Posted: February 28th, 2023

Max Weber

Use the readings and videos to answer the question below.

Politician, lawyer and sociologist — does Max Weber provide a good role model for applied sociologists? Why or why not? How do the ideas expressed in the Freiburg Address influence your opinion?

Reading 1: https://www.jstor.org/stable/488244

Reading 2: https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Max_Weber

Video: https://youtu.be/ICppFQ6Tabw 

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The national state and economic policy (Freiburg
address)
Max Weber & Ben Fowkes

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To cite this article: Max Weber & Ben Fowkes (1980): The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address), Economy
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The national state
and economic policy
(Freiburg address)
Max Weber
(Inaugural lecture, Freiburg, May 1895)

The title I have chosen promises much more than I can achieve
today, or wish to achieve. What I intend is first of all this: to use a
single example to make clear the role played by racial differences
of a physical and pyschological nature, as between nationalities,
in the economic struggle for existence. I should then like to add
some reflections on the situation of a state which rests on a
national basis — such as our own — within the framework of a con-
sideration of economic policy. I am choosing for my example a set
of events which although they are occurring a long way from us
have repeatedly come to the notice of the public in the last ten
years. Allow me, then, to conduct you to the eastern marches of
the Reich, to the open country of the Prussian province of West
Prussia. This setting combines the character of a national border-
land with some unusually sharp variations in the conditions of
economic and social existence, and this recommends it for our
purpose. Unfortunately I cannot avoid calling on your forbearance
initially while I recite a series of dry data.

The rural areas of the province of West Prussia contain three
different types of contrast, as follows: First, extraordinary varia-
tions in the quality of agricultural land. From the sugar-beet
country of the Vistula plain to the sandy uplands of Cassubia the
estimates of the gross tax yield vary in a ratio of 10 or 20 to 1.
Even the average values at district level fluctuate between 4£ and
33| marks per hectare.

Then there are contrasts in the social stratification of the pop-
ulation which cultivates this land. As in general in the East, the
official statistics refer alongside the ‘rural parish’ (Landgemeinde)
to a second form of communal unit, unknown to the South: the
‘estate district’ (Gutsbezirk). And, correspondingly, the estates
of the nobility stand out in bold relief in the landscape between
the villages of the peasants. These are the places of residence of
the class which gives the East its social imprint — the Junkers.
Everywhere there are manor-houses, surrounded by the single-
storey cottages the lord of the manor (Gutsberr) has allotted to
the day-labourers, plus a few strips of arable land and pasture;
Economy and Society Volume 9 Number 4 November 1980
© RKP 1980 0308-5147/80/0904 0428 $1.50/1

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The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address) 429

these people are obliged to work on the manor the whole year
round. The area of the province of West Prussia is divided between
these two categories in roughly equal proportions. But in particular
districts the share of the manorial estates can vary from a few
per cent to two thirds of the whole area.

Finally, within this population which is subject to a twofold
social stratification, there exists a third contrast; it is between the
nationalities. And the national composition of the population of
the individual communities also varies from region to region. It is
this kind of variation which is of interest to us today. In the first
place, the proportion of Poles is naturally greater as you approach
the boundary of the Reich. But this proportion of Poles also
increases as the quality of the soil deteriorates. Any language-map
will show that. One will at first wish to explain this historically
from the form taken by the German occupation of these lands,
which initially spread over the fertile plain of the Vistula. And this
would not be entirely incorrect. But let us now ask the further
question: what social strata are the repositories of Germanism
(Deutschtum) and Polonism (Polentum) in the country districts?
In answer to this question, the figures of the most recently pub-
lished population census (that of 1885)’ present us with a curious
picture. Admittedly we cannot directly extract the national
composition of each parish from these figures, but we can do this
indirectly, provided we are content to achieve only approximate
accuracy. The intermediate step is the figure for religious affiliation,
which, for the nationally mixed district we are concerned with,
coincides to within a few per cent with nationality. If we separate
the economic categories of the peasant village and the manorial
estate in each district, by identifying them with the corresponding
administrative units of the rural parish and the estate district,2

we find that their national composition is related inversely to the
quality of the soil; in the fertile districts the Catholics, i.e. the
Poles, are relatively most numerous on the estates, and the
Protestants, i.e. the Germans, are to be found in greater propor-
tions in the villages. In districts where the soil is inferior the
situation is precisely the opposite of this. For example, if we take
the districts with an average net tax yield of under 5 marks per
hectare, we find only 35.5 per cent Protestants in the villages and
50.2 per cent Protestants on the estates; if on the other hand we
take the group of districts which provide an average of 10 to 15
marks per hectare, we find the proportion of Protestants rising to
60.7 per cent in the villages and falling to 42.1 per cent on the
estates. Why is this? Why are the estates the reservoirs of Polonism
on the plain, and the villages the reservoirs of Polonism in the hills?
One thing is immediately evident: the Poles have a tendency to

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430 Max Weber

collect together in that stratum of the population which stands
lowest both economically and socially. On the good soil, like that
of the Vistula plain, the peasant’s standard of living has always
been higher than that of the day-labourer on an estate; on the bad
soil, which could only be rationally exploited on a large scale, the
manorial estate (Rittergut) was the repository of tivilization and
hence of Germanism; there the miserable small peasants still live
below the level of the day-labourers on the estates. If we did not
know that anyway, the age-structure of the population would lead
us to that presumption. If we look at the villages we find that as
one rises from the plain to the hilltops, and as the quality of the
soil deteriorates the proportion of children under 14 years old
rises from 35—36 per cent to 40—41 per cent. If we compare the
estates, we find that the proportion of children is higher on the
plain than in the villages, that it increases as the height above sea-
level increases, though more slowly than this happens in the villages,
and finally that on the hilltops the proportion is lower than the
proportion in the hilltop villages. As usual, a large number of
children follows hard on the heels of a low standard of living,
since this tends to obliterate any calculations of future welfare.
Economic advance (wirtschaftliche Kultur), a relatively high stand-
ard of living and Germanism are in West Prussia identical.

