The German Genius

brilliant and original, though they had certain reservations, summed up by Joseph Schumpeter, who said that Modern Capitalism “shocked professional historians by its often unsubstantial brilliance.” 33
    Der moderne Kapitalismus , published in two volumes in 1902 and re-issued as a single work in 1916, was the book that made Sombart’s name. 34 Many, though again not all, of his colleagues regarded this book as an immediate classic. In this work, he rejected Marx’s base-superstructure theorem where, it will be remembered, productive forces comprise the fundamental layer of society, with an ideological architecture built on top. Sombart thought that the essence of capitalism was its spirit, in some ways anticipating Max Weber’s ideas. More than any of the other sociologists at the time, Sombart’s work overlapped with the lesser figures addressed in the previous chapter. Such issues as race, Judaism, Germanness, technology, Marxism, and nationalism are returned to time and again.
    In their analysis of Sombart’s career, Reiner Grundmann and Nico Stehr argue that he performed a volte face on two crucial issues, and this perhaps explains the conviction with which he wrote: he had the passion of a convert. In the first place, he began as a Marxist and an ardent socialist. 35 After the turbulent 1890s, however, Sombart became an equally ardent anti -Marxist, and one, moreover, with anti-Semitic overtones. His attitude to his own country changed too. Early on, he had had serious misgivings about where Germany was headed, but all that changed around 1910 and he developed a strident nationalism. In his book Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft im neunzehnten Jahrhundert ( The German Economy in the Nineteenth Century ), published in 1903, he began to argue that the national character of the German people was responsible for the spirit of capitalism. This somewhat muddy argument became clearer as Sombart began to distinguish between two types of capitalists: entrepreneurs and traders. By 1909, and then in Der Bourgeois , in 1913, he was writing that the entrepreneur is “quick in comprehension, true in judgement, clear in thought, with a sure eye for the needful…Above all he must have a good memory.” Contrast that with his view of the trader, whose “intellectual and emotional world is directed to the money value of conditions and dealings, who therefore calculates everything in terms of money.” This type, in particular, he said, was epitomized “by the Jewish species.” He argued that there was indeed a “spirit of capitalism” that was based on a particular form of rationalism, best seen in the United States and England. Later he was more specific still. “The capitalist spirit in Europe was cultivated by a number of races, each with different characteristics of its own and that, of [these] races, the Trading peoples (Etruscans, Frisians and Jews) may be divided off from those we have termed Heroic…The Scotch, the Jews, the Frisians and Etruscans are trading peoples, the Celts and the Goths heroic people. Since the Jewish spirit is capitalistic, and the English are said to possess the capitalist spirit, they also possess the Jewish spirit.” By Nazi times, in Deutscher Sozialismus (1937), he was able to write: “What we have characterised as the spirit of this economic age…is in many respects a manifestation of the Jewish spirit…which dominates our entire era.” 36 Since he had been saying this long before Hitler, he came to see himself as the Third Reich’s chief ideologue. The Nazis did not.
    T HE “G ERMAN L INE” IN S OCIOLOGY
     
    Jeffrey Herf (1984) characterizes Sombart, along with Ernst Jünger, Oswald Spengler, Hans Freyer, Carl Schmitt, Gottfried Benn, and Martin Heidegger, as one of the main architects of what he terms “reactionary modernism.” The essence of reactionary modernism in Germany was support for industrial development combined with a rejection of liberal democracy, a view that appealed to the Nazi regime. Men like Ernst Jünger and Gottfried Benn were in favor of technological progress and even approved of some modernist aesthetic developments, but they eschewed many of those institutions that would act as checks and balances in political and social affairs. “The rural conditions of a natural, living Gemeinschaft constitute much more desirable conditions of social existence than those of the artificial Gesellschaft .” 37 Sombart, in his concept of heroes and traders,