Letters

Mandarins and Sociologists

Editor:

In his thoughtful review of my Decline of the German Mandarins, [DISSENT, January—February 1970] Arthur Mitzman argues that I do not sufficiently connect the writings of the great German sociologists with the “middle- and working-class opposition to the bureaucratic empire.” While charging, on those grounds, that I am too much concerned with “pure Geist,” he also accuses me of “reducing the critical social theory of these men to a variety of mandarin ressentiment,” of “denigrating as little more than maudlin rhetoric a body of social theory whose assimilation by contemporary radical thought is at once imperative and long overdue.”

To state his case as efficiently as possible, Mitzman uses the perfectly respectable techniques of exaggeration and simplification. I thought my passages on Weber, Simmel, and Tonnes were often quite enthusia...