And yet the two nationalities have competed for centuries on
the same soil, and with essentially the same opportunities. What
then is the basis of the distinction? One is immediately tempted
to believe that the two nationalities differ in their ability to adapt
to different economic and social conditions of existence. And this
is in fact so — as is proved by the tendency of development revealed
by shifts in the population and changes in its national composition.
This also allows us to perceive how fateful that difference in the
ability to adapt is for the Germanism of the East.

It is true that we only have at our disposal the figures of 1871
and 1885 for a comparative examination of the displacements
which have occurred in the individual parishes, and these figures
allow us to perceive only the indistinct beginnings of a development
which has since then, according to all indications, been extraordi-
narily reinforced. Apart from this, the clarity of the numerical
picture naturally suffers under the enforced but not entirely
correct assumption of an identity between religious affiliation and
nationality on one side, and administrative subdivisions and social
structure on the other. Despite all this, we can still gain a clear
enough view of the relevant changes. The rural population of West
Prussia, like that of large parts of the whole of eastern Germany,
showed a tendency to fall during the period between 1880 and
1885; this fall amounted to 12,700 people, i.e. there was a decline

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The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address) 431

of VA per cent, while the overall population of the German Reich
was increasing by about SVt per cent. This phenomenon, like the
phenomena we have already discussed, also occurred unevenly:
in some districts there was actually an increase in the rural popu-
lation. And indeed the manner in which these phenomena were
distributed is highly characteristic. If we take first the different
soil qualities, one would normally assume that the decline hit the
worst land hardest, for there the pressure of falling prices would
be first to render the margin of subsistence too narrow. If one
looks at the figures, however, one sees that the reverse is the case:
precisely the most well-favoured districts, such as Stuhm and
Marienwerder, with an average net yield of around 15—17 marks,
experienced the greatest population loss, a loss of 7—8 per cent,
whereas in the hilly country the district of Konitz and Tuchel,
with a net yield of 5—6 marks, experienced the biggest increase,
an increase which had been going on since 1871. One looks for an
explanation, and one asks first: from which social strata did the
population loss originate, and which social strata gained from the
increase? Let us look at the districts where the figures demonstrate
a great reduction in population: Stuhm, Marienwerder, Rosenberg.
These are without exception districts where large-scale landowner-
ship predominates particularly strongly, and if we take the estate
districts of the whole province together, we find that although in
1880 they exhibited a total population two thirds smaller than the
villages (on the same area of land) their share in the fall of the rural
population between 1880 and 1885 comes to over 9,000 people,
which is almost three quarters of the total reduction over the whole
province: the population of the estate districts has fallen by
about VA per cent. But this fall in population is also distributed
unevenly within the category referred to: in some places the
population actually increased, and when one isolates the areas where
the population was sharply reduced, one finds that it was precisely
the estates on good soil which experienced a particularly severe
loss of population.

In contrast to this, the increase of population which took place
on the bad soils of the uplands worked chiefly in favour of the
villages, and indeed this was most pronounced in the villages on
bad soils, as opposed to the villages of the plain. The tendency
which emerges from these figures is therefore towards a decrease
in the numbers of day-labourers on the estates situated on the best
land, and an increase in the numbers of peasants on land ofinferior
quality. What is at stake here, and how the phenomenon is to be
explained, becomes clear when one finally asks how the nationalities
are affected by these shifts in population.

In the first half of the century the Polish element appeared to

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432 Max Weber

be in retreat, slowly but continuously. However, since the 1860s,
as is well known, it has just as continuously, and just as slowly,
been advancing. Despite their inadequate basis, the language data
for West Prussia make the latter point extremely plain. Now a shift
in the boundary between two nationalities can occur in two ways,
which are fundamentally distinct. It may on the one hand happen
that the language and customs of the majority gradually impose
themselves on national minorities in a nationally mixed region,
that these minorities get ‘soaked up’. This phenomenon can be
found as well in eastern Germany: the process is statistically
demonstrable in the case of Germans of the Catholic confession.
Here the ecclesiastical bond is stronger than the national one,
memories of the Kulturkampf also play their part, and the lack of
a German-educated clergy means that the German Catholics are
lost to the cultural community of the nation. But the second form
of nationality-displacement is more important, and more relevant
for us: economic extrusion-. And this is how it is in the present
case. If one examines the changes in the proportion of adherents
of the two faiths in the rural parish units between 1871 and 1885,
one sees this: the migration of day-labourers away from the
estates is in the lowlands regularly associated with a relative decline
of Protestantism, while in the hills the increase of the village
population is associated with a relative increase of Catholicism.3 It
is chiefly German day-labourers who move out of the districts of
progressive cultivation; it is chiefly Polish peasants who multiply
in the districts where cultivation is on a low level.

But both processes — here emigration, there increase in numbers
— lead back ultimately to one and the same reason: a lower expec-
tation of living standards, in part physical, in part mental, which
the Slav race either possesses as a gift from nature or has acquired
through breeding in the course of its past history. This is what has
helped it to victory.

Why do the German day-labourers move out? Not for material
reasons: the movement of emigration does not draw its recruits
from districts with low levels of pay or from categories of worker
who are badly paid. Materially there is hardly a more secure situa-
tion than that of agricultural labourer on the East German estates.
Nor is it the much-bruited longing for the diversions of the big
city. This is a reason for the planless wandering off of the younger
generation, but not for the emigration of long-serving families of
day-labourers. Moreover, why would such a longing arise precisely
among the people on the big estates? Why is it that the emigration
of the day-labourers demonstrably falls off in proportion as the
peasant village comes to dominate the physiognomy of the land-
scape? The reason is as follows: there are only masters and

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The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address) 433

servants, and nothing else, on the estates of his homeland for the
day-labourer, and the prospect for his family, down to the most
distant of his progeny, is to slave away on someone else’s land
from one chime of the estate-bell to the next. In this deep, half-
conscious impulse towards the distant horizon there lies hidden
an element of primitive idealism. He who cannot decipher this
does not know the magic of freedom. Indeed, the spirit of freedom
seldom touches us today in the stillness of the study. The naive
youthful ideals of freedom are faded, and some of us have grown
prematurely old and all too wise, and believe that one of the most
elemental impulses of the human breast has been borne to its grave
along with the slogans of a dying conception of politics and
economic policy.

