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Werner Sombart's ʻovercomingʼ of Marxism

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Werner Sombart's ʻovercomingʼ of Marxism CHAPTER 27 Werner Sombart’s ʻOvercomingʼ of Marxism 27.1 The Historical School as ʻDigestive Scienceʼ (Rosa Luxemburg) The ʻolder historical schoolʼ of political economy, whose members included Wilhelm Roscher (1817–94), Bruno Hildebrandt (1812–78) and Karl Knies (1821– 98), emerged in the 1840s. It was a specifically ʻGermanʼ reaction both to the French Revolution and to the ʻWesternʼ cosmopolitanism of classical political economy from Smith to Ricardo.1 It was ostensibly concerned with opposing the ʻsurgical extractionʼ of the economy from the ʻliving bodyʼ of popular life and the life of the state, and in particular the ʻnarrow egotistic psychologyʼ according to which social actors are guided, in their economic behaviour, only by economic considerations, as opposed to ethical motives.2 If Machiavelli banished ethics from politics, Adam Smith performed the same operation for political economy, criticises Knies, who emphasises the significance of the ʻethico-political momentʼ for political economy and speaks of the discipline being ʻelevatedʼ to the status of a ʻmoral and political science’.3 At first glance, this seems to represent an integral approach to studying social practices. But behind this pathos of wholeness, there lies the definition of political economy as a ʻstate economyʼ concerned with ʻjudging men and ruling them’.4 The historical school developed from cameralism, which became the discipline of state science due to the Prussian path of capitalist develop- ment.5 Marx describes cameralism as ʻa medley of smatterings, through whose purgatory the hopeful candidate for the German bureaucracy has to pass’.6 And the historical school of law, a second precursor of the historical school of politi- cal economy, is discussed by him as a symptom of the ʻGerman state of affairs’, which involved Germany adopting not the revolutions of other countries, but their restorations, so that Germany is situated ʻbelow the level of history’: it is 1 According to Braunreuther, historicism in political economy ʻwas related to reactionary- Romantic aspirations directed against the French Revolutionʼ (Braunreuther 1978, p. 116). On the contrast between the historical school and classical political economy, see Winkel 1977, pp. 92ff, 117–18; Krause and Rudolph 1980, pp. 2, 43; Marshall 1982, p. 29; Hennis 1988, pp. 50–1. 2 Knies 1883, pp. 436–7. 3 Knies 1883, pp. 438, 440. 4 Roscher, quoted in Knies 1883, p. 437. 5 Braunreuther 1978, pp. 111–12. 6 Marx and Engels 1975–2005, vol. 35, p. 14; compare Engels in vol. 16, p. 465. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�8099�_��9 Werner Sombart’s ʻOvercomingʼ of Marxism 339 a ʻschool of thought that legitimizes the infamy of today with the infamy of yesterday, a school that stigmatizes every cry of the serf against the knout as mere rebelliousness once the knout has aged a little and acquired a heredi- tary significance and a history’.7 In the Theories of Surplus Value, Marx says of Roscher’s political economy that it ʻproceeds “historically” and, with wise mod- eration, collects the “best” from all sources, and in doing this contradictions do not matter; on the contrary, what matters is comprehensiveness . All systems are thus made insipid, their edge is taken off and they are peacefully gathered together in a miscellany’.8 Marx calls this the vulgar economic ʻgraveyardʼ of political economy as a science: the more political economy is ʻperfected’, the more its empiricist ʻvulgar elementʼ breaks away from it and confronts it as its opposite.9 Schmoller is considered the founder of the ‘younger historical school’; the theorists identified with it include (besides Sombart and Weber) Lujo Brentano, Karl Bücher, Eberhard Gothein and Georg Friedrich Knapp. The personal con- tinuities with the Katheder socialists are not to be overlooked. In both cases, confronting Marx increasingly became the main concern, with different posi- tions developing in a process of differentiation that was primarily determined by the various theoristsʼ approach to Marx’s analysis. Rosa Luxemburg charac- terised the younger historical school as a ʻdigestive scienceʼ whose secret cause was Marx: ʻUnder the oracular ramblings of the “historical school”, one could hear the mischievous giggling of Marx’s pitiless sarcasm’.10 Luxemburg added that during the last quarter century (i.e. since the emergence of the younger historical school ), ʻovercoming Marxʼ had become a ʻfavourite pastime of German professors and a tried and tested way of applying for a private lecture- ship in Germany’.11 Much as on the practical terrain of social policy, a multi-tiered ʻpassive revolutionʼ is enacted on the theoretical terrain of German political economy as well, with the aim of overcoming both classical political economy and the 7 Marx and Engels 1975–2005, vol. 3, p. 177. In his discussion of Roscher, Weber also notes that the historical school of political economy is dependent on the historical school of law, placing the emphasis on the former’s telling reformulations of the latter’s positions (Weber 1988d, pp. 9–10). 8 Marx and Engels 1975–2005, vol. 32, p. 501. 9 Ibid. 10 Luxemburg 1970–5e, p. 491. 11 Luxemburg 1970–5e, pp. 489, 491. For Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of the historical school, see also Luxemburg 1970–5f, pp. 730ff, 772,782, 784; Luxemburg 1970–5g, p. 388; Luxemburg 1970–5d, pp. 163–4; Luxemburg 1970–5h, pp. 188, 223, 249, 260–1, 265; Luxemburg 1970–5h, pp. 525ff, 562, 646ff..
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