In Memoriam

Remembering Gerd Schroeter

Alan Sica

Canadian Journal of Sociology 24, 2 (Spring 1999)

To learn that someone has died unexpectedly or prematurely is always shocking, especially when the dead is so undeserving of a hasty departure. Gerd Schroeter’s sudden disappearance from the intellectual scene reminds me of how good he was at what he did, and how he overcame with laconic humor and honesty what Adorno called the “damaged life” — that bitter fruit of the Second World War. He was once characterized by a mutual friend of ours in Kansas as possessed of “an ear for the queer,” which I took to be a compliment as much as an analysis. He knew first-hand the peculiarities of history and odd quirks of fate, which visited him one last time long before they should have.

I last saw Gerd at the recent ASA meeting in Toronto after a lapse of a decade or so, and he seemed as agelessly congenial and sincerely engaging as ever. He was that slightly built kind of enduring creature who, with a twinkle in the eyes, one imagines will last forever, chattering on into his late 80s about earlier days long after most of his generation have disappeared. To have him slip away in the night, and without having had the chance for another talk or letter, is truly an unsettling event.

Recently the American Sociological Association agreed to help set up a national archive of sociological materials in the library at Penn State. Among the most interesting materials that will eventually be deposited there, I suspect, will be private letters sociologists have thought to preserve — which prompts the following archivally anchored tale, of the sort I think Gerd would have liked. During the mid-80s, Gerd and I shared the editing duties of a fledgling journal called History of Sociology, while I served as its amateur publisher. Its immediate predecessor was the Journal of the History of Sociology, begun in 1978. In its second year I was asked to become its book review editor, mainly because I had submitted a manuscript which argued that Weber and Pareto knew of each other and chose not to cite each other’s work — a contention which at the time was heretical and, I thought, somewhat provocative given their respective attitudes toward “the irrational” in social action.

Looking into my letter files, I have found in “Folder 1" my first two letters from Gerd, one dated November 20, 1978 to Glenn Jacobs, then editor of the JHS, and another from December 12, 1978 directed to me, in response to my “answer” to his critique of the paper I had submitted. In all the years since, through hundreds of manuscript reviews I have read — as editor of Sociological Theory, associate editor of both AJS and ASR, and so on — I cannot remember having seen any more intelligently informed, precise, and genuinely useful criticisms than those Gerd provided me in my first attempt at publication in a refereed journal. To illustrate his character, allow me to quote from his remarks, wishing I could give them entirely:

This is a most interesting manuscript, well-organized, generally well-written, focused on a specific question and obviously germane to fostering a more accurate “history of sociology”. (My one qualification is that I find footnote 1 excessively long — it turns out, indeed, to be rather a “red herring.”)
I have no doubts that the essay should be published, but to make it even better, would like to raise the following points:

1. The “omphalos” of Sica’s article is clearly the discovery that Weber’s habilitation was published in Vol. II of Biblioteca di Storia Economica. This has, however, been previously pointed out (without details or even a reference) by Piet Tommissin, “Vilfredo Pareto,” in KLASSIKER DES SOZIOLOGISCHEN DENKENS. Ed. Dirk Käsler. Vol. I (1976), p. 476, fn. 4. [In his review in AJS, LXXXIV (Sept. 1978), pp. 486–488, Guy Oakes calls this essay “the most ambitious piece of scholarship” in a collection which “surpasses any comparable volumes in the Anglo-American literature”.] Tommissin also refers to Julien Freund, VILFREDO PARETO. LA THEORIE DE L’EQUILIBRE (Paris: Seghers, 1974), pp. 187–192, where the possible Weber-Pareto connections are apparently discussed. [Tommissin’s fn 322]. I don’t have access to the Freund book.

2. Concerning Pareto’s knowledge of German, Tommissin points to a letter written in 1894 to Knud Wicksell (contained in Vol. XIX of the Librairie Droz series) where he claims that his knowledge of German is poor/inadequate. Kurt Wolff points out in his essay in TRYING SOCIOLOGY (p. 7) that “Pareto knew no German.” (Eisermann is a lot more likely to be right on this question, though.)

3. Concerning Weber’s knowledge of Italian, there is an interesting account in Roberto Michels’ article, “Max Weber,” Nuovo Antologia, CCIX (1920), p. 360:

Dell’Italia il Weber aveva un concetto simpatico. Aveva un’alta opinione della scienza economica, e piu ancora, di quella politica italiana. Apprezzo il Loria che connobbe personalmente a Torino. Ebbe un’idea altissima del Machiavelli, del Botero e, tra i moderni, di Gaetano Mosca. Parlava italiano, se non con purezza, con sufficiente disinvoltura. Lo ricordo in un pranzo di amici, a Torino, dall’on...


Schroeter’s letter goes on like this, in several languages, for another full page, through “point 7,” each of them precisely anchored in the literature, and all helpful to me in clarifying and amplifying the argument, even when I disagreed with the conclusions he took from what he’d read. I wrote him a detailed response to every point — novice professors have lots of energy for that sort of thing — and he swiftly answered with another two-page letter, in a thoroughly gentlemanly, persistently helpful manner: “Let me point out that I appreciated your comments fully as much as you appreciated mine, since I too work in isolation (undoubtedly even more so in the ‘physical’ sense than you do)....Your letter is every bit as interesting as your manuscript: are you trying to live up to Nietzsche’s insightful observation reflected in Aphorism 319 of Human, All Too Human?”
As his letters demonstrate, Gerd was altruistic to an extreme, handing over to me (and anybody else who asked) the fruits of his own meticulous research, very little of which he ever published (his dissertation on Geiger ought to have become a book, I have no doubt). I do not know of scholars like Schroeter anymore, though they may be out there, quietly living the life of patient kindness, aiding their fellow researchers selflessly. But I doubt it. His death reminds me, too heavily perhaps, of what is suddenly and irreplaceably lost, in terms of sheer knowledge and genteel interaction, when people like him become absent from our world.