We have here an occurrence of a mass-psychological character:
the German agricultural labourers can no longer adjust themselves
to the social conditions of life in their homeland. We have reports
of West Prussian landowners complaining about their labourers’
‘self-assertiveness’. The old patriarchal relationship between lord
and vassal is disappearing. But this is what attached the day-labourer
directly to the interests of the agricultural producers as a small
cultivator with a right to a share in the produce. Seasonal labour in
the beet-growing districts requires seasonal workers and payment
in money. They are faced with a purely proletarian existence, but
without the possibility of that energetic advance to economic
independence which gives added self-confidence to the industrial
proletarians who live cheek by jowl in the cities of the West. Those
who replace the Germans on the estates of the East are better able
to submit to these conditions of existence: I mean the itinerant
Polish workers, troops of nomads recruited by agents in Russia,
who cross the frontier in tens of thousands in spring, and leave
again in autumn. They first emerge in attendance upon the sugar-
beet, a crop which turns agriculture into a seasonal trade, then
they are everywhere, because one can save on workers’ dwellings,
on poor rates, on social obligations by using them, and further
because they are in a precarious position as foreigners and therefore
in the hands of the landowners. These are accompanying
circumstances of the economic death-struggle of Old Prussian
Junkerdom. On the sugar-beet estates a stratum of industrial
businessmen steps into the shoes of the patriarchally ruling lord
of the manor, while in the uplands the lands of the manorial
estates crumble away under the pressure of the crisis in the agrarian
economy. Tenants of small parcels and colonies of small peasants
arise on their outfields. The economic foundations of the power of
the old landed nobility vanish, and the nobility itself becomes
something other than what it was.

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434 Max Weber

And why is it the Polish peasants who are gaining the land? Is
it their superior economic intelligence, or their greater supply of
capital? It is rather the opposite of both these factors. Under a
climate, and on a soil, which favour the growing of cereals and
potatoes above all, alongside extensive cattle-raising, the person
who is least threatened by an unfavourable market is the one who
brings his products to the place where they are least devalued by a
collapse in prices: his own stomach. This is the person who pro-
duces/or his own requirements. And once again, the person who
can set his own requirements at the lowest level, the person who
makes the smallest physical and mental demands for the main-
tenance of his life, is the one with the advantage. The small Polish
peasant in East Germany is a type far removed from the bustling
peasant owner of a dwarf property, whom one may see here in
the well-favoured valley of the Rhine as he forges links with the
towns via greenhouse cultivation and market-gardening. The small
Polish peasant gains more land, because he as it were eats the very
grass from off of it, he gains not despite but on account of the low
level of his physical and intellectual habits of life.

We therefore seem to see a process of selection unfolding. Both
nationalities have for a long time been embedded in the same
conditions of existence. The consequence of this has not been
what vulgar materialists might have imagined, that they took on
the same physical and psychological qualities, but rather that one
yielded the ground to the other, that victory went to the nationality
which possessed the greater ability to adapt itself to the given
economic and social conditions of existence.

This difference in the ability to adapt seems to be present ready-
made, as a fixed magnitude. The nations’ respective abilities to
adapt might perhaps undergo further shifts in the course of many
generations, through the millennial process of breeding which no
doubt originally produced the difference, but for any reflections
on the present situation it is a factor with which we have to
reckon, as given.4

The free play of the forces of selection does not always work
out, as the optimists among us think, in favour of the nationality
which is more highly developed or more gifted economically. We
have just seen this. Human history does not lack examples of the
victory of less developed types of humanity and the extinction of
fine flowers of intellectual and emotional life, when the human
community which was their repository lost its ability to adapt to
the conditions of existence, either by reason of its social organiza-
tion or its racial characteristics. In our case it is the transformation
of the forms of agricultural enterprise and the tremendous crisis in
agriculture which is bringing to victory the less economically

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The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address) 435

developed nationality. The rise of sugar-beet cultivation and the
unprofitability of cereal production for the market are develop-
ments running parallel and in the same direction: the first breeds
the Polish seasonal worker, the second the small Polish peasant.

On looking back at the facts presented here, I am in no position,
as I shall willingly concede, to develop theoretically the signi-
ficance of the various general points which may be derived from
them. The immensely difficult question, certainly insoluble at
present, of where to place the limit of the variability of physical
and psychological qualities in a population under the influence of
its given conditions of existence is something I shall not even
venture to touch on.

Instead of this, everyone will automatically want to ask, above
all else: what can and should be done in this situation?

You will however permit me to abstain from an exhaustive
discussion of this on the present occasion, and to content myself
with briefly indicating the two demands which in my view should
be posed from the standpoint of Germanism, and are in fact being
posed with growing unanimity. The first is the demand for the
closing of the Eastern frontier. This was accomplished under
Prince Bismarck, and then reversed after his resignation in 1890:
permanent settlement remained forbidden to the aliens, but they
were permitted entry as migratory workers. A ‘class-conscious’ land-
owner at the head of the Prussian government excluded them in the
interests of the maintenance of our nationality, and the hated
opponent of the Agrarians [Caprivi] let them in, in the interests of
the big landowners, who are the only people to gain from this
influx. This demonstrates that the ‘economic class-standpoint’ is
not always decisive in matters of economic policy — here it was
the circumstance that the helm of the ship of state fell from a
strong hand into a weaker one. The other demand is for a policy
of systematic land purchase on the part of the state, i.e. the exten-
sion of crown lands on the one hand, and systematic colonization
by German peasants on suitable land, particularly on suitable
crown land, on the other hand. Large-scale enterprises which can
only be preserved at the expense of Germanism deserve from the
point of view of the nation to go down to destruction. To leave
them as they are without assistance means to allow unviable Slav
hunger colonies to arise by way of gradual fragmentation of the
estates into small parcels. And it is not only our interest in
stemming the Slav flood which requires the transfer of considerable
parts of the land of eastern Germany into the hands of the state,
but also the annihilating criticism the big landowners themselves
have made of the continued existence of their private property by
demanding the removal of the risk they run, their personal respon-

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436 Max Weber

sibility for their own property, which is its sole justification. I
refer to the proposal for the introduction of a corn monopoly
[the Kanitz proposal of 1894 for a state monopoly on the import
of corn into Germany] and the granting of a state contribution of
half a billion marks a year.5

But, as I said earlier, I would prefer not to discuss this practical
question of Prussian agrarian policy today. I would rather start
from the fact that such a question arises at all, the fact that we all
consider the German character of the East to be something that
should be protected, and that the economic policy of the state
should also enter into the lists in its defence. Our state is a national
state, and it is this circumstance which makes us feel we have a
right to make this demand.

