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Updated: May 2, 2025
The tendency to look down upon the Balkan States from the fancied heights of a superior "culture" has never been so marked in France or Britain as in Germany, where the Press is now engaged in comparing their own cultural exploits in Belgium with the lack of culture displayed by the "bandits" and "assassins" of Serbia, and where a man of such scientific distinction as Werner Sombart can describe the heroic kingdom of Montenegro as "nothing but a bad joke in the history of the world!"
Indeed the admiring throng rushed to the stage to shower him with admiration. "Das war aber zu schon!" sighed a dowager near me. "Ja, ja, wunderbar. Ein Berliner Professor!" I investigated Professor Sombart and learned from authority which is beyond question that he was an out and out Government agent foisted on to the University of Berlin against the wishes of its faculty.
Such a theory as syndicalism, declares Sombart, "could only have grown up in a country possessing so high a culture as France; that it could have been thought out only by minds of the nicest perception, by people who have become quite blasé, whose feelings require a very strong stimulus before they can be stirred; people who have something of the artistic temperament, and, consequently, look disdainfully on what has been called 'Philistinism' on business, on middle-class ideals, and so forth.
In the early nineties Engels saw the beginning of this change, and, in what Sombart rightly says may be looked upon as a kind of "political last will and testament" to the movement, Engels writes: "The time for small minorities to place themselves at the head of the ignorant masses and resort to force in order to bring about revolutions is gone.
"They are good-natured, gentlemanly, cultured people," says Sombart; "people with spotless linen, good manners and fashionably dressed wives; people with whom one holds social intercourse as with one's equals; people who would at first sight hardly be taken as the representatives of a new movement whose object it is to prevent socialism from becoming a mere middle-class belief."
They are, as it were, the fine silk as contrasted with the plain wool of ordinary people. They detest the common, everyday round as much as they hate what is natural; they might be called 'Social Sybarites. Such are the people who have created the syndicalist system." On one point Sombart is wrong.
"What is one to think when Sombart asks his readers: 'What single cultural work has emerged from the great shop, England, since Shakespeare except that political abortion the English State? "If I had to answer Sombart I should say, the great shop has given the English State practically everything which makes for internal peace, solidarity and national health.
I soon felt that if Lissauer is the Horace of Hate, Sombart is its Demosthenes. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George. No, we must go far beyond that. We must hate the very essence of everything English. We must hate the very soul of England. An abysmal gulf yawns between the two nations which can never, and must never, be bridged over.
Professor Werner Sombart, who for years has watched the world movement more carefully perhaps than anyone else, has pointed out that there is a strong tendency to uniformity in all countries a "tendency," in his own words, "of the movement in all lands toward socialism."
When I ventured to say to him that not all of the thousands of people who belong to a class or club at Hull-House could possibly know my personal opinions, and to mildly inquire upon what he founded his assertions, he triumphantly replied that I had once admitted to him that I had read Sombart and Loria, and that anyone of sound mind must see the inevitable conclusions of such master reasonings.
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