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The media as a cultural problem: Max Weber's sociology of the press

Wilhelm Hennis
History of the Human Sciences 1998 11: 107
DOI: 10.1177/095269519801100206
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Vol. 11 No. 2
HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES
@ 1998 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
107
[0952-6951(199805)11:2;107-110; 003909]

The media as a cultural

problem: Max Webers
sociology of the press
WILHELM HENNIS

ABSTRACT
a major study of the conbusiness.
the
temporary newspaper
Although
project eventually collapsed, he did draft an outline proposal which is here translated into
English for the first time.

During

1909 and

Key words

Max

1910, Max Weber planned

Weber, media, sociology of the press

Most of what we today know about Webers proposal for a Sociology of the
Press comes from the report that he presented to the first meeting of the

German Sociological Society in Frankfurt during October 1910.1 The effort

that Weber devoted, virtually single-handed, to the realization of this investigation is evident from the second volume of letters - covering the years
1909-10 - which has recently been published as part of the Max Weber
Gesamtausgabe (MWG 11/6). Weber did not participate in the foundation of
the German Sociological Society with a view to the establishment of a new
academic discipline, but rather to establish a forum which would permit the
planning and execution of sociological investigations consistent with his
own interests.
The German social sciences of the period already possessed an apparatus for
the conduct of large surveys - the Verein fr Sozialpolitik. This was an association in which academics, politicians, the higher levels of state bureaucracy,

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108

experienced local administrators and practical men met to discuss and decide
upon the practical questions of the day. It came increasingly into conflict with
its younger members for the way in which it endeavoured to unite around
those proposals upon which generally accepted compromises could be made.
For the founding generation, represented by Gustav von Schmoller, all problems could be resolved harmoniously provided there was sufficient goodwill
on all sides. The younger members, among them Werner Sombart and the
brothers Max and Alfred Weber, no longer shared this belief. They wanted to
see debate on recalcitrant, controversial questions as well; those issues that
could not simply be resolved through compromise - sober discussion of value
freedom without an imperative to arrive at positive results. Forty years after
the foundation of the Bismarckian Empire - and intellectually the successors
of Marx and Nietzsche! - the younger members were no longer prepared to
ignore, no longer capable of ignoring, the evident conflicts of interest and
cleavages within Wilhelminian society. Weber and his friends considered that
the most fateful power of modernity lay in a capitalism founded upon formally free labour - a capitalism conforming to the pattern outlined by Marx
in the first volume of Capital. There was no way back from this form of
capitalism to a more patriarchal economy. The specific task of social science

defined by Weber, for himself and for his friends, as knowledge of those
cultural problems which contemporary economic organization threw up for
all spheres of cultural life. They knew it was not their part to offer scientific
solutions to these problems. The task of science was initially to identify the
was

problems as clearly as possible.

Webers plan for a sociology of the press must be seen in this context. The
Preliminary Report lays bare his conception of the tasks facing sociological
investigation with a clarity encountered only rarely elsewhere in his writings.
The object of Weberian sociology is not society; the word is quite simply
never used. There is nothing at all that links his sociology of Verstehen with
contemporary structural-functionalist sociology or systems theory. His sociology is a Science of Man, man as a cultural being, who, conditioned by historically changing social circumstances (economic, political, cultural,
religious) can always become something distinctive and different, right up
until that moment of forgetfulness when the ultimate being neglects to pose
questions to the world about him.
The Preliminary Report published here in English for the first time is
not that straightforward a text, but all the same it requires little in the way
of commentary. Whatever might appear to the reader to be historical, i.e.
superseded, can, with a clear conscience, be simply disregarded. Wherever
the word newspaper is encountered it is perfectly in order to substitute the
term private media. The general character (Zeitungsgesinnung) of a newspaper can be read as its tendency, its commercial aim. As ever with Weber,
what is important and worth remembering in this text are the perspectives

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109

and the

precisely formulated central questions. The letters from the years

together the 25,000

1909-10 show the endless trouble Weber took to scratch

Marks that he considered necessary for the prosecution of the investigation.

If it was to succeed, then the survey needed the support of everybody
involved in the press, above all the publishers and the journalists. Already
weary of the difficulties he had encountered in finding finance and collaborators, in 1911 Weber withdrew from the project that he had initiated, having
become entangled in a legal dispute with a newspaper, declaring (how reluctantly ?) that he would have to accept that journalists would no longer work
with him. The project lost momentum, the great survey was never conducted, the few peripheral studies that were completed are of no interest
here2
This Preliminary Report is due to appear in Vol. I/13 of the Max-WeberGesamtausgabe, which deals with higher education and science policy. It can
safely be assumed that many years will pass before this volume sees the light
of day. In any case, anything of any interest that Weber had to say about
higher education policy has already been published in English translation by
Edward Shils.3 The unholy separation in Webers work between his political and scholarly writings has obscured the fact that his statements on
higher education policy, linked to the struggle over freedom to teach, are at
the same time part of his struggle for value freedom. I have sought to bring
together the political and methodological aspects in an earlier essay.4 The
Preliminary Report to the survey of the press documents Webers scholarly way of thought just as accurately as his methodological thinking. It is
for Weber always a question of the pitiless sobriety of judgement, being
fully prepared for disappointment at the modest prospects for change in our
world. What other way is there of approaching the contemporary cultural
problematic of the media?
The following translation comes from a proof copy of the Preliminary
Report that Weber presented to the managing committee of the Sociological
society in April 1909. It was found in the papers of Ferdinand T6nnies, the
first chairman of the German Sociological Society, by researchers from the
Max-~XTeber-Arbeitstelle.5 A somewhat earlier version, with some minor variations on this one, can be found in Werner Sombarts papers.6 The importance of Webers plan was first noted by Dirk Kdsler; I have elsewhere sought
to place it in the context of Max Webers central question.77

NOTES
can be found in the collection Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und
Sozialpolitik (Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1988[1924]), pp. 431-41.
Arnulf Kusch has described the history of the planned survey from the point of

1 This
2

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110

view of journalism;

see his Max Webers Anregung zur empirischen Journalismusforschung, Publizistik 33(88) (1988): 5-29; see also Hans Bohrmann, Grenzüberschreitung? - Zur Beziehung von Soziologie und Zeitungswissenschaft 1900-1960,
in S. Papcke (ed.) Ordnung und Theorie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchge-

sellschaft, 1986), pp. 93 ff.

(ed.) Max Weber on

3 E. Shils

of

the Academic Calling in

Universities: The Power of the State and the Dignity

Imperial Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press, 1973).
Hennis, "The Pitiless Sobriety of Judgement":

Max Weber between Carl

Schmoller
Academic
Politics
of Value Freedom,
The
Menger
4
27-59.
Human
Sciences
(1991):
History of the
5 Nachlaß Tönnies, Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesbibliothek, Kiel. See the exact
reference in MWG II/6: 92.
6 Nachlaß Sombart, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Berlin (Nachlaß Sombart 18b, f. 200-10).
7 Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction (Hemel Hempstead, Herts: Allen & Unwin,
4 W.

and Gustav

1988), pp.

von

55-6.

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