Chapter 6 - Weber's Foray into Geopolitics

Summary

Weber was involved in two major political events in his lifetime, and many minor ones. The best known, most consequential and most discussed is the production of the constitution of the Weimar Republic, which Weber contributed to by writing an extensive newspaper article and serving on the constitutional commission. The second was abortive, but on a larger stage. Although his efforts were without immediate consequences, the event itself was the pivotal, stage- setting world political event of the twentieth century: the Versailles peace conference. Weber contributed to this by writing, or contributing to the writing, of the German response to the Entente on the subject of “The Authorship of War,” the notorious war- guilt clause of the treaty. But the text has received little discussion, despite the fact that the analysis has some commonalities with the article on the constitution and bears on some great themes: leadership and the issue of the Deutsche Sonderweg (the alternative path of German development). One reason for this neglect is the fact that Weber was only one of the four signatories of this text. It was also controlled to some extent by the German Foreign office and the leader of the German delegation. Nevertheless, much of it is clearly his work, and contains some material that qualifies some of the standard interpretations of his political thinking, and opens a new set of questions about his geopolitical thinking.

The text was presented by the German delegation to Versailles, of which Weber was a member. It was rejected out of hand by the victorious Allies, who had negotiated their own account of the question of responsibility for the war. In what follows, I will give the context for the document, for Weber's involvement, and discuss some of the issues relating to the war and its genesis itself – the subject of the analysis in the text. The topic of the origins of The Great War, as it was then known, has a vast literature. No historical topic has been discussed at such length, by so many historians of so many countries and with such inconclusiveness, so the context given here will be necessarily highly selective. Nevertheless, some of the outstanding historical issues relate directly to Weber's interpretation of the war, and I will touch on at least the major ones here.