Sharpening the Antitheses (review of Max Weber: A Biography, by Marianne Weber)

Max Weber’s life reads as though it had been cast by Providence in the mold of one of Thomas Mann’s neurasthenic fin de siècle heroes (as though God had chosen in one of His creations to have life imitate art). There is the same effort to transmute sickness into creativity, the same dizzy dance on the peaks of rationality, the same overstretched dialectic between idealism and the necessity to accommodate oneself to the world as it is, the same dark foreboding that mankind stands at the end of a humane and creative era and is about to plunge into a dark abyss. It, like the lives of Mann’s heroes, is a life filled with a premonition of disaster in which personal collapse prefigures cultural, political, and social dissolution. But whereas Mann’s heroes are either diminished or flawed titans, Max Weber’s life is characterized by a moral and intellectual grandeur which give it a universal and redemptive dimension.

Biographies of great and complex men are especially difficult to write. Intimacy is usually sacrificed to the exploration of the public image of the man; or else the biographer, writing a generation or more after the events, finds the historical moment has evaporated and gives his reader an abstraction. Marianne Weber, Max Weber’s wife, set to work on this biography immediately after Weber’s death in 1920. It was published in 1926 and has just been translated into English. It is an extraordinary account which at one and the same time’ is the story of a great man, the history of an intellectual era, and an account of Germany at that decisive moment in her history when the achievements of 1870 were drifting toward the tragedy of World War I and its aftermath. Marianne Weber manages to combine in her biography the intimacy of the private and loving view with the objectivity and distance which Weber himself so much admired. More recent accounts of Weber and his thought, by Reinhard Bendix, Arthur Mitzman, and Martin Green, no matter what their individual excellences, seem both abstract and derivative when compared with Marianne Weber’s account.

ST

About the Author

Stephen J. Tonsor

Max Weber’s life reads as though it had been cast by Providence in the mold of one of Thomas Mann’s neurasthenic fin de siècle heroes (as though God had chosen in one of His creations to have life imitate art). There is the same effort to transmute sickness into creativity, the same dizzy dance on the peaks of rationality, the same overstretched dialectic between idealism and the necessity to accommodate oneself to the world as it is, the same dark foreboding that mankind stands at the end of a humane and creative era and is about to plunge into a dark abyss. It, like the lives of Mann’s heroes, is a life filled with a premonition of disaster in which personal collapse prefigures cultural, political, and social dissolution. But whereas Mann’s heroes are either diminished or flawed titans, Max Weber’s life is characterized by a moral and intellectual grandeur which give it a universal and redemptive dimension.

Biographies of great and complex men are especially difficult to write. Intimacy is usually sacrificed to the exploration of the public image of the man; or else the biographer, writing a generation or more after the events, finds the historical moment has evaporated and gives his reader an abstraction. Marianne Weber, Max Weber’s wife, set to work on this biography immediately after Weber’s death in 1920. It was published in 1926 and has just been translated into English. It is an extraordinary account which at one and the same time’ is the story of a great man, the history of an intellectual era, and an account of Germany at that decisive moment in her history when the achievements of 1870 were drifting toward the tragedy of World War I and its aftermath. Marianne Weber manages to combine in her biography the intimacy of the private and loving view with the objectivity and distance which Weber himself so much admired. More recent accounts of Weber and his thought, by Reinhard Bendix, Arthur Mitzman, and Martin Green, no matter what their individual excellences, seem both abstract and derivative when compared with Marianne Weber’s account.