18 - “Meet Me in St. Louis”: Troeltsch and Weber in America

Summary

Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber, seminal figures in modern sociology and thought and penetrating analysts of the modern world, visited in 1904 the United States, the country most closely associated with what Max Weber called the “spirit of capitalism.” And not only did they see - as German scholars were accustomed to see - New England and the East Coast, but also America's heartland, the Midwest, and, in the case of Weber, the South and the West. The occasion was an invitation to attend the World Congress of Arts and Sciences in St. Louis. This congress was part of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a world's fair remembered today mainly through the hit song by Judy Garland, “Meet me in St. Louis, Louis, meet me at the fair,” from the musical by the same name.

And yet the congress, which today is all but forgotten and which the American historian Frederick H. Jackson more than forty years ago called “a neglected landmark in the history of ideas,” deserves further elucidation, if only to set the stage for Troeltsch's and Weber's American visit. When reconstructing this visit, I had the opportunity to use not only the letters of the Webers, as found in Marianne Weber's biography of her husband Max, but also the hitherto unpublished travel accounts of Ernst Troeltsch, as well as many other local sources that recorded the tracks of the two scholars on their way.