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Max Weber And Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Richard Pipes
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Extract

When Max Weber published in 1906 two book-length studies of contemporary Russian politics, Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie in Russland (On the situation of bourgeois democracy in Russia), and Russlands Übergang zum Schein-konstitutionalismus (Russia's transition to pseudo-constitutionalism), he was venturing upon a field of inquiry in which he had previously shown no interest, and which seemingly lay entirely outside the range of his professional qualifications. He was by this time widely known as an economic historian specializing in agrarian and financial problems, and in the methodology of the social sciences. True, two years earlier he had also departed from his specialty by writing on the relationship between capitalism and Protestantism, but in that instance his deviation had not been quite as radical, since these studies had concerned the economic implications of a religious movement. What could have induced him, so shortly after recuperation from a nervous breakdown which had incapacitated him for the better part of five years (1897–1903), to interrupt his academic routine, acquire a reading knowledge of Russian, and devote several months to the tedious perusal of the Russian daily press? Why did he, as his widow and biographer reports, “follow for months in breathless tension the Russian drama” of 1905? Weber's interest in Russian politics, it is obvious, had deeper motives than mere fascination with current events; indeed, it was intimately connected with his two most vital concerns: the future of Germany, and the future of free society.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , April 1955 , pp. 371 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1955

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References

1 Weber, Marianne, Max Weber—Ein Lebensbild, Tübingen, 1936, p. 342.Google Scholar

2 Weber, Max, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, Munich, 1921, p. 26Google Scholar; henceforth referred to as GPS.

3 Jaspers, Karl, Max Weber, Oldenburg, 1932, p. 66.Google Scholar

4 Hilfe (Berlin), November 9, 1916.

5 GPS, pp. 8–30.

6 Quoted by Mettler, A., Max Weber und die philosophische Problematih in unserer Zeit, Leipzig, 1934, p. 17.Google Scholar

7 Quoted in Mayer, J. P., Max Weber and German Politics, London [1944], p. 44.Google Scholar

8 GPS, p. 167.

9 ibid., p. 29.

10 Weber, Max, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tübingen, 1947, 1, p. 122Google Scholar; henceforth referred to as We & G.

11 ibid., p. 143.

12 GPS, p. 158.

13 Cf. this with Bismarck's opinion: “I am in no way in favor of an absolutist government. I consider parliamentary cooperation—if properly practiced—necessary and useful, as much as I consider parliamentary rule harmful and impossible.” (Italics added.) Speech in the Reichstag, 1884, quoted in Klemm, Max, ed., Was sagt Bismarck dazu?, 11, Berlin, 1924, p. 126.Google Scholar See also Fürst, OttoBismarck, von, Gedanken und Erinnerungen. New York-Stuttgart, 1898, p. 412.Google Scholar

14 GPS, p. 140.

15 Quoted by Köllreutter, Otto, in “Die staatspolitischen Anschauungen Max Webers und Oswald Spenglers,” Zeitschrift für Politik, XIV (1925), pp. 482–83.Google Scholar

16 GPS, pp. 149–50.

17 ibid., p. 141.

18 Weber, Max, Der Sozialismus, Vienna, 1918, p. 24Google Scholar; this essay is reprinted in Weber, Max, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik, Tübingen, 1924, pp. 492–518.Google Scholar

19 Weber, Max, Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie in Russland, Beilage, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, XXII (1906), pp. 347–48Google Scholar; henceforth referred to as Zur Luge.

20 Mayer, , Max Weber, p. 99.Google Scholar

21 GPS, p. 391.

22 Zur Lage, p. 349.

23 Compare this opinion with Leroy-Beaulieu's: “The commune … is, properly speaking, and setting autocracy apart, the only indigenous institution, the only living tradition the Russian people can boast.” Leroy-Beaulieu, A., The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians, London-New York, 1894, II, p. 2.Google Scholar

24 Zur Lage, p. 244.

25 ibid., p. 245.

26 ibid., p. 346.

27 ibid., p. 335.

28 ibid., p. 280.

29 ibid., p. 347.

30 ibid., p. 28in.

31 ibid., pp. 347–48.

32 ibid., p. 338n.

33 ibid., p. 353.

34 Weber, Max, Russlands Übergang zum Scheinkonstitutionalismus, Beilage, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, XXIII, No. 1 (1906)Google Scholar; henceforth referred to as Scheinkonstitutionalismus.

35 ibid., p. 170.

36 W & G, I, p. 173.

37 Max, MayerWeber, p. 47.Google Scholar

38 This view is derived from Leroy-Beaulieu, , op.cit., 11, pp. 77–81Google Scholar; see Weber's acknowledgment in W & G, 11, p. 672.

39 Scheinkonstitutionalismus, p. 228. See Weber's allusion to Bismarck's role in Germany, W & G, 11, p. 672.

40 Scheinkonstitulionalismus, pp. 249–50.

41 Zur Lage, p. 349.

42 As is done by Mayer, , Max Weber, p. 26.Google Scholar

43 “Deutschland unter den europäischen Weltmächten,” Hilfe (Berlin), November 9, 1916.

44 The date June 24, given in Weber, Marianne, op.cit., p. 718Google Scholar, is erroneous. This article is reprinted in GPS, pp. 107–25.

45 GPS, p. 117. (Weber here indicates the possibility of a Socialist-Revolutionary, rather than Social-Democratic, dictatorship.)

46 ibid., p. 120.

47 ibid., p. 124.

48 “Innere Lage und Aussenpolitik,” Frankfurter Zeitung, February 3, 1918, reprinted in GPS, pp. 323–36; Der Sozialismus, Vienna, 1918.

49 GPS, pp. 323–24.

50 Der Sozialismus, pp. 29–30.

51 ibid., p. 30.

52 ibid., p. 31.

53 Weber, Marianne, Max Weber, p. 648.Google Scholar

54 Good accounts of Russian politics during this period may be found in Florinsky, M., The End of the Russian Empire, New Haven, Conn., 1931Google Scholar, and SirPares, Bernard, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy, London, 1939.Google Scholar

55 Cf. his statement in W & G, 11, p. 670: “Under all the changes of rulers which had occurred in France since the First Empire, the political apparatus remained essentially the same. The reason for this is the fact that this apparatus—wherever it has control of the modern media of information and communications (the telegraph)—makes a 'revolution,’ in the sense of a violent formation of entirely new political structures, an evergreater impossibility, owing both to purely technical reasons and to its innerly rationalized structure; it has replaced ‘revolutions’ with coups d'état …”

56 Lenin, V. I., Sochineniia, 3rd ed., XXI, p. 452Google Scholar, quoted in Carr, E. H., The Bolshevik Revolution, 1, New York, 1951, p. 243.Google Scholar

57 The Russian Fundamental Laws of 1906 were deliberately patterned after the Prussian as well as the Japanese constitution, which the Russian ruling groups took as prototypes of regimes with a constitutional order but without parliamentary rule. See Miliukov, P., in Milioukov, P., Seignobos, C., and Eisenmann, L., Histoire de Russie, III, Paris, 1933, pp. 1123–24.Google Scholar