GUENTHER ROTH Obituary

ROTH--Guenther, a retired professor of sociology at Columbia University, died at the age of 88 on May 18 of complications from advanced prostate cancer, according to his wife Caroline W. Bynum. He was a historical sociologist and social historian, specializing in 19th century Germany and particularly the works and lives of Max and Marianne Weber. He became first known with his study "The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany" (1963), which advanced his influential theory of the "negative integration" of a radical labor movement into a dominant regime. In a review Ralf Dahrendorf called it "a brilliant and impressive picture...a combination of original historical interest and a trained sociological perspective." In 1968 Roth (and Claus Wittich) published the first complete English edition of Max Weber's magnum opus "Economy and Society" (1968), which has become a standard reference. This was followed by the essay volumes "Scholarship and Partisanship" (1971, with Reinhard Bendix) and "Max Weber's Vision of History" (1979, with Wolfgang Schluchter). In 1991 he edited (with Hartmut Lehmann) a volume on "Max Weber's Protestant Ethic" for the German Historical Institute in Washington. His major work of the 1990s was "Max Weber's Anglo-German Family History 1800-1950" (2001, in German), a study of the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, which created the first globalization in the 19th century. In a review, the German historian Wolfgang Mommsen writes that "a wholly new foundation has been laid for research of Max Weber's life and work. Besides...giving us a fascinating group portrait of a successful German bourgeois merchant family." In 2016, he published (with John Roehl) an edition of the letters of diplomat Kurt Riezler to his fiancee Kathe Liebermann, which he discovered in an attic in Baltimore and which shed light on the coming of World War I. Born in Germany in 1931, Roth came to the United States in 1953 from the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research to finish a project on the American denazification of Germany. He subsequently worked with Reinhard Bendix in the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California in Berkeley where he received his Ph.D. in 1960. He taught at the University of Illinois in Urbana, the State University of New York in Stony Brook, and the University of Washington in Seattle before coming to Columbia University in 1988. He also held visiting professorships in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Mannheim. He is survived by his wife Caroline W. Bynum (professor emerita at Columbia University and the Institute for Advanced Study), a daughter Alice Roth (Santa Rosa, California), a son Christian Roth (Seattle), and a step-daughter Antonia Walker (New York City).

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Published by New York Times on May 21, 2019.

Memories and Condolences
for GUENTHER ROTH

Sponsored by Michael F. Sparks.

2 Entries

MICHAEL SPARKS

January 19, 2020

Guenther Roth
A Eulogy & Homage

Karl Marx out west was my first thought when he stode into our classroom for the first time. As he addressed us, I looked around at the other mixed-level undergraduate students. They appeared either wide-eyed terrified or thoroughly engaged, mesmerized even, and not much in between.
Professor Roth assigned only one book, a paperback titled The Sociology of Religion, by Max Weber. Ten weeks later, when he wrote the final exam for the course on the board, it contained only one brief sentence, What is the structure of The Sociology of Religion? Then he left us alone for an hour. Presumably, he would return later to collect the disastrous results, or so we all imagined at first. Perhaps he didn't want to field any questions as to what on earth we were supposed to do with that up there on the board. Perhaps he meant us to suffer, as we had made him suffer at times. More likely, it was a sign of some confidence in what had transpired over those ten weeks, that he had actually succeeded in teaching us precisely this, the structure of the Weber book, and we had absorbed a bit of it. Once the consternation subsided, we all actually set to work on this seemingly impossible task; no one stared listlessly out the windows. At the very least, a few thoughts managed to emerge. Yes, the answer had something to do with this business of theoretical structure. We had mostly gotten the point of it all, or so it seemed.
I started slowly, trying some things out, and then became increasingly excited as I wrote on. I was getting the hang of it. Indeed, it was an overall vision of sorts with which he had hoped to leave us. Later in his office when he returned my effort, he was largely pleased with me, although he consoled me also, suggesting that I not just peter out. . . conclude with a few summary comments.
At one particularly dramatic moment in that class he had stopped abruptly in the middle of a lectureand they were all lectures, for he rarely led any kind of sustained discussionand bore down mercilessly on one student: Is that a recording device? The student had been fiddling with a cassette, taping his lectures, a perfectly ordinary practice of some undergraduates. Perhaps we should have anticipated what followed, given the thick Germanic accent. I come from a country where people were executed for much less. Certainly no recording of lectures would be permitted in his classroom.
The other UW course I recall was that of Political Sociology. Only one textbook also, Alexis de Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the French Revolution, was assigned. Among many other novel things, there we learned the simple lesson that revolutions tend to occur when things are getting better, not worse. Again it was an exclusive lecture format, which occasionally put a considerable strain upon us at times when the class seemed to lose interest or break down. Once, Guenther fumed at us for loss of focus. It is your responsibility to ask pertinent questions. Chummy, Socratic dialogues with undergraduates was not a forté. Although he and I seldom discussed the political upheaval of the times, I do recall him mentioning that he had stormed into a group of protestors who were chanting Power to the People, demanding that they define and specify: What people? Power to which people? What do you mean by the people? My own ambivalence served as sort of a buffer, as did my openness to the gifts and experieince he obviously brought to the table.