However, how does the attitude assumed by economics relate to
this? Does it treat such nationalist value-judgments as prejudices,
of which it must carefully rid itself in order to be able to apply its
own specific standard of value to the economic facts, without
being influenced by emotional reflexes? And what is this standard
of value peculiar to economic policy (Volkswirtscbaftspolitik)’? I
should like to try to get closer to this question by making one or
two further observations.

As we have seen, the economic struggle between the nationalities
follows its course even under the semblance of ‘peace’. The
German peasants and day-labourers of the East are not being
pushed off the land in an open conflict by politically superior
opponents. Instead they are getting the worst of it in the silent
and dreary struggle of everyday economic existence, they are
abandoning their homeland to a race which stands on a lower level,
and moving towards a dark future in which they will sink without
trace. There can be no truce even in the economic struggle for
existence; only if one takes the semblance of peace for its reality
can one believe that peace and prosperity will emerge for our
successors at some time in the distant future. Certainly, the vulgar
conception of political economy is that it consists in working out
recipes for making the world happy; the improvement of the
‘balance of pleasure’ in human existence is the sole purpose of our
work that the vulgar conception can comprehend. However the
deadly seriousness of the population problem prohibits eudaemo-
nism; it prevents us from imagining that peace and happiness
lie hidden in the lap of the future, it prevents us from believing
that elbowroom in this earthly existence can be won in any other
way than through the hard struggle of human beings with each
other.

It is certain that there can be no work in political economy on
any other than an altruistic basis. The overwhelming majority of

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The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address) ‘ 437

the fruits of the economic, social and political endeavours of the
present are garnered not by the generation now alive but by the
generations of the future. If our work is to retain any meaning it
can only be informed by this: concern for the future, for those
who will come after us. But there can also be no real work in
political economy on the basis of optimistic dreams of happiness.
Abandon hope all ye who enter here: these words are inscribed
above the portals of the unknown future history of mankind. So
much for the dream of peace and happiness.

The question which leads us beyond the grave of our own
generation is not ‘how will human beings feel in the future’ but
‘how will they be’. In fact this question underlies all work in poli-
tical economy. We do not want to train up feelings of well-being in
people, but rather those characteristics we think constitute the
greatness and nobility of our human nature.

The doctrines of political economy have alternately placed in
the forefront or naively identified as standards of value either the
technical economic problem of the production of commodities or
the problem of their distribution, in other words ‘social justice*.
Yet again and again a different perception, in part unconscious,
but nevertheless all-dominating, has raised itself above both these
standards of value: the perception that a human science, and that
is what political economy is, investigates above all else the quality
of the human beings who are brought up in those economic and
social conditions of existence. And here we must be on our guard
against a certain illusion.

As a science of explanation and analysis political economy is
international, but as soon as it makes value judgments it is bound
up with the distinct imprint of humanity we find in our own
nature. We are often most bound to our own nature on precisely
those occasions when we think we have escaped our fleshly limi-
tations. And if — to use a somewhat fanciful image — we could
arise from the grave thousands of years hence, we would seek the
distant traces of our own nature in the physiognomy of the race
of the future. Even our highest, our ultimate, terrestrial ideals are
mutable and transitory. We cannot presume to impose them on
the future. But we can hope that the future recognises in our
nature the nature of its own ancestors. We wish to make ourselves
the forefathers of the race of the future with our labour and our
mode of existence.

The economic policy of a German state, and the standard of
value adopted by a German economic theorist, can therefore be
nothing other than a German policy and a German standard.

Has this situation perhaps changed since economic development
began to create an all-embracing economic community of nations,

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438 ‘ Max Weber

going beyond national boundaries? Is the ‘nationalistic’ standard
of evaluation to be thrown on the scrapheap along with ‘national
egoism’ in economic policy? Has the struggle for economic survival,
for the maintenance of one’s wife and children, been surmounted
now that the family has been divested of its original function as
an association for production, and meshed into the network of the
national economic community? We know that this is not the case:
the struggle has taken on other forms, forms about which one may
well raise the question of whether they should be viewed as a miti-
gation or indeed rather an intensification and a sharpening of the
struggle. In the same way, the world-wide economic community is
only another form of the struggle of the nations with each other,
and it aggravates rather than mitigating the struggle for the main-
tenance of one’s own culture, because it calls forth in the very
bosom of the nation material interests opposed to the nation’s
future, and throws them into the ring in alliance with the nation’s
enemies.

We do not have peace and human happiness to bequeath to our
posterity, but rather the eternal struggle for the maintenance and
improvement by careful cultivation of our national character. And
we should not abandon ourselves to the optimistic expectation
that we have done what is necessary once we have developed
economic progress to the highest possible level, and that the pro-
cess of selection in the freely conducted and ‘peaceful’ economic
struggle will thereupon automatically bring the victory to the
more highly developed human type.

Our successors will not hold us responsible before history for
the kind of economic organization we hand over to them, but
rather for the amount of elbow-room we conquer for them in the
world and leave behind us. Processes of economic development are
in the final analysis also power struggles, and the ultimate and
decisive interests at whose service economic policy must place
itself are the interests of national power, where these interests
are in question. The science of political economy is a political
science. It is a servant of politics, not the day-to-day politics of the
individuals and classes who happen to be ruling at a particular
time, but the lasting power-political interests of the nation. And
for us the national state is not, as some people believe, an indeter-
minate entity raised higher and higher into the clouds in proportion
as one clothes its nature in mystical darkness, but the temporal
power-organization of the nation, and in this national state the
ultimate standard of value for economic policy is ‘reason of
state*. There is a strange misinterpretation of this view current
to the effect that we advocate ‘state assistance’ instead of ‘self-
help’, state regulation of economic life instead of the free play of

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The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address) 439

economic forces. We do not. Rather we wish under this slogan of
‘reason of state’ to raise the demand that for questions of German
economic policy — including the question of whether, and how
far, the state should intervene in economic life, and when it should
rather untie the economic forces of the nation and tear down the
barriers in the way of their free development — the ultimate and
decisive voice should be that of the economic and political interests
of our nation’s power, and the vehicle of that power, the German
national state.

