In 1904, the sociologist Max Weber traveled across the United States, loved what he saw and wrote about it. In return, America became a fan of Max Weber’s writings long before his homeland Germany. His most famous book? “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” a product of his American field trip, in which he comes to the conclusion that Lutherans and Calvinists are better entrepreneurs than Catholics. The latter, according to Weber, were stubbornly resisting modernity and mired in medieval traditions and rituals. And yes, you guessed right, Weber wasn’t Catholic. But half of Germany was and that’s probably why his book didn’t fly off the shelves over there.
Weber praised the progressive dynamics of America’s many “voluntaristic sects” and saw them operating as social and economic networks, which, due to their members’ Protestant work ethic, were thriving in a capitalist society. There was nothing voluntary or progressive about the Protestant Church in Imperial Germany where he came from. It was a quasi-governmental agency that supported the Kaiser’s agenda and was just as authoritarian and top-down as the Prussian military.
Despite all his enthusiasm for the New World, there were a few things that struck Weber as odd — “Christian Science” being one of them, still new at the time and preaching that sickness was a mental error curable by reading the right books. Always the self-assured German professor, Weber wasn’t fazed by outliers and predicted that these pockets of superstition would be swept away by cultural rationalization, secularization and bureaucratization. This, after all, was based on his theory of modern Western society, where scientific understanding would inevitably replace belief systems and mythical explanations.
Weber never made it to Minnesota when he crisscrossed the Midwest and the East Coast by train. If he visited today, he’d probably end up in a car on Interstate Hwy. 35 or Hwy. 52 staring with disbelief at those giant roadside billboards. He might still be OK with the many signs insisting in huge letters that Jesus is alive “beyond reasonable doubt” and view them as clever attempts by his beloved Protestant sects to network with the legal community. But I bet somewhere down the road he would give up and throw his claim out the window that Enlightenment in Western societies is unstoppable. That would likely happen when driving by the billboards that spew antiscience propaganda — against evolution, which was already widely accepted at his time, or against vaccines, which would have saved his life. Max Weber was one of 50 million victims who died during the 1918 influenza epidemic, also known as Spanish flu. He was only 56 years old — most likely with many famous books still in him.
Henning Schroeder is a former vice provost and dean of graduate education at the University of Minnesota and currently teaches in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.
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