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Differences and Cross-National Similarities among Mandarins

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Fritz K. Ringer
Fritz K. Ringer
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
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Extract

In response to the preceding article, Professor Sven-Eric Liedman's very interesting critique of my The Decline of the German Mandarins, let me begin by describing how I selected and approached my sources for that work. I first studied printed collections of speeches given at various German universities during the Weimar period, which I happened to encounter in the library. I next made a list of all nonscientists above the rank of instructor who taught for three or more years in faculties of arts and sciences at the universities of Berlin, Munich, Freiburg, and Heidelberg between 1918 and 1933. I read everything written by these men during those years that was relatively unspecialized or methodological in character. Finally, I extended my reading of university speeches and of my authors' works backward in time to 1890, while also adding major handbooks and anthologies in several disciplines, along with writings by academics—and a few nonacademics—who were not members of my original sample, but who were prominently mentioned in the material I had already read.

Type
CSSH Discussion
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , January 1986 , pp. 145 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1986

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References

1 Though I excluded the natural scientists, 1 did encounter occasional speeches by scientists in which they seemed to follow the ideological lead of their colleagues in the social sciences and humanities. This impression has since been confirmed by Forman, Paul, “Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 3 (1971), 1–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McCormach, Russell, “On Academic Scientists in Wilhelmian Germany,” Daedalus (Summer 1974), 157–68.Google Scholar

2 Texts are not actions; but reasons (including good reasons) may be causes of beliefs expressed in texts, in the same way that an agent's reason for acting may be the cause of his acting as he does. See Ricoeur, Paul, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” in Interpretative Social Science; A Reader, Rabinow, Paul and Sullivan, William M., eds. (Berkeley, Calif., 1979), 73–101Google Scholar; Maclntyre, Alasdair, “The Antecedents of Action,” Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (Notre Dame, Ind., 1978), 191–210Google Scholar; Davidson, Donald, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980), 3–19.Google Scholar

3 Alasdair Maclntyre, “The Intelligibility of Action,” Vanderbilt University, manuscript, 9. It should go without saying that some aspects of tree shape are effects of causes other than high winds, and that no two trees need be exactly alike.

4 I knew that C. H. Becker had been a professor before he became a politician and administrator. It did not seem to me important. See also pp. 69–70 (Becker) and pp. 137–38 (nonacademic völkisch thinkers).

5 I remarked that some modernists (e.g., Meinecke), not the orthodox, might be called “enlightened conservatives” (p. 134). The term “liberal” might be relatively appropriate when applied to those modernists (e.g., Brentano and the brothers Weber) who “read” Humboldt somewhat as John Stuart Mill did, and who were more interested in cultural vitality than in social harmony (pp. 21, 115–16, 121, 126, 147–51, 159–62, 236–38).

6 The perfect case of a dialectical reversal is Thomas Mann's splendidly self-critical evolution away from the high mandarin orthodoxy of the Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen.

7 See also p. 247 for the context in which Alfred Weber developed the concept of the freischwebende Intelligenz, which was later taken over by Mannheim.

8 Weber, Max, “R. Stammler's Überwindung' der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung,” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 4th ed. (Tubingen, 1973), 291–359.Google Scholar

9 Liedman writes (and quotes (me)) as follows: “Werner Sombart's description of capitalism ‘was saturated with the cultivated man's honor of commerce,’ that is, there was a mandarin scent to his non-mandarin radicalism.” The effect is spoiled by the fact that the “cultivated” Sombart had moved a great distance away from his “radical” phase. Liedman could have followed Somba?'s remarkable evolution on pp. 145, 153–54, 156–59, 162, 183–85, 232, 234–35, 26162, 267–68, 387–89.

10 Simon, W. H., European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 1963), 238–63.Google Scholar

11 Ringer, Fritz K., Education and Society in Modern Europe (Bloomington, Ind., 1979Google Scholar; idem,) “Education and the Middle Classes in Modem France,” in Bildungsbürgertum im 19. JahrhundertGoogle Scholar, Conze, Werner and Kocka, Jürgen, eds. (Stuttgart, 1985), part 1, 109–46Google Scholar; Muller, Detlef, Ringer, Fritz, and Simon, Brian, eds., The Rise of the Modern Educational System (London, forthcoming, 1986), introduction, ch. 2, and concluding comments.Google Scholar

12 See Bruch, Rüdiger vom, Wissenschaft, Politik and öffentliche Meinung: Gelehrtenpolitik im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (1890–1914) (Husum, 1980)Google Scholar; and my review of it in Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 24 (1984), 783–85.Google Scholar

13 Another example: In his footnote 35, Liedman claims that “to Ringer, the concept of Gemeinschaft is implicitly reactionary.” But I tried very hard to show that T?nnies disliked and tried to counter the reactionary appropriation of his concept (pp. 164–71, 230, 236, 392).

14 Cambridge, 1981.Google Scholar

15 Rothblatt, Sheldon, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

16 Wiener might compare his data from a biographical encyclopedia with Ringer, Fritz K., “The Education of Elites in Modern Europe,” History of Education Quarterly, 18 (1978), 159–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He might try to specify how broadly representative his “sample” of opinion is. Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York, 1958) is a brilliant analysis of an English intellectual tradition that included Coleridge, Carlyle, and Arnold, that was affected by German philosophy, and that made “culture” a standard against capitalist individualism. On the whole, Williams conveys the sense that this tradition was more a critical than a dominant strand in English intellectual life, especially before 1860. Are Wiener's results consistent with this impression?Google ScholarPubMed

17 For a comparison of Matthew Arnold on “culture” and Georg Simmel (and others) on Bildung, see Ringer, Fritz K., “The German Mandarins Reconsidered” (Occasional Paper, Center for Studies in Higher Education,University of California, Berkeley, 1981).Google Scholar

18 Morrell, Jack and Thackray, Arnold, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford, 1981), esp. 223–96.Google Scholar

19 My doctoral student David Vampola is about to begin a computer analysis of personal and career data on German academics between the 1860s and the 1950s that may throw light on the processes of filiation and convergence.

20 I wrote that Weber traced it to Helmholtz (1860s) and that its antecedents could be traced back to Mill or even to Descartes (pp. 96, 102–3). This is partly confirmed by Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Wahrheit und Methode, 4th ed. (Tubingen, 1975), 1, 3. Gadamer stresses the role of Mill's German translator (also 1860s). Liedman implies that the German word was first used by Dilthey, but that is not so.Google Scholar

21 See Bourdieu, Pierre, “Champ intellectuel et projet créateur,” Les temps modernes (11 1966), 865–906.Google Scholar