Has it been superfluous to recall things that appear to go with-
out saying? Or was it unnecessary for precisely a younger
representative of economic science to recall these matters? I do
not think so, for it appears that our generation is liable very easily
to lose sight of these simple bases for judgement. We have witnessed
a hitherto unimaginable growth in the present generation’s interest
in the burning issues of our field of science. Everywhere we find
an advance in the popularity of the economic method of approach.
Social policy has become the central preoccupation instead of
politics, economic relations of power instead of legal relations,
cultural and economic history instead of political history. In the
outstanding works of our historical colleagues we find that today
instead of telling us about the warlike deeds of our ancestors they
dilate at length about ‘mother-right’, that monstrous notion, and
force into a subordinate clause the victory of the Huns on the
Catalaunian Plain. One of our most ingenious theorists was self-
confident enough to believe he could characterize jurisprudence as
‘the handmaiden of political economy’. And one thing is certainly
true: the economic form of analysis has penetrated into juris-
prudence itself. Even its most intimate regions, the treatises on the
Pandects, are beginning to be quietly haunted by economic ideas.
And in the verdicts of the courts of law it is not rare to find so-
called ‘economic grounds’ put in where legal concepts are unable
to fill the bill. In short, to use the half-reproachful phrase of a
legal colleague: we have ‘come into fashion’. A method of analysis
which is so confidently forging ahead is in danger of falling into
certain illusions and exaggerating the significance of its own point
of view. This exaggeration occurs in a quite specific direction. Just
as the extension of the material of philosophical reflection —
already made apparent externally through the fact that nowadays
we frequently find e.g. prominent physiologists occupying the old
Chairs of Philosophy — has led laymen to the opinion that the
old questions of the nature of human knowledge are no longer
the ultimate and central questions of philosophy, so in the field
of political economy the notion has grown in die minds of the
coming generation that the work of economic science has not only

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440 Max Weber

immensely extended our knowledge of the nature of human
communities, but also provided a completely new standard by
which these phenomena can ultimately be evaluated, that political
economy is in a position to extract from its material its own
specific ideals. The notion that there exist independent economic
or ‘socio-political’ ideals is revealed as an optical illusion as soon as
one seeks to establish these ‘peculiar’ canons of evaluation by
using the literature produced by our science. We are confronted
instead with a chaotic mass of standards of value, partly eudaemo-
nistic, partly ethical, and often both present together in an am-
biguous identification. Value-judgments are made everywhere
in a nonchalant and spontaneous manner, and if we abandon the
evaluation of economic phenomena we in fact abandon the very
accomplishment which is being demanded of us. But it is not the
general rule, in fact it is well-nigh exceptional, for the maker of a
judgment to clarify for others and for himself the nature of the
ultimate subjective core of his judgments, to make clear the ideals
on the basis of which he proceeds to judge the events he is observing-,
there is a lack of conscious self-inspection, the internal contra-
dictions of his judgment do not come to the writer’s notice, and
where he seeks to give a general formulation of his specifically
‘economic’ principle of judgment he falls into vagueness and
indeterminacy. In truth, the ideals we introduce into the substance
of our science are not peculiar to it, nor have we worked them out
independently: they are old-established human ideals of a general
type. Only he who proceeds exclusively from the pure Platonic
interest of the technologist, or, inversely, the actual interests of a
particular class, whether a ruling or a subject class, can expect to
derive his own standard of judgment from the material itself.

And is it so unnecessary for us, the younger representatives of
the German historical school, to keep in sight these extremely
simple truths? By no means, for we in particular are liable to
fall victim to a special kind of illusion: the illusion that we can
entirely do without conscious value-judgments of our own. The
result is of course, and the evidence is quite convincing on this
point, that we do not remain true to this intention but rather fall
prey to uncontrolled instincts, sympathies, and antipathies. And
it is still more likely to happen that the point of departure we
adopt in analysing and explaining economic events unconsciously
becomes determinant in our judgment of the events. We shall
perhaps have to be on our guard lest the very qualities of the dead
and living masters of our school to which they and their science
owed its success turn in our case into weaknesses. In practice we
have essentially to consider the following two different points of
departure in economic analysis.

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The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address) 441

Either we look at economic development mainly from above:
we proceed from the heights of the administrative history of the
larger German states, pursuing to its origins the way they have
administered economic and social affairs and their attitude to
these matters. In that case we involuntarily become their apolo-
gists. If — let us keep to our original example — the administration
decides to close the Eastern border, we are ready and inclined to
view the decision as the conclusion of a historical development,
which as a result of the gigantic reverberations of the past has
posed great tasks the present-day state must fulfil in the interest of
the maintenance of our national culture. If on the other hand that
decision is not taken it is very easy for us to believe that radical
interventions of that kind are in part unnecessary and in part do
not correspond any longer to present-day views.

Or, and this is the other starting-point, we may view economic
development more from below, we may look at the great spectacle
of the emancipatory struggles of rising classes emerging from the
chaos of conflicts of economic interest, we may observe the way
in which the balance of economic power shifts in their favour.
Then we unconsciously take sides with the rising classes, because
they are the stronger, or are beginning to be so. They seem to
prove, precisely because they are victorious, that they represent a
type of humanity that stands on a higher level ‘economically’: it
is all too easy for the historian to succumb to the idea that the
victory of the more highly developed element in the struggle is
a matter of course, and that defeat in the struggle for existence is
a symptom of ‘backwardness*. And every new sign of the shift of
power gives satisfaction to the historian, not only because it
confirms his observations, but because, half unconsciously, he
senses it as a personal triumph: history is honouring the bills he
has drawn on it. Without being aware of it, he observes the resis-
tance that development finds in its path with a certain animosity;
it seems to him to be not simply the natural result of the inter-
play of various inevitably divergent interests, but to some extent
a rebellion against the ‘judgment of history’ as formulated by the
historian. But criticism must also be made of processes which
appear to us to be the unreflected result of tendencies of historical
development; and precisely here, where there is most need of it,
the critical spirit deserts us. In any case, there is a very obvious
temptation on the historian to become a part of the camp-following
of the victor in the economic struggle for power, and to forget
that economic power and the vocation for political leadership of
the nation do not always coincide.

