Classical Sociology

Max Weber’s Reception into Classical Sociology 35
Weber’s sociology in the English-speaking world before the Second World
War and as J.P. Mayer (1944: 9) correctly noted in the foreword to Max
Weber and German Politics, ‘the political writings of Max Weber are almost
unknown in this country’. The conflict between Germany and Britain in
the war period and after also disrupted intellectual exchange and further
contained the growth of interest in Weber’s sociology.
In France, there was little interest in German sociology after
Durkheim’s death, apart from occasional contributions such as Maurice
Halbwachs’s article on puritans and capitalism (1925) and his general
assessment of Weber in Annales d’histoire economique et sociale (1929). Julien
Freund (1966) published his influential Sociologie de Max Weber and
Raymond Aron’s lectures at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences at
the University of Paris were eventually translated into English as Main
Currents in Sociological Thought (1968). Aron’s principal interest was in
Weber’s analysis of power and he published a number of valuable contributions
to this dimension of Weberian sociology. Aron was the only major
French contributor to the 15th German Sociological Congress at Heidelberg
to commemorate the centenary of Max Weber’s birth in 1864. His paper
‘Max Weber und die Machtpolitik’ (1964) emphasized the importance of
Darwin (struggle of the fittest) and Nietzsche (the will to power) in
Weber’s political sociology, which concentrated on the power struggles
between nation states.
In Italy, Benedetto Croce, who first encountered Weber at the 1908
International Philosophy Congress in Heidelberg, was highly critical of the
growth of positivism in sociology (Croce, 1905). Weber was critical of
Croce’s treatment of intuition and empathy in Roscher and Knies (Weber,
1975: 167–9). However, they were both critical of the methodological
assumptions of historical materialism. Croce’s views were influential in the
development of Carlo Antoni’s analysis of the development of the social
sciences. Dallo Storicismo alla Sociologia was published in 1940 and translated
in 1959. In Antoni’s account of the problem of historicism and the
growth of sociology, Weber played a crucial role (Antoni, 1962). For
Antoni, Weber’s work was a clear illustration of how the relativistic crisis
in the historical sciences in the nineteenth century had prepared the way
for the rise of sociology. The other figure in Weber’s reception in Italy was
his friend and colleague Robert Michels (1876–1936), whose work on the
iron law of oligarchy was closely related to Weber’s critique of the negative
impact of bureaucracy on national leadership. Michels played an important
role as an intellectual conduit between Germany and Italy, changing
his first name to ‘Roberto’ as an indication of his involvement in Italian life.
In 1911, Michels dedicated his principal academic work on Political Parties
(Michels, 1962) to Weber. His obituary (Michels, 1920) clearly identified
Weber as a master of modern social science, who had made a profound
contribution to the study of political life. Michels in his obituary lamented
the fact that, given Weber’s huge intellectual talent, he had not enjoyed a