Max Weber Studies

[MWS 20.2 (2020) 209-218] ISSN 1470-8078 doi: 10.15543/maxweberstudies.20.2.209© Max Weber Studies 2020, Global Policy Institute, University House, Coventry University London, 109 Middlesex Street, London E1 7JF. The Pandemic and Max Weber1 Hinnerk Bruhns2 I had a little bird, Its name was Enza. I opened the window, And in-flu-enza.3 Was Max Weber a late victim of the so-called Spanish flu, a pandemic that had nothing Spanish about it? This has been said very often, but it is probably unlikely. Now, a hundred years later in early 2020, it is something of an irony of fate that all the events that were planned to commemorate the centenary of his death have become a victim of a pandemic. Max Weber himself would not have shed any tears about the planned centenary events, indeed quite the opposite. He already stood moderately distanced from the business of the modern conference . Thus he wrote—delayed because of an ‘obstinate influenza’—in April 1909 to Gustav Schmoller that he would and could be chairman of the committee of the German Sociological Society ‘only so long as it was prevented from becoming a general debating and gossip society [...].4 Conferences were fine for him if they discussed research strategies, research projects, research conclusions and methodological questions. This was very much the case with the Verein für Sozialpolitik which he wanted to impose—though without success—on 1. Translated by Sam Whimster. 2. Hinnerk Bruhns teaches at Centre de recherches historiques (EHESS/CNRS), France. 3. This was a children’s skipping rhyme heard nationwide during the height of the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, probably of earlier origins, perhaps from the time of the Russian flu. Influenza is a frequent theme in his letters—often to be read, ‘in bed with influenza’. 4. Letter to Gustav von Schmoller, 13 April 1909. Max Weber Briefe 1909 bis 1910, MWG II/6 (ed. M. Rainer Lepsius and Wolfgang J. Mommsen; Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1994), p. 99. 210 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2020. the German Sociological Society, of which he was a founder and on which he just as quickly turned his back. Had Weber guessed what would be written about him in the hundred years after his death—how he would be discussed, argued over and blustered about—then he wouldn’t have just spoken about methodological pestilence.5 He would have demanded that the social sciences direct their energy into the investigation of the surrounding reality. For Weber, in the years before his death, the war, the lost peace, the position and future of Germany were the central societal, political and economic problems. The catastrophe of the World War hid from him, like most of his contemporaries, the enormous extent of the ‘Spanish’ flu, which the American soldiers landing in Europe had brought with them, a pandemic that would claim three or four times the number of human victims than the war itself, which today for us represents Europe’s own primal catastrophe. Seen in terms of numbers the deaths from today’s Covid19pandemic are not comparable with the World War, or the Spanish flu, or the Russian influenza pandemic of 1889–1895 that was spread along the railway tracks, or the medieval and early modern plagues. But it does appear to us contemporaries as a phenomenon that we already—to speak with Weber—endow with historical significance and consider as a cultural historical fact. In his disagreements with Karl Knies and Wilhelm Wundt Weber, from the viewpoint of cultural values, placed military devastations such as the incursion of Gustav Adolphus into Germany, the incursion of Genghis-Khan into Europe, the natural catastrophes such as the incursion of the Dollart, or the effects of the Black Death on the social history of England, all on the same level: ‘All those events have left behind historically significant consequences—that for us are anchored to “cultural values”’.6 The anchoring of consequences to cultural values is the decisive point. Weber adds that it is only by causally explaining culturalhistorical ‘facts’ that we arrive at history in the real sense of the word...