With this we now arrive at a final series of reflections belonging
more to the realm of practical politics. There is only one political

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442 Max Weber

standard of value which is supreme for us economic nationalists,
and it is by this standard that we also measure the classes which
either have the leadership of the nation in their hands or are
striving for it. What we are concerned with is their political
maturity, i.e. their understanding of the lasting economic and
political interests of the nation’s power and their ability to place
these interests above all other considerations if the occasion
demands. A nation is favoured by destiny if the naive identification
of the interests of one’s own class with the general interest also
corresponds to the interests of national power. And it is one of the
delusions which arise from the modern over-estimation of the
‘economic’ in the usual sense of the word when people assert that
feelings of political community cannot maintain themselves in
face of the full weight of divergent economic interests, indeed that
very possibly these feelings are merely the reflection of the
economic basis underlying those changing interests. This is
approximately accurate only in times of fundamental social trans-
formation. One thing can certainly be said: among nations like the
English, who are not confronted daily with the dependence of
their economic prosperity on their situation of political power, the
instinct for these specifically political interests does not, at least
not as a rule, dwell in the broad masses of the people, for they are
occupied in the fight to secure their daily needs. It would be
unfair to expect them to possess this understanding. But in great
moments, in the case of war, their souls too become conscious of
the significance of national power. Then it emerges that the
national state rests on deep and elemental psychological founda-
tions within the broad economically subordinate strata of the
nation as well, that it is by no means a mere ‘superstructure’, the
organisation of the economically dominant classes. It is just that
in normal times this political instinct sinks below the level of
consciousness for the masses. In that case the specific function of
the economically and politically leading strata is to be the
repositories of political understanding. This is in fact the sole poli-
tical justification for their existence.

At all times it has been the attainment of economic power
which has led to the emergence within a given class of the notion
that it has a claim to political leadership. It is dangerous, and in
the long term incompatible with the interests of the nation when
an economically declining class is politically dominant. But it is
still more dangerous when classes which are beginning to achieve
economic power and thereby the expectation of political domina-
tion are not yet politically mature enough to assume the direction
of the state. Germany is at present under threat from both these
directions, and this is in truth the key to understanding the present

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The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address) 443

dangers of our situation. The changes in the social structure of
eastern Germany, with which the phenomena discussed at the
outset are linked, also belong within this larger context.

Right up to the present time in Prussia the dynasty has been
politically based on the social stratum of the Prussian Junkers.
The dynasty created the Prussian state against them, but only
with their assistance was it possible. I know full well that the
word ‘Junker’ resonates harshly in South German ears. It will
perhaps be thought that if I now say a word in their favour, I shall
be speaking a ‘Prussian’ language. I cannot be sure. Even today in
Prussia the Junkers have open to them many paths to influence
and power, many ways to the ear of the monarch, which are not
available to every citizen; they have not always used this power
in accordance with their responsibility before history, and there
is no reason for a bourgeois scholar like myself to love them. But
despite all this the strength of their political instincts is one of
the most tremendous resources which could have been applied
to the service of the state’s power-interests. They have done their
work now, and today are in the throes of an economic death-
struggle, and no kind of economic policy on the part of the
state could bring back their old social character. Moreover the
tasks of the present are quite different from those they might be
able to solve. The last and greatest of the Junkers stood at the
head of Germany for a quarter of a century, and the future will
very likely find the tragic element in his career as a statesman,
alongside his incomparable greatness, in something which even
today is hidden from view for many people: in the fact that the
work of his hands, the nation to which he gave unity, gradually
and irresistibly altered its economic structure even while he was in
office, and became something different, a people compelled to
demand other institutions than those he could grant to them,
or those his autocratic nature could adapt itself to. In the final
analysis it is this fate which brought about the partial failure of
his life’s work. For this was intended to lead not just to the
external but to the inner unification of the nation, and, as every
one of us knows, that has not been achieved. With his means he
could not achieve it. And when, last winter, ensnared by the
graciousness of his monarch, he made his way into the splendidly
decorated capital of the Reich, there were many people who felt —
I can vouch for this — as if the Kyffhauser legend was about to
come true, felt that the Sachsenwald had opened up and the long-
lost hero was emerging from its depths.6 But this feeling was not
shared by everyone. For it seemed as if the cold breath of historical
impermanence could be sensed in the January air. A strangely
oppressive feeling overcame us, as if a ghost had stepped down from

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444 Max Weber

a great past epoch and were going about among a new generation,
and through a world become alien to it.

The manors of the East were the points of support for the ruling
class of Prussia, which was scattered over the countryside, they
were the social point of contact for the bureaucracy. But with their
decline, with the disappearance of the social character of the old
landed nobility, the centre of gravity of the political intelligentsia
is shifting irresistibly towards the towns. This displacement is the
decisive political aspect of the agrarian development of the East.

But whose are the hands into which the political function of the
Junkers is passing, and what kind of political vocation do they
have?

I am a member of the bourgeois classes. I feel myself to be a
bourgeois, and I have been brought up to share their views and
ideals. But it is the task of precisely our science to say what people
do not like to hear — to those above us, to those below us, and also
to our own class — and when I ask myself whether the German
bourgeoisie is at present ripe to be the leading political class of the
nation, I cannot answer this question in the affirmative today. The
German state was not created by the bourgeoisie with its own
strength, and when it had been created, there stood at the head of
the nation that Cacsar-like figure hewn out of quite other than
bourgeois timber. Great power-political tasks were not set a second
time for the nation to accomplish: only much later on, timidly,
and half unwillingly, did an overseas ‘power policy’ begin, a policy
which does not deserve the name.

