Sombart, Werner

(1863-1941)

   economist and social philosopher; a sponsor of Germany s Sonderweg (special path), he forged many of the social-conservative arguments employed against both Marxism and liberal capitalism. Born in Ermsleben am Herz to a wealthy estate owner and politician, he was raised from 1875 in Berlin* upon his father s election to the Reichstag.* He studied economics at Berlin (with Gustav Schmoller) and Pisa and took his doctorate in 1888. A youthful interest in Marxism induced his 1890 "exile" to

   Breslau as an ausserordentlicher Professor of economics. He was finally pro-moted to Professor ordinarius in 1906 at Berlin s Handelshochschule, suc-ceeded Schmoller in 1917, and became emeritus in 1931.

   A prolific author, Sombart was deemed the "Proteus of German social sci-entists. According to Arthur Mitzman, he "decisively altered his social and political perspective at least once every decade during the period 1888-1915." In the process he moved "from evolutionary Marxism and a profound belief in modern industrial civilization...to rejection of modern civilization and nostal-gic love of community, to the exaltation of the entrepreneur and the hero, and ultimately to a position not far removed from Nazism. He is best known for Der moderne Kapitalismus, a two-volume (later three-volume) study, first pub-lished in 1902, that outlined how and why European economic history had moved through the stages of precapitalism (feudalism), early capitalism, and late capitalism. He came to view historical causation as a spiritual rather than a material process—a position defined in Der Bourgeois (1913), in which he iden-tified Jews* as agents of a money-dominated commercial mentality alien to a human-oriented entrepreneurial spirit. In his patriotic outburst of 1915, Handler und Helden (Traders and heroes), the English displaced the Jews as purveyors of crass materialism.

   It required the Republic for Sombart to enjoy the recognition he had justly earned. Equated in stature to Max Weber,* he became a member of the Prussian and Bavarian academies and served during 1932-1935 as president of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy). Thoroughly alienated from Marxism, which he debunked in 1924 as corrupted by "the Jewish spirit," he championed a humanistic "German socialism to replace the capital-oriented politics of social democracy. Rejecting economic determination (he claimed that the age of capitalism was drawing to a close), he thought that the NSDAP would initiate an era of German recovery under bureaucratic control. His early attrac-tion to the Third Reich sullied his reputation.

   REFERENCES:M. Epstein, "Obituary"; Lebovics, Social Conservatism; Lenger, Werner Sombart; Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement; Fritz Ringer, Decline of the German Mandarins.