From Weimar Culture (Peter Gay, 2001) pp36-7
Unlike the art historians and the psychoanalysts, the republican intellectuals practicing political science were directly, deliberately — I am tempted to say defiantly — involved in the political life of the Republic and sought to influence its course — or, rather, those who were setting its course.
Political science had been a victim of the German Empire. German Staatswissenschaft of the 1850s and 1860s had made pioneering investigations into comparative government and public administration. But with the advent of Bismarck’s Second Reich, political scientists, like other liberals, came to concentrate on the relatively harmless branch of political science, public law, which trained submissive officials rather than free intellectuals. The study of “social and political reality,” Franz Neumann wrote later, from his American vantage point, “found virtually no place in German university life. Scholarship meant essentially two things: speculation and book learning. Thus what we call social and political science was largely carried on outside the universities.” Of course, Neumann continues, there was one exception: Max Weber, who possessed “a unique combination of a theoretical frame” combined with “a mastery of a tremendous number of data, and a full awareness of the political responsibility of the scholar.” Yet Weber had little influence at home. “It is characteristic of German social science that it virtually destroyed Weber by an almost exclusive concentration upon the discussion of his methodology. Neither his demand for empirical studies nor his insistence upon the responsibility of the scholar were heeded.” It is “in the United States,” Neumann significantly concludes, “that Weber really came to life.”
..p89..
The ideology that continued to dominate the German historical profession through the twenties was tenacious in part because it had a long history of its own; it could invoke a figure as charismatic for German historians as the personages of the German past were for the German people: Leopold von Ranke. Beyond doubt, Ranke was a very great historian; it must be confessed that if German historians often took a high tone of self-congratulation, they had much to congratulate themselves on. Ranke was a pioneer in the use of archives, a master of complex materials, a splendid dramatist, and the founder of a new style of historical thinking. Ranke’s central doctrines – the autonomy of the historian and his duty to understand each segment of the past from within – were of enormous service to the profession. But in the hands of German historians in the late Empire and the young Republic, the autonomy of history turned into its isolation. The segregation of history from ethics drove most German historians into a passive acceptance of things as they were, and the segregation of history from other disciplines alienated most German historians from the social sciences. For all his acknowledged historical erudition, most historians dismissed Max Weber as an “outsider”;“ for all his extravagance, the medievalist Georg von Below spoke for his fellows when he insisted that historians could “do without a new science of ‘sociology.’”
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