A couple of years later, I returned to speak with him about graduate school. Although he successfully concealed any disappointment that I preferred going elsewhere, he sent out recommendations that were obviously responsible for many fellowship offers and he appeared pleased that I chose Chicago. During the previous two years or so I had been doing other things related to the building trades. We talked about his similar experiences in Germany after the war and the work he had done on his house on Bainbridge Island; he mentioned a friend in San Francisco who had built many of those classic row houses.
He invited me to sit in on a graduate seminar that he was jointly teaching with Michael Hechter. As was typical of Guenther's Weberian perspective, when some aspect of the book Hechter had chosen for the class, Barrington Moore's The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, touched upon Wallersteinian themes of center and periphery that Hechter had explored in his own book, Internal Colonialism, Guenther was altogether quick to pounce upon him, tossing out a quip about reductionism, a familiar barb, it seemed, that got everyone laughing.
Every summer I returned to Seattle and we had lunch and renewed our acquaintance. To this day, I remain thoroughly amazed that he could down a full cup of plain yogurt as though it were sweet pudding. Then too he would share the fact that if he didn't have some such similar snack at certain moments he might go a bit faint, an admission of weakness that I found somewhat endearing. Perhaps it was the influence of this new girlfriend that he now spoke about with some affection and pride as we touched upon topics related to her academic work.
I was also deeply touched that twenty years or so later when I was visiting my daughter, then getting a masters in Spanish language at NYU, he had greeted my advance e-mail with of course I remember you, inviting me to drop by the upper west side. By then he had retired from Columbia. Perhaps most memorable was the integrity he demonstrated when, during that trip, I left him something that I had written about Lincoln in conjunction with a college-level class I had been teaching for a non-profit organization about the Civil War, a piece that I knew he might find disagreeable. His eventual e-mail response was a model of value-free Weberian impartiality and honesty:

Some time ago you sent me a ms, which I never answered (I think). It appeared to me overwritten and full of obiter dicta, thus not disciplined and focused enough. So I wanted to spare you may impression, which I now give you without remembering anything in particular. Forgive me.

Great mentors tell students--however awkwardly I phrase this--what they must, or need to, know, not what they may yearn to hear. Aside from Weber, Guenther and I had completely different takes upon the nature, point of, and approach to the social sciences. But I always felt that he had my back, and that his was one of the pairs of shoulders of giants (along with Shils, Toulmin, and Sahlins, among others) that I stood upon. He never damned with faint praise, never patronized. He never cheapened a relationship with a student. He shot from the hip, as Hechter once said. And he would expect the same from others, from me especially. Like Weber, he was an academician for the ages. His example is dearly missed.

I am only saddened that he didn't live to see the publication of a much larger work of mine that was more in his wheelhouse. I truly believe that I would have brought him along with me, into the fold, and thus escaped the ultimate doghouse of reductionism.

Without him my life would no doubt have coursed along a different path and proven much less rewarding and fulfilling.

Thank you, Guenther Roth.