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Werner Sombart (1863-1941)-Social Scientist. Edited by Jurgen G. Backhaus. Vol. 1: His Life and Work, 301 pp. Vol. 2: His Theoretical Approach Reconsidered, 330 pp. Vol. 3: Then and Now, 406 pp. Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag, 1996.
These three volumes (entirely in English) contain critical essays, commentaries, appreciations, and bibliographies of Werner Sombart by thirty authors from nine nations (and three continents)-over a thousand pages devoted to consideration of the life, work, and impact of one scholar. Virtually all of this material arose from a 1991 conference in Heilbronn, Germany, that lasted one week and was devoted to the career of the many-faceted Sombart.
Sombart's life spanned the whole history of modern Germany until World War II. He was four years old when Bismarck formed the North German Federation, eight years old when Wilhelm of Prussia was declared emperor of the newly formed German Empire, and he died three weeks before Adolph Hitler's armies invaded the Soviet Union. For much of his career he competed with Max Weber (who was one year younger) for the professional laurel wreath of his generation of German social scientists. Weber seems to have been the clear winner in the English-speaking world, although more than one of the Sombart conferees might wish to argue that point.
Sombart's personal views and politics cloud attempts to arrive at an objective evaluation of his scholarly contributions to economics, history, and sociology. Why this is so should be a matter of concern to scholars in these fields, for it may say as much about the limits of truly scientific work in social science as it does about Sombart. Sombart appears certainly to have been anti-Semitic in a way that was all too often characteristic of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century gentile scholars: He had no difficulty fostering intimate intellectual relationships with individual Jewish scholars, often as teacher-mentor; at the same time, his view of Jews as a socioeconomic and cultural group was not very different from the crude stereotyping we associate with anti-Semitism today. But Sombart lived on (as Weber did not) into the Germany of Hitler and National Socialism, and although he and the Nazis had their differences, there was enough common ground that Sombart's reputation was tainted.