10 Scientific Work in Germany

I participated as a silent observer in meetings of the Verein für Sozialpolitik¹ held in Vienna in 1909 and Nürnberg in 1911. I was elected a member of the committee at its 1919 meeting in Regensburg. This did not mean a great deal; it was the honor customarily bestowed upon all who had contributed to the association’s publications. But in time my position within the association became more meaningful. In contrast to its policy before the war, the association sought representation from all directions. Recognized as the representative of the Austrian School, I became ever more engaged. And so it happened that I was elected, in the end, to the board of directors. I took part in the preparation of the publications concerning the cartel problem. The preparation for and the staging of the debates on the problem of economic value held in Dresden in 1932 were predominantly my work.

I was elected—I believe it was in 1924 or 1925—a member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie².

I withdrew from both organizations in 1933.

I was not favorably impressed with German professors of economic state sciences and sociology. There were among them a number of educated and sincere men filled with genuine scientific aspirations. But most of them were not.

That these men were not economists, and in fact, that they usually assumed stances opposed to economics, should not be held against them. They were, after all, the students of Schmoller, Wagner, Bücher, and Brentano. They did not know the economics literature and had only the scantest idea of economic problems. Every economist was suspected of being an enemy of the state, anti-German, and a protagonist of business interests and free trade. And whenever they actually picked up an economics essay, they wanted, most emphatically, to discover its errors and deficiencies. They were dilettantes in all that they undertook. They wanted to be historians, but they scarcely looked at the interdisciplinary sciences, the most important tools of the historian. A spirit of historical research was alien to them. They were unacquainted with the basic questions of statistics. They were laymen in jurisprudence, technology, banking, and trade. They published books and essays concerning things they knew nothing about with amazing carelessness.

What was much worse was that they were always ready to move with the shifting winds. In 1918 most of them sympathized with the Social Democrats; in 1933 they made agreements with the Nazis. They would have become communists had the Bolshevists come to the fore.

Werner Sombart was the great master of this set. He is said to be a pioneer in economic history, economic theory, and sociology; he was deemed an upstanding man because he had once aroused the anger of Kaiser Wilhelm. The recognition of his colleagues was well earned by Sombart, as he combined in his person all of their shortcomings to the highest degree. He had never known any ambition other than to make money and to attract attention to himself. His sizable work on modern capitalism is a historical bungling. He had always speculated on public applause alone, writing paradoxes to guarantee success. He was unusually gifted, but never sought serious thought and endeavor. He took his part in suffering from delusions of grandeur, the occupational disease of German professors. He professed Marxism when doing so was fashionable; when Hitler came to power, he wrote that the führer received his orders from God.

He had no interest in economics whatsoever. In about 1922, when he was asked by Weiss-Wellenstein, in my presence, if he wished to give a lecture on inflation, he declined with the words: “That problem is a technical one of banks. Having nothing to do with economics, it does not interest me.” His original title for his book, The Three Economies, was The End of Economics. He told me that he had rejected this title out of regard for his colleagues who made their livings teaching economics.

Nevertheless, it was more interesting to talk with Sombart than with most of the other professors. At least he was not stupid or limited.

Many professors claimed to be specialists in theory. Among these were Gottl and Oppenheimer, monomaniacs too big for their own boots; Diehl was a narrow-minded ignoramus; and Spiethoff was a man never able to publish a book.

At the helm of the Verein during those years was Professor Eckhart, a likeable Rhinelander who produced nothing of significance with the exception of a few contributions to the history of German domestic maritime commerce. His rival was Bernhard Harms, who had popularized the term Weltwirtschaft³ in Germany. Driven by his desire to assume leadership of an organization, he founded the List-Gesellschaft.⁴

Keeping company with these men made it clear to me that the German people could no longer be saved; these characterless imbeciles were already an elite few, chosen from the best. The field they taught at the universities was the most critical to a political education. The educated, as well as the masses, treated them as ambassadors of the science. What was to become of a youth with such teachers?

In 1918, in Vienna, Max Weber said to me,

You don’t like the Verein. I like it even less, but at this time, it is the only such association of men in our field. Criticism from outside does not help. One must work within the association itself and seek to remedy its shortcomings. I will try in my way, and you must do it in yours.

I heeded Weber’s advice, though I knew that it would be in vain. As an Austrian, as a Privatdozent, and as a “theorist,” I remained an outsider to the Verein. I was treated with the utmost courtesy, but I was seen as a stranger.

Even Max Weber could do nothing to alter the situation. The early death of this genius was a great disaster for Germany. Had Weber lived longer, the German people of today would be able to look to this example of an “Aryan” who would not be broken by National Socialism. But even such an intellect could do nothing to change the course of fate.

I also met men in both of these German societies whose company enriched me greatly. I recall, above all, Max Scheler, the philosopher and sociologist. Then there were Leopold von Wiese, the sociologist from Cologne; Moriz Bohm; and Albert Hahn from Frankfurt. I met Walter Sulzbach and his wife, Maria Sulzbach-Fürth, at the 1926 meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Vienna. I have pursued a friendship with them for years. I would also like to mention others, namely, Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow, Götz Briefs, Georg Halm, and Richard Passow. The subtly minded historian Eberhard Gothein and the penetrating and upstanding Ludwig Pohle have, unfortunately, already passed away.

There was talk of a possible appointment for me at a German university on two occasions: in 1925 at the University of Kiel, and in 1928 (or was it 1927?) at the Handelshochschule Berlin.⁵ The etatists and the socialists unleashed a passionate agitation against me both times and the appointments failed to materialize. I had not expected anything other. I was ill-suited to teaching Prussia’s royal police science.