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(1999) Max Weber and the culture of anarchy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Max Weber
a German intellectual and the question of war guilt after the great war
Karl-Ludwig Ay
pp. 110-128
Historians know that German bourgeois intellectuals (Max Weber being a prominent example) experienced the verdict of war guilt against their country as though suffering from the impact of an individual and private catastrophe. For a better understanding of this reaction it may be helpful to put Weber in his social context. As a member of the bourgeois and intellectual elite of the Kaiserreich Max Weber shared their politics and gallant upper-middle-class mentality. His social group had gained for their nation a prominent position in the world of learning, economic and egalitarian modernisation, and it was socially separated from the ordinary people by the boundary line of status honour and Satisfaktionsfähigkeit. Members of this educated middle-class elite (Bildungsbürgertum) held leading positions, they identified with their nation, they represented German scholarship, and, therefore, during the revolution of November 1918 and in the period after the country's military defeat the verdict of German war guilt was experienced by Weber's class as a collective as well as an individual condemnation. Its members felt disgraced by it, whilst the common people of their own nation held them responsible for all wartime hardships.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-27030-9_5
Full citation:
Ay, K. (1999)., Max Weber: a German intellectual and the question of war guilt after the great war, in S. Whimster (ed.), Max Weber and the culture of anarchy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 110-128.
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