Volume 39, Number 4 · February 13, 1992
Demonic Democracy
By Gordon A. Craig
Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber
by Lawrence A. Scaff
University of California Press, 265 pp., $37.50
Max Weber Briefe 1906–1908 (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung II, Band V)
edited by M. Rainer Lepsius, edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen, in collaboration with Birgit Rudhard, by Manfred Schön
Verlag J.C.B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 796 pp., 378 DM
Max Weber, born in 1864 as the child of a well-to-do Berlin family, began his scholarly career at the end of the 1880s. It was a time of crisis and turbulence in European thought. The great age of liberalism was coming to an end with the rise of mass politics and new kinds of leaders, popular tribunes with charisma (to use a Weberian term) like Georg von Schönerer and Karl Luager and other precursors of Mussolini and Hitler. Among intellectuals, there was a widespread repudiation of the former faith in historical progress, as well as a tendency to turn away from liberal rationalism to neoromantic forms of philosophical and artistic expression. Characteristic of the crisis, above all, was a deep cultural pessimism, a sense of being trapped in a world of degeneration and decline, of disenchantment with old ideals and a frenetic search for new forms of self-realization—free love movements and youth cults, nature worship and vegetarianism. From the very beginning the young scholar was preoccupied with what he called 'the fate of our times,' and the unifying theme of both his scholarship and his life was the prevailing cultural crisis and the destiny of humankind in the contemporary world.
Review, 5285 words
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