Max Weber in America
the summer of 1903, the Heidelberg sociologist Max Weber had a visit from Hugo Munsterberg, a Harvard professor known for his pioneering work in the new field of applied psychology. Dr. Munsterberg was promoting an international gathering of scholars from many disciplines, to be held in St. Louis, Missouri, the next year. He invited Weber to attend, and to present a paper on Germany's rural community. Weber, then thirty nine, had not been well. He had suffered a nervous collapse five years earlier, had been institutionalized at intervals, and had lived for a time in Italy in the hope of regaining his intellectual stamina. He was still unable to teach, but by 1903 he had resumed some of his scholarly work. Munsterberg's invitation, and the prospect of visiting the world's most advanced industrial nation, elated him; he accepted immediately. Weber's lecture at the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Science in the fall of 1904 his first public appearance in more than four years provided the occasion for an extensive American tour that was pivotally important to the development of his social and political thought. Until 1899, Weber had been engaged almost entirely in research on agrarian policies in the eastern provinces of Prussia. In the United States he would be able to observe at first hand the revolutionary force of modern capitalism the force that was about to destroy traditional social structures in East Elbia, and would introduce modern capitalist calculation into peasant landholdings as well as the management of the estates of Prussia's landed aristocracy, the Junkers. Cut off from their traditional lineages with the land, agrarian workers were now being paid hourly wages, like the industrial proletariat. Weber saw this as a major factor behind the