PREFATORY NOTE

The basic idea here briefly set forth dates back to the year 1910 and was first presented in a lecture course for laymen on the subject of “State and Society” which I delivered at the University of Czernowitz (Cernauti) in the winter of 1910-1911. Subsequently, at Columbia University in the winter of 1913-1914, I presented it at length in a course entitled “The Theory of Social Classes.” Since that time I have never altogether stopped developing my thoughts and analyzing the material on the subject, but after 1916 the topic took second place to other interests. Hence I am glad to seize upon the occasion of a lecture, delivered on November 19, 1926, at the University of Heidelberg, under the title “Leadership and Class Formation,” to formulate once again and to publish for the first time a line of reasoning which, according to my present plan of work, I shall be able to work out fully only years from now, if at all. I offer this by way of explanation, though not of excuse, for the gaps and unevennesses in the following presentation, which stand in regrettable contrast to the length of time during which the thoughts matured and the amount of effort that went into them.

The qualifying phrase, “in an ethnically homogeneous environment,” is not meant to deny the significance of racial differences in explaining concrete class formations. On the contrary, my early thinking on the subject followed the paths of the racial theory of classes, as it is found in the works of Gumplowicz, upon which I came while I was still at school. One of the strongest impressions of my apprenticeship came from Haddon, the ethnologist, who, in a course given at the London School of Economics late in 1906, demonstrated to us the differing racial types of various classes of Asiatic peoples, with the aid of countless photographs. Nevertheless, this is not the heart of the matter, not the reason why there are social classes. True, even the cursory outline, imperfect in every respect, which I present in the following, must at one point take account of this factor—since no explicit presentation would be possible otherwise. But in order not to complicate the basic features of the picture, I thought it best to exclude the racial factor in what I have to say. When it comes to investigating the “essential nature” of a social phenomenon, it is often proper and necessary to ignore certain external factors that may be quite characteristic or at least common. They may be “essential” in many respects, but not for the purposes in hand.

The theory of social classes has not attracted an amount of study truly commensurate with its fundamental importance. Marx, for example, who recognized its importance and even exaggerated it in one direction, offered a theory of the evolution of classes, but not really a theory of classes themselves. Even so, it is scarcely fair for Sombart to say (Sozialismus und Soziale Bewegung, p. 2) that in the works of Guizot, Mignet, and Louis Blanc we “can read everything that can be stated to this day about the nature and growth of social classes.” Sombart’s own definition (loc. cit., p. 1) offers more than that and deserves to be recognized here as a contribution to the subject. And the widely known theories of the past fifty years do more than merely echo the thoughts of the aforementioned authors (and of Ferguson as well), nor are they made of thin air. Our own views rest, in more or less important points, on the work of Schmoller, which includes much more than merely the element of the division of labor; and on Durkheim and Spann (note the latter’s reduction of “class” to “estate,” in the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften article, “Klasse und Stand”). In many respects, furthermore, we hark back to Simmel, A. Bauer (Les Classes sociales, 1902), and Overberg (“La Classe sociale,” Extrait des Annales de la Société belge de Sociologie, 1905); as well as to the theory of Bücher, so wittily expressed in the well-known simile about the mariage de convenance between occupation and property—though it is a theory that never goes much beneath the surface or past the foreground. The book by P. E. Fahlbeck, excellent in many individual sections, seems to us to be merely skirting the problem, which appears often enough. As for the book by Niceforo, it represents no more than a first step along a promising avenue of approach and hence, understandably, succeeds only in part. We are compelled to forego debating the views of all these authors, to whom we should have to add the majority of sociologists and “historians of society” (such as Riehl and Rossbach), though such a method of presentation might best serve to set forth our own concepts in detail and to buttress them against objections.

Our subject owes much more to legal and social history; to ethnology (where, unfortunately, the wrong questions are often asked and there is lack of a real grasp of the problem); to the study of the family; and to eugenics—for those, that is, who know how to recognize the relevance of what these disciplines have to offer. Beyond all this, the subject—and this is what constitutes its fascination—poses a wealth of new questions, offers outlooks on untilled fields, foreshadows sciences of the future. Roaming it, one often has a strange feeling, as though the social sciences of today, almost on purpose, were dealing with relative side-issues; as though some day—and perhaps soon—the things we now believe will be discounted. But this is not an aspect that I wish to bring to the fore. Quite the contrary. My purpose is to present, not only as briefly but as soberly as possible, a sharply delimited series of problems, together with their corresponding solutions. The wider vistas must open up to the reader spontaneously or not at all.