entrepreneurial activity and “the trader” as a limited component of entrepreneurial activity. Modern trade differed from precapitalistic trade in that the qualities the conqueror brought to it disappeared and only those of the trader remained. Only at this time, Sombart claimed, did it become an activity of the Jews. Accordingly, he wrote: “The Jews were never a ‘trading people’ so long as ‘trade’ — at least intermunicipal and international trade — had the character of an enterprise that was half pirating and half adventurous; that is to say, until modern times” (284 [368]). In addition, he cautioned that, in the accounts of pre-modern Jewish commercial activity: “There is no clear proof for the existence of trade as a calling” (282 [365] trans. modified, italics added). We have seen above that he had stated that the entrepreneur-conqueror had a calling, while the trader did not. Sombart in effect distinguished between premodern, non-Jewish trade, which was a calling, and modern, Jewish trade, which was not. Two years later, in Der Bourgeois, he explicitly dissociated the Jew and the conqueror.

[The Jews] derive their profits amongst war, murder, or assassination; while other peoples seek to derive it by means of war, murder, or assassination. Without a navy, without an army, the Jews work their way up to being masters of the world, using as their weapons those of the Florentines—money, treaties (i.e. contracts), and specialized knowledge. All enterprises that they establish are born of the spirit of the trader; all Jews who rise to be capitalist entrepreneurs represent the type of the merchant (1967: 100–101 [1988: 105–106], trans. modified).

Here Sombart argued that the Jews did not actually engage in the acts of the conqueror (war, murder or assassination) themselves, but simply benefited from these acts as financiers, weapons suppliers, etc. Even in the act of war, the Jew was limited to the function of trader. In this sense the Jew was like Weber’s Puritan, who was also dissociated from conquering types. The difference was that this dissociation did not diminish the Puritan’s position as transvaluating hero, while it did do so for the Jew.

Sombart certainly listed common characteristics to prove his assertion that “Puritanism is Judaism.” These included the preponderance of religious interests, the idea of the necessity to prove oneself, asceticism within the world, the fusion of religious notions with an interest in profit, a bookkeeping approach to sin and the rationalization of sexual intercourse (1962: 235–236 [1920: 293–293]). But despite this claim of simple identity, i.e. that Puritanism was Judaism, structurally the Puritan was not the Jew due to the latter’s lack of power as a transvaluator. The Jew was always a “rigidly minded scribe,” never a prophet, a visionary or a mighty king (199 [242]).

This is above all seen in the chronological relationship of the Jew and the Puritan to capitalism. Both Weber and Sombart describe the same scenario for the development of capitalism. There was first a heroic period, an early capitalist era in which the modern world was created out of the traditional one. This gradually developed into high capitalism, characterized by rationalized, impersonal relationships between people. Personal responsibility was replaced by mechanistic, instrumental activity. Capitalism began as a dynamic transvaluation in the form of a calling and ended as an iron cage. As we have seen, Weber clearly placed the Puritan in the heroic early period. His writing on America was designed to demonstrate that that earlier ethos had not yet died out and could possibly be reconstituted with a different, political, content.

Sombart, on the other hand, made the Jew synonymous with late capitalism. He was denied the earlier heroic qualities, even in the area of trade. Those qualities were reserved for the conqueror-entrepreneur. The qualities attributed to the Jew were those impersonal ones that Sombart, following Simmel, identified with money and that were incompatible with having a calling. Accordingly, Sombart believed that money lending played an “extraordinarily great” part in the economic life of the Jewish people (1962: 284–285 [1920: 368]). The Jew was described as having little interest in the personal qualities of an individual (247 [318]). He was lacking the need for personal worth. “It means little to him to be untrue to himself, if it is a question of attaining the wished-for goal” (255 [327]). As the Jew became more important in economic life, he transformed business from being a personal relationship to being an impersonal one. The most characteristic modern Jewish institution for Sombart was the stock exchange — the institutionalization of money at its most abstract level, that of credit — which he identified with both the trader and high capitalism (77 [60]). In sum, those very negative elements that Weber saw as a movement away from the Puritan ethic, Sombart viewed as a movement toward the Jewish ethic. Accordingly Weber saw America as containing a residue of Puritanism from the earlier era, whereas Sombart viewed America as the acme of late capitalism and hence as “Jewish.” Despite similarities, Sombart’s Jew was structurally the antithesis of Weber’s Puritan. [9]

Concluding Comments
Sombart’s legacy has been an unfortunate one. He did play a major role, more so than did Weber, in starting the dialogue on capitalism within German academia. American scholars such as Frank Knight and Talcott Parsons took his work very seriously in the late 1920s with the appearance of the second, much-enlarged edition of Modern Capitalism (Knight 1928, Parsons 1928–1929). But the development of his concepts moved in a very different pattern than did Weber’s. While Weber began with the ethical model of the Puritan and widened his investigations concerning capitalism and the capitalist spirit and the rationalization process, Sombart began with a more general theory of capitalism and then investigated specific aspects including his version of its ideal typical origins, i.e. the relationship of the Jews to capitalism. His writings on the Jews were always a side project, one that added little of interest to his systemic discussion of capitalism and that lacked the important element of transvaluator. In fact, the idea of the transvaluator was never as central for Sombart as it was for Weber. The same year that he published Der Bourgeois, he published the two-volume Studies on the Developmental History of Modern Capitalism, which dealt with the impact of the demand for luxury (1913a) and of war (1913b) on capitalism. The greatly expanded second edition of Modern Capitalism (1928), with the subtitle, “Historical-Systematic Presentation of the Entire European Economic Life from Its Beginnings to the Present,” did not feature personal types. Weber’s Puritan, on the contrary, remained central to his later work because of the element of transvaluation.

But while Sombart’s type of the Jew became less important for him after World War I, critics after World War II, especially in North America, raised it to a central place and made it part of the narrative of the development of the “German mind” from Luther to Hitler. Before World War II, The Jews and Modern Capitalism was only one of a number of works by Sombart translated into English. An introduction to Modern Capitalism by Frederick L. Nussbaum (1968) appeared in the early 1930s and a translation of the full three-volume work was promised. It never appeared. Since the war, the others have mostly disappeared from the lists of all but reprint houses, while the book on the Jews has remained almost continuously in print. It could even be argued that Sombart’s own equation of his “Jew” with Weber’s “Puritan” actually promoted the devaluation of his general works, because it made the type of the Jew seem more central than it actually was. The purpose of this essay has been to demonstrate that marginality and to hopefully direct attention to his other works. Although there has been more attention to those general theories recently in Germany (Backhaus 1996; Brocke 1987), they remain largely obscured in North America by Sombart’s antisemitic legacy. Perhaps this trend is coming to an end with the appearance of a collection of Sombart’s economic writings in translation (Sombart, 2001).


Notes