Publications

1969 “Protection of confidentiality in the courts: The professions,” Social Problems 16: 376–85

1977 “The Buckskin Curtain as Shibboleth and Security-blanket”. Journal of Ethnic Studies, 4, 4(Winter 1977): 85–94 [Four Canadian books on natives published in 1975]

1978 “In search of ethnicity: Multiculturalism in Canada.” Journal of Ethnic Studies, 6, 1 (Spring1978): 98–107 [First three volumes in the “Generations” series]

1980 “Max Weber as outsider: His nominal influence on German sociology in the Twenties. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16: 317–332 [Reprinted in Peter Hamilton ed., Max Weber: Critical Assessments 1, pp. 33–51, London: Routledge, 1991) Volume I]

1980/81 “From discord to professionalization: German sociology since the Second World War.” Journal of the History of Sociology 3(1): 112–118 [Günter Lüschen, ed., Deutsche Soziologie seit 1945: Entwicklungsrichtungen und Praxisbezug. 1979]

1980 “History of sociology as discourse.” Contemporary Sociology 9: 517–519 [Dirk Käsler, ed., Klassiker des soziologischen Denkens. Vol. I: Von Comte bis Durkheim; Vol. II: Von Weber bis Mannheim. 1967/78]

1982 “Weber and Weimar: A response to Factor and Turner.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 18: 157–162

1984 “Where there’s smoke, there’s ire.” The Canadian Journal of Sociology 9: 193–194

1985 “Dialogue, Debate, or Dissent? The Difficulties of Assessing Max Weber’s Relation to Marx.” In Robert J. Antonio and Ronald Glassman, eds., A Weber-Marx Dialogue, pp.2–19. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas

1985 “Ideal types: Beacons or blinders? (Introduction to ‘A Conversation Between Joseph Schumpeter and Max Weber’ by Walter Tritsch).” History of Sociology 6, 1 (Fall): 161–166

1985 “Exploring the Marx-Weber Nexus.” The Canadian Journal of Sociology 10: 69–89 [Three German books, plus the translation of Karl Löwith, Max Weber and Karl Marx].

1986 “Reading the small print, or The Weber/Durkheim unawareness puzzle revisited.” European Journal of Sociology 27: 195–196

1988 “Searching for roots.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 24: 237–242 [Irmela Gorges, Sozialforschung in Deutschland, 1872–1914, and Sozialforschung in der Weimarer Republik, 1918–1933. 1986]

1988 “Lost in the jungle: A rejoinder to Randall Collins.” Contemporary Sociology 17: 278–279

1988 “The Marx-Weber Nexus Revisited.” In M. Kajitani, ed., Shakaigaku no rekishi [Sociology and Ideas], pp.123–137. Tokyo: Gakubun-Sha

1990 “Horkheimer, Mannheim and the foundations of critical-interpretive social science.” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 10: 271–292 (with John Harms)

1990 “Theory as Style.” The Canadian Journal of Sociology 15: 85–97 [Bryan Green, Literary Methods and Sociological Theory. 1988]

1992 “Mission impossible: Sociology in crisis (again).” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 28: 375–380 [Bernhard Plé, Wissenschaft und säkulare Mission, 1990; Stephen Turner and Jonathan Turner, The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology. 1990]

1996 “History of sociology as sociology of knowledge.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 32: 49–51 [Hans-Jürgen Dahme et al, eds., Jahrbuch für Soziologiegeschichte 1990, and Carsten Klingemann, et al, eds., Jahrbuch für Soziologiegeschichte 1991]

1998 “Max Horkheimer (1895–1973)”; “Leo Lowenthal (1900–1993)”; “Franz Neumann (1900–1954)” In Modern Germany. 2 vols, New York: Garland

Translations

1981 Claus Offe, “The social sciences: Contract research or social movements?” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 2: 31–37

1984 Extensively revised the translation of Wolfgang Mommsen’s Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920. (University of Chicago Press)

1985 Walther Tritsch, “A conversation between Joseph Schumpeter and Max Weber.” [1955] History of Sociology 6(1): 167–172

1987 Wolf Lepenies, “Dangerous elective affinities: Raymond Aron and the German-French connection in sociology.” [1984] History of Sociology 6/7(2): 169–176.(with Robert Alun Jones)

1987 Kurt Lenk, “The tragic consciousness of German sociology.” In Volker Meja, ed., Modern German Sociology, pp. 57–75 New York: Columbia University Press. (with Volker Meja)

Ulrich Beck, “Beyond status and class: Will there be an individualized class society?” In Volker Meja, ed., Modern German Sociology, pp. 340–355. New York: Columbia University Press. (with Volker Meja)

Ulrich Oevermann et al., “Structures of meaning and objective hermeneutics.” In Volker Meja, ed., Modern German Sociology, pp.436–447 New York: Columbia University Press. (with Dieter Misgeld)

1990 Max Horkheimer, “A new concept of ideology?” [1930] In Volker Meja and Nico Stehr, eds., Knowledge and Politics, pp. 140–157. London: Routledge (with Volker Meja.)

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