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ABSTRACT GUILFORD, JEFFERSON EVANS. Weber and Troeltsch: Friendship, Cooperation, Conflict. (Under the direction of Noah Strote.) Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch were two of the leading intellectuals at the time of the outbreak of the First World War. For most of their adult lives, these two remained close friends, working in close cooperation at the University of Heidelberg and helping one another in the development of their innovative ideas concerning the relationship between religion and society. However, the two scholars also represented opposite ends of the German middle class political spectrum. Troeltsch opposed the modern forces of democracy and socialism that were reshaping German society, while Weber partially accepted them and believed that they could be integrated into a strong German nation state. This paper studies the works of Weber and Troeltsch and shows how, in spite of their cooperation, each scholar used their studies to support their opposing political ideals. Further, this paper explains the end of the friendship, showing how personal conflict resulted from Weber and Troeltsch’s contrasting interpretations of the First World War. © Copyright 2013 by Jefferson E. Guilford All Rights Reserved Weber and Troeltsch: Friendship, Cooperation and Conflict by Jefferson Evans Guilford A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts History Raleigh, North Carolina 2014 APPROVED BY: _______________________________ ______________________________ Noah Strote K. Steven Vincent _______________________________ Mi Gyung Kim ii DEDICATION To my teachers. iii BIOGRAPHY Jefferson Guilford is a native of Raleigh, North Carolina. He was interested in history from a young age, especially in ancient and medieval military history. As an undergraduate at North Carolina State University, he studied philosophy, focusing on nineteenth and twentieth century German thought. The work of Friedrich Nietzsche stood at the heart of his studies. When he returned as a graduate student in NC State’s Department of History, he continued to study German thought, focusing on philosophy, sociology, theology, and the interconnections between these fields. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction…………………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter One: Intellectual and Political Orientations………………………………. 20 Chapter Two: Ideological Tensions, Scholarly Cooperation……………………….. 48 Chapter Three: Deepening Friendship, Divergent Perspectives……………............ 89 Chapter Four: Conflict: Global and Personal………………………………............. 124 Conclusion……………………………………………………..………………............. 159 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………........... 167 1 Introduction During the fifty years that preceded the outbreak of World War I, modernity washed over Germany like a great flood, reshaping in unpredictable ways its political, economic, and cultural landscape. This flood coincided, more or less, with the existence of the Second German Empire (1871-1918), a political entity born out of Bismarck’s calculated warfare and destined to die amidst the incalculable violence of the First World War. Within this brief span of time, the modern forces of industrialization and urbanization transformed life for German subjects. The Empire, which came into existence with a primarily rural population of less than forty-five million, had, by 1914, become an urbanized society of more than sixty- eight million with the greatest industrial output of any European nation.1 Such rapid social transformation resulted in the sharpening of class, ethnic, and religious tensions. It also shifted the balance of power within the Empire away from the rural aristocracy and the university-educated bourgeoisie, groups which had traditionally dominated Germany’s military and bureaucratic hierarchies, and toward new groups, such as mass political parties and industrialists. These changes provoked two contrasting responses among the German educated elite. The more common response was a conservative rejection of modernity rooted in pre-modern ideals and a narrow conception of the German nation. Opposing this view, a much smaller group, whose leading members were professors in the social sciences, stoically accepted the economic and social conditions of the modern age and sought to address the 1 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 342. 2 most problematic aspects of these conditions through realistic analysis and pragmatic reform.2 The current study seeks a deeper understanding of these two conflicting attitudes toward modernity, which dominated the cultural discourse of the Second German Empire. The investigation will focus on the scholarly and political works of two of the leading intellectuals of the period, Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber, who represented the opposing sides of this cultural and political debate. Troeltsch maintained a thoroughly conservative attitude toward modernity and sought, in his historical, theological, and political works, to oppose the modern forces of democracy, socialism, and secularism and to defend and revitalize the pre-modern values of the German educated elite. In contrast, Weber began his work as a political economist with the assumption that the forces of modernity could not be reversed. Instead of opposing modern processes, which he viewed as inevitable, he devoted himself to understanding them and to offering pragmatic solutions to the problems they presented. Each thinker provides a well-articulated example of their respective stances toward modernity. An examination of these two examples will shed light on the general relationship between the contrasting attitudes of nostalgic conservatism and pragmatic progressivism, attitudes which not only shaped the political discourse of Wilhelmine Germany, but which remain central in contemporary political discourse. In addition, the comparative investigation of Weber and Troeltsch will provide insight into the intellectual development of these thinkers, both of whom remain influential in their 2 Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Harvard University Press, 1969), 42-61, 128-142. 3 respective fields. These two thinkers were close friends for the majority of their adult lives and exerted significant influence on one another’s scholarly output, cooperating to form an original understanding of the historical impact of Protestantism that holds a central position in both of their works. Finally, the current study shows how each thinker, in spite of their cooperation and friendship, continued to use their shared ideas to support their conflicting political goals. By incorporating similar concepts into fundamentally divergent ideological orientations, Weber and Troeltsch produced works that agreed with and supported one another on matters of detail but that conflicted with one another on the most fundamental levels. This conflict, which the current work explores in detail, not only serves to demonstrate the way in which historical concepts can be implemented in the service of contradictory political interests, but it also helps to explain the end of Weber and Troeltsch’s friendship by connecting the immediate causes of their break with their deeper ideological disagreements. The debate surrounding German modernization, in which Troeltsch and Weber played leading roles, took place in a context of rapid and profound economic and social change. In less than fifty years, the profile of German society had been fundamentally altered. Industrial production dominated the economy, cities and factory towns expanded unchecked, and diverse populations crowded together in slums. Such economic and demographic transformation led to increasing prosperity for a great number of Germans, but it also tore millions from their ancestral rural homes and threw them into cramped, unsanitary, disorienting urban centers. This new environment made growing disparities in 4 wealth painfully obvious and helped to sharpen existing cultural tensions by crowding together mutually suspicious populations of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Alongside this sharpening of religious and cultural tensions came a general decrease in religious devotion among the Protestant lower classes. Religious organizations rarely maintained sufficient infrastructure in the expanding cities. As a result, many who left the countryside for the cities left their faith behind as well, becoming either indifferent or antagonistic toward their old beliefs.3 Related to this decline of religion among the urban masses was the rise of the Social Democratic Party, which grew steadily over the course of the Empire’s existence by appealing to the ever-swelling ranks of the urban working class with its Marxian critique of the stark inequality of the emerging social order. Along with its condemnation of the economic exploitation of German workers and its opposition to the legal and political structures that legitimized this exploitation, the Social Democratic Party also criticized the state-funded German Evangelical Church, which they viewed as merely another pillar supporting the unjust status quo. As such, they demanded equal rights for all religious groups and a complete separation of church and state. They believed that such changes would bring an end to the perverse alliance between the Protestant Church and an exploitative social order, and allow the original “communalistic” ethic of the Gospels to reemerge.4 Naturally, 3 Helmut

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