And after the nation’s unity had thus been achieved, and its poli-
tical ‘satiation’ was an established fact, a peculiarly ‘unhistoricaP
and unpolitical mood came over the growing race of German
bourgeois, drunk as it was with success and thirsty for peace.
German history appeared to have come to an end. The present
was the complete fulfilment of past millennia. Who was inclined
to question whether the future might judge otherwise? Indeed it
seemed as if modesty forbade world history from going over to
the order of the day, from resuming its day-to-day course after
these successes of the German nation. Today we are more sober,
and it is seemly to make the attempt to lift the veil of illusions
which has hidden the position of our generation in the historical
development of the fatherland. And it seems to me that if we do
this we shall judge differently. Over our cradle stood the most
frightful curse history has ever handed to any race as a birthday-
gift: the hard destiny of the political epigone.

Do we not see his miserable countenance wherever we look
in the fatherland? Those of us who have retained the capacity to
hate pettiness have recognised, with passionate and furious sorrow,

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The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address) 445

the petty manoeuvring of political epigones in the events of the
last few months, for which bourgeois politicians are responsible
first and foremost, in far too much of what has been said recently
in the German parliament, and in a certain amount of what has
been said to it. The gigantic sun which stood at its zenith in
Germany and caused the German name to shine forth in the furthest
corners of the earth was too strong for us, it might almost seem,
and burnt out the bourgeoisie’s slowly developing sense of political
judgment. For where is this to be seen at the present moment?

One section of the haute bourgeoisie longs all too shamelessly for
the coming of a new Caesar, who will protect them in two directions:
from beneath against the rising masses of the people, from above
against the socio-political impulses they suspect the German
dynasties of harbouring.

And another section has long been sunk in that political Phili-
stinism from which broad strata of the lower middle classes have
never awakened. Already when the first positive political task
began to come on the nation’s horizon, after the wars of unifica-
tion — I mean the idea of overseas expansion — this section of the
bourgeoisie lacked the simplest economic understanding of what it
means for Germany’s trade in far-off oceans when the German flag
waves on the surrounding coasts.

The political immaturity of broad strata of the German bour-
geoisie is not due to economic causes, nor is it due to the much-
bruited ‘interest polities’, which is present in no less a degree in
other nations than the German. The explanation lies in its
unpolitical past, in the fact that one cannot make up in a decade
for a missing century of political education, and that the domination
of a great man is not always an appropriate instrument for such a
process. And this is now the vital question for the political future
of the German bourgeoisie: is it too late for it to catch up on its
political education? No economic factor can make up for this loss.

Will other classes become the repositories of a politically greater
future? The modern proletariat is self-confidently announcing itself
as the heir of the ideals of the middle classes. What then of its
claim to inherit the political leadership of the nation?

If anyone were to say of the German working class at present
that it was politically mature, or on the road to political maturity,
he would be a flatterer, a seeker after the dubious accolade of
popularity.

The highest strata of the German working class are far more
mature economically than the possessing classes in their egoism
would like to admit, and it is with justification that the working
class demands the freedom to put forward its interests in the
form of the openly organised struggle for economic power. Politi-

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446 Max Weber

cally the German working class is infinitely less mature than a
clique of journalists, who would like to monopolise its leading
positions, are trying to make the working class itself believe. In
the circles of these declasse bourgeois they like to amuse themselves
with reminiscences of an epoch now one hundred years in the past.
In some cases they have even succeeded in convincing other people:
here and there anxious souls see in them the spiritual successors of
the men of the Convention. But they are infinitely more harmless
than they appear to themselves, for there lives in them not one
glimmer of that Catiline energy of the deed which agitated the
halls of the Convention. By the same token however they possess
no trace of the Convention’s tremendous national passion. Wretched
political manipulators — that is what they are. They lack the
grand power instincts of a class destined for political leadership.
The workers are led to believe that only the upholders of capital’s
interests are at present politically opposed to giving them a share
in state power. It is not so. They would find very few traces of a
community of interest with capital if they investigated the study-
rooms of Germany’s scholars and intellectuals.

However the workers too must be asked about their political
maturity. There is nothing more destructive for a great nation than
to be led by politically uneducated philistines, and the German
proletariat has not yet lost this character of philistinism; that is
why we are politically opposed to the proletariat. Why is the
proletariat of England and France constituted differently, in
part? The reason is not only the longer period of economic educa-
tion accomplished by the English workers’ organised fight for
their interests; we have once again what is above all a political
element to bear in mind: the resonance of a position of world
power. This constantly poses for the state great power-political
tasks and gives the individual a political training which we might
call ‘chronic’, whereas with us the training is only received when
our borders are threatened, i.e. in ‘acute’ cases. The question of
whether a policy on the grand scale can again place before us the
significance of the great political issues of power is also decisive
for our development. We must understand that the unification of
Germany was a youthful prank committed by the nation at an
advanced age, and should rather have been avoided on grounds of
excessive cost if it was to form the conclusion instead of the point
of departure for a policy of German world power.

The threatening danger in our situation is this: the bourgeois
classes, as repositories of the power-interests of the nation, seem
to be withering, and there is still no sign that the workers have
begun to mature so that they can take their place.

The danger does not lie with the masses, as is believed by

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The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address) 447

people who stare as if hypnotised at the depths of society. The
final content of the socio-political problem is not the question of
the economic situation of theruled but of thepolitical qualifications
of the ruling and rising classes. The aim of our socio-political
activity is not world happiness but the social unification of the
nation, which has been split apart by modern economic develop-
ment, for the severe struggles of the future. At present the bour-
geoisie is carrying the burden of these struggles, but it is becoming
too heavy. Only if we were in fact to succeed in creating a ‘labour
aristocracy’, of the kind we now miss in the workers’ movement,
which would be the repository of its political sense, only then
could the burden be transferred to the broader shoulders of the
workers. But that moment still seems a long way away.

For the present, however, one thing is clear: there is an immense
labour of political education to be performed, and no more serious
duty exists for us than that of fulfilling this task, each of us in his
narrow circle of activity. The ultimate goal of our science must
remain that of cooperating in xhepolitical education of our nation.
The economic development of periods of transition threatens the
natural political instincts with decomposition; it would be a mis-
fortune if economic science also moved towards the same objective,
by breeding a weak eudaemonism, in however intellectualised a
form, behind the illusion of independent ‘socio-political’ ideals.

