Overview

Arthur Mitzman's critical study of three major German sociologists - the nineteenth-century pioneers Ferdinand Tonnies, Werner Sombart, and Robert Michels - is rooted in the context of German social and intellectual history. Mitzman shows how Tbnnies's interest in community and Michels's critique of socialist bureaucracy were both intimately connected with their allegiance to an older, more communitarian and decentralized Germany that was being irreparably destroyed by Prussian domination. Sombart's analysis of modern capitalism and his evolution from supporter of revisionist socialism to bitter critic of modernity are similarly related, by the author, to his increasing estrangement from German society.With the brilliance of analysis that distinguished his study of Max Weber - The Iron Cage - Arthur Mitzman's book has revised long-held ideas about the beginnings of sociology: Far from originating as an antiseptic development of scientific objectivity, it grew out of a passionate commitment to humanist values within a social order apparently determined to destroy them.

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Reviews

<p> Mitzman is absolutely first-class, perceptive, disciplined, unobtrusively learned, compelling. <p> --Robert K. Merton, Columbia University

-Mitzman is absolutely first-class, perceptive, disciplined, unobtrusively learned, compelling.- --Robert K. Merton, Columbia University

This is an explication of the sociology of cultural despair. On the premise that social forces, social thought and intellectuals' personal lives interact and create the spirit of an age ( the choice of a particular social ideal is in the last analysis dependent on the individual's whole conception of life and the world was how Werner Sombart put it) Mitzman has sought the roots of Central Europe's inter-war alienation in the biographies and collected works of three colossi - Tonnies (Wesenwille and Willkur, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft), Sombart (the capitalist as either adventurer or burger) and Michels (the iron law of oligarchy in politics). All traveled on the same trajectory - from estrangement with Imperial Germany's rapidly developing capitalism and semi-feudal Prussianized military-bureaucratic complex, through a flirtation with Socialism to cynical rightist romanticism. The legacy these thinkers left was largely negative - that community is not compatible with contemporary institutions, that entrepreneurial joie de vivre gets smothered by bureaucracy, and that socialism when selling out for power and position becomes incapable of changing anything. It's Mitzman's intent to revise these judgments and reclaim community, creativity and altruistic socialism as realizable ideals, but only those who have read his primary sources will stay with him to the end. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Arthur Mitzman is professor of modern European history at the University of Amsterdam in Holland. He has taught at Brooklyn College, Goddard College, the University of Rochester, and Simon Fraser University, and is the author of The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber.

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