Werner Sombart

Summary

German sociologist and economist whose Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (1911) and Die Zukunft der Juden (1912) attributed a distinct racial psychology and capitalist spirit to the Jews while supporting Zionism, and who was Franz Oppenheimer’s principal antagonist in the German Sociological Society debates over race and sociology (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.84-85, p.98).

At the first Soziologentag (1910) Sombart attempted to redeem the term “race” for use in sociology, arguing the conversation between sociology and racial biology had just begun (PDF p.82).
At the second Soziologentag (1912) he insisted the Jewish question be made explicit — “Are we a people, are we a nation – and do we have the right to act” — and spearheaded the counterattack on Oppenheimer’s lecture against racial theories (PDF p.82-83).
His Berlin lecture on the future of the Jews sold over 1,500 pricy tickets; his open support for Zionist ideology was a boon for German Zionism and broke a fifteen-year hush in liberal Jewish-owned newspapers (PDF p.85).
Oppenheimer accused him of plagiarising the land-enclosure origin of capitalism from his own 1898 work, and inverted his causality in reviews in Die Welt and Die neue Rundschau (PDF p.85, p.87, p.91).
In Judentaufen (1912) he argued: “You cannot ‘leave a race’ like you would a church”, doubting endogamy would ever cease (PDF p.94).
His approach subordinated social factors to biological explanations; he admitted racial theory’s “great merit” for him was that “it has freed us from the domination of the materialist conception of history” (PDF p.97-98).

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