Of course we do have to remember, and for that very reason,
that it is the opposite of political education when one seeks to
formulate a vote of no confidence, paragraph by paragraph,
against the nation’s future social peace, or when the secular arm
reaches for the hand of the church to give support to the temporal
authorities. But the opposite of political education is also pro-
claimed by the stereotyped yelping of the ever growing chorus
of the social politicians of the woods and fields — if I may be
forgiven the expression. And the same may be said of that soften-
ing of attitude which is human, amiable, and worthy of respect,
but at the same time unspeakably narrowing in its effects, and
leads people to think they can replace political with ‘ethical’
ideals, and to identify these in turn harmlessly with optimistic
expectations of felicity.

In spite of the great misery of the masses, which burdens the
sharpened social conscience of the new generation, we have to
confess openly that one thing weighs on us even more heavily
today: the sense of our responsibility before history. Our genera-
tion is not destined to see whether the struggle we are engaged
in will bear fruit, whether posterity will recognise us as its
forerunners. We shall not succeed in exorcising the curse that
hangs over us: the curse of being posthumous to a great political

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448 Max Weber

epoch. Instead we shall have to learn how to be something different:
the precursors of an even greater epoch. Will that be our place in
history? I do not know, and all I will say is this: youth has the
right to stand up for itself and for its ideals. And it is not years
which make a man old. He is young as long as he is able to remain
sensitive to the grand passions nature has placed within us. And
so — you will allow me to conclude with this — a great nation
does not age beneath the burden of a thousand years of glorious
history. It remains young if it has the capacity and the courage
to keep faith with itself and with the grand instincts it has been
given, and when its leading strata are able to raise themselves
into the hard and clear atmosphere in which the sober activity
of German politics flourishes, an atmosphere which is also pervaded
by the solemn splendour of national sentiment.

Translated by Ben Fowkes

Notes

1. Gemeindelexikon, Berlin, 1887.
2. This administrative subdivision is more characteristic evidence of social
stratification than a division on the basis of the size of the enterprise. In the
plains manorial enterprises of less than 100 hectares are not uncommon, nor,
conversely, are peasant enterprises of more than 200 hectares in the hills.
3. For example the manorial estates of the district of Stuhm experienced a
decline in population of 6.7 per cent between 1871 and 1885, and the pro-
portion of Protestants in the Christian population fell from 33.4 per cent to
31.3 per cent. The villages of the district of Konitz and Tuchel increased in
population by 8 per cent and the proportion of Catholics rose from 84.7 per
cent to 86.0 per cent.
4. I need hardly point out the irrelevance for the above comments of the
disputes in natural science over the significance of the principles of selection,
or over the general application in natural science of the concept of ‘breeding’,
and all the discussions which have taken this their starting-point. This is in
any case not my field. However, the concept of ‘selection’ is today common
ground, just as much as is, e.g., the heliocentric hypothesis, and the idea of
‘breeding’ human beings is as old as the Platonic state. Both these concepts
are employed e.g. by F. A. Lange in his Arbeiterfrage [Die Arbeiterfrage in
ibrer Bedeutung für Gegenwart und Zukunft, (Duisburg, 1865)] and they
have long been so familar to us that a misunderstanding of their meaning is
impossible for anyone who knows our literature. More difficult to answer is
the question of how much lasting value should be attached to the latest
attempts of anthropologists to extend Darwin’s and Weismann’s selection
concept to the field of economic investigation. They are ingenious, but
arouse considerable reservations as to method and factual results, and are no
doubt mistaken in a number of exaggerated versions. Nevertheless the
writings of e.g. Otto Ammon (‘Natural selection in man’, ‘The social order
and its natural basis’) deserve more attention than they have been given,

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The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address) 449

irrespective of all the reservations that have to be made. One weakness of
most of the contributions made from natural scientific quarters to the illumi-
nation of the problems of our science consists in their mistaken ambition to
provide above all a ‘refutation’ of socialism. Their eagerness to attain this
goal leads to the involuntary conversion of what was intended to be a ‘natural-
scientific theory’ of the social order into an apology for it.
5. The same train of thought as mine led Professor Schmoller too to pose the
demand for state purchase of land in his journal (Schmollers Jahrbuch, 19,
1895, pp. 625ff.). In fact that part of the stratum of big landowners whose
retention as agricultural managers is desirable from the state’s point of view
cannot in most cases be allowed to keep their land in full ownership but only
as tenants of the crown demesne. I am certainly of the opinion that the
purchase of land only has long-term validity if organically combined with the
colonization of suitable crown lands, with the result that a part of the land
in the East passes through the hands of the state and while it is in this position
undergoes an energetic course of improvement with the assistance of state
credits. The Settlement Commission [set up in 1886 to buy Polish estates
and settle German farmers on them. Trans.l has to contend with two diffi-
culties in this connection. One is that it is burdened with the ‘after-effects of
the cure’, in the shape of the colonists who have been planted and who ought
preferably to be handed over after a while, along with their requests to post-
pone repayment to the ordinary state treasury, which is somewhat more hard-
hearted than the Commission. The other difficulty derives from the fact that
the estates which have been purchased have been for the most part in the
hands of crown tenants for over a decade. Now the improvement must be
carried out at breakneck speed and with great losses by the administration
itself, although certainly a large number of crown lands would be suitable
for immediate colonization. The consequent dilatoriness of the procedure
does not by any means justify the judgment of Hans Delbrück on the national-
political impact, delivered in his many well-known articles in the Preussische
Jahrbücher. A merely mechanical calculation, comparing the number of
peasant farms founded with the number of Poles, is not conclusive proof for
anyone who has observed the civilizing effect of colonization on the spot: a
few villages with a dozen German farms each will eventually Germanise many
square miles, naturally with the pre-condition that the flood of proletarian
reinforcements from the East is dammed up, and that we do not cut the
ground from under the feet of those who are bringing progress, by leaving
the big estates to the free play of the forces which are leading to their frag-
mentation and ruin, and are acting with even less restraint now thanks to the
laws on renting land in perpetuity.
6. This is a reference by Weber to the old German legend that the Emperor
Frederick Barbarossa was not dead but waiting in the heart of the Kyffhäuser
mountains in Thuringia to come forth and lead the German people against
their enemies. Bismarck’s own estate was located in the Sachsenwald [Trans.].

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