Sombart, Werner

Werner Sombart (1863–1941) was a German economist and founding figure of sociology. While he was very well known during his lifetime, he was largely forgotten after his death. Outside Germany, Sombart is perhaps best known for his essay Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? first published in 1906 (Sombart 1976). To this day, political scientists, historians, and labor specialists refer to the “Sombart question” when addressing the exceptional character of the American labor movement.

Sombart came from a liberal bourgeois family. He obtained his doctoral degree under Gustav Schmoller in Berlin in 1888 with a dissertation on the Roman Campagna. At the recommendation of Schmoller, but against the opposition of the faculty, two years later he was appointed associate professor at Breslau. It was not until the end of the First World War that Sombart became full professor in Berlin, where he succeeded one of his teachers, Adolph Wagner. Before that, Max Weber tried twice, unsuccessfully, to get him appointed as his successor, first in Freiburg, later in Heidelberg. In 1904, Sombart became one of the editors of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Archive of Social Science and Social Policy) along with Max Weber and Edgar Jaffé. The Archiv was the most influential German social science journal of the time until its closure in 1933.

His main work is Moderner Kapitalismus (Modern Capitalism), first published in two volumes in 1902 and reissued in a much-enlarged second edition from 1916 to 1928, albeit never translated entirely into English. While Sombart was not the first to use the term capitalism (Louis Blanc is considered to have coined the term in the 1850s), the title of this work puts the term capitalism in a prominent position. Marx had never used the noun but spoke of the “capitalist mode of production.” The book offers in the eyes of many contemporary social scientists a classical analysis of the origins and the nature of capitalism. He also develops a kind of methodological and epistemological manifesto for a modern social science. In contrast to the “historical school” in economics from which he started (being a pupil of Gustav Schmoller), he started to aim for explanations based on ultimate causes. For Sombart, historical appearances build up to a social system that can be grasped by theory (and here he mentions explicitly the theory of Marx). However, he still considers himself a member of the historical school. Sombart did not follow the intellectual agenda of Marx's base-superstructure theorem in which productive forces are the most basic layer in society, on which relations of production are erected and are, in turn, overlaid with an ideological sphere. In Marx, the primacy is with the former two, in Sombart, with the latter—he gives definite priority to the spiritual sphere of society. Sombart thus was not a Marxist in the strict sense, but he was sympathetic to the socialist cause (Lenger 1994).

Among the recurring themes in Sombart's works are race, Judaism, Germanness, capitalism and technology, Marxism, fashion, consumption and leisure, and methodological issues. The first three are somewhat odd for a sociologist; nevertheless, they were of central importance to him. He also advocated a new program for sociology, which he called “Noo-sociology” and which attracted hardly any followers. A noological sociology is based on the premise that all society is spirit (Geist) and all spirit, society. Its fields of investigation are forms and cycles of civilization. Its methods, therefore, cannot be those of the natural sciences. It is committed to emergent social phenomena that must be understood and placed in restrictive sociohistorical and institutional contexts—for example, religion, the state, the church, or the economy. It is worth noting that Sombart calls the scientific approach “Western” and the noological approach, “German” sociology.

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