Max Weber is widely regarded as one of the foundational thinkers of the twentieth century. But how did this reclusive German scholar manage to leave such an indelible mark on modern political and social thought? Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought is the first comprehensive account of Weber's wide-ranging impact on both German and American intellectuals. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Joshua Derman illuminates what Weber meant to contemporaries in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany and analyzes why they reached for his concepts to articulate such widely divergent understandings of modern life. The book also accounts for the transformations that Weber's concepts underwent at the hands of émigré and American scholars, and in doing so, elucidates one of the major intellectual movements of the mid-twentieth century: the transatlantic migration of German thought.
Historical scholarship on “great spaces,” a central concept in the political thought of Nazi Germany, has previously focused on legal debates while neglecting important economic contexts. The journalist Ferdinand Fried deserves to be considered one of the major economic theorists of “great spaces” in the Weimar, Nazi, and early postwar eras. Fried argued that the world economy was inexorably passing from globalization through economic nationalism to a reconstituted “world economy of great spaces.” Deglobalization, as he depicted it, was a global experience that produced similar economic and political outcomes around the world. His writings anticipated and inspired Nazi propaganda aimed at legitimizing German hegemony in Europe. His ideas, and their reception, illustrate how dialectical and global visions of history have resonated with conservative intellectuals during crises of the world economy.
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