Werner Sombart

Works

• 1896Socialism and the Social Movement in the Nineteenth Century

  Survey of the socialist theories and workers’ movements of the century with a positive reception of Marx; it strengthened Sombart’s reputation as a socialist and was reissued in many revised editions.

• 1902Modern Capitalism

  Economic history of capitalism in two volumes (later three) that asks how a new economic mentality, the capitalist spirit, arose and how capitalism developed from early to late forms; it differs from Marx in explaining the origin by mentality, and Max Weber took up its question in the Protestant Ethic.

Position

Sombart is on the map for Modern Capitalism (Der moderne Kapitalismus, 1902), which the NDB counts among the works central to the emergence of sociology in Germany. It combines an argument for the superiority of capitalism over earlier economic forms with the historical question of its origin; Sombart understood this origin as a psychogenesis, a change of economic mentality, and so differed from Marx, whom he had received positively in Socialism and the Social Movement (1896). Max Weber took up this question in the Protestant Ethic and edited the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik with Sombart and Edgar Jaffé from 1904. In studies of 1911–13 on the causes of capitalism’s rise, among them The Jews and Economic Life, Sombart treated single aspects one-sidedly and lost theoretical rigour; the NDB records antisemitic stereotypes in a number of his writings. After the First World War he moved toward the Conservative Revolution, and in the 1920s his positions interested the far right. After 1945 the rapprochement and the antisemitic stereotypes long stood in the way of an appreciation of his work, and sociologists denied him a place among the founders of the discipline. How his Jews and capitalism thesis was received, and how he stood to National Socialism, is set out under Context & critique.

Life & context

Werner Sombart was born on 19 January 1863 in Ermsleben in the Harz, the son of the landowner, industrialist and National Liberal politician Anton Sombart. He studied law, economics, history and philosophy in Pisa, Berlin and Rome, mainly with Adolph Wagner and Gustav Schmoller, and took his doctorate in 1888 under Schmoller in Berlin with a study of tenancy and wage conditions in the Roman Campagna. After some years as syndic of the Bremen Chamber of Commerce he became associate professor in Breslau in 1890. In 1906 he moved to the Berlin Handelshochschule and in 1917 to the University of Berlin, where he was made emeritus in 1931 and continued to teach. He was the last chairman of the Verein für Sozialpolitik and died in Berlin on 18 May 1941.

Further main works

• The Jews and Economic Life (Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 1911)
• Merchants and Heroes (Händler und Helden, 1915)
• German Socialism (Deutscher Sozialismus, 1934)
• On Man (Vom Menschen, 1938)