Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy

These specially commissioned set of essays explore the close interrelation of culture and anarchy within the patriarchal confines of Wilhelmine Germany. The book presents the first complete publication (in both English and German) of a series of letters written by Max Weber in 1913 and 1914 during his stays at the anarchist settlement of Ascona. The letters show Weber debating with the issues of free love, eroticism, patriarchy, anarchism, terrorism, pacifism, political and personal convictions and power. The book reveals Max Weber's involvement in the case of Otto and Frieda Gross. In its day this was a cause celebre, where radical feminism and anarchism fought the established patriarchalism of Germany and Austria. It was a case of the father, Professor Hans Gross, forcibly detaining his son Otto, a libertarian psychoanalyst, in an asylum and threatening his daughter-in-law Frieda with the removal of her children. Weber offered his legal advice and, if necessary, his bare hands in the defence of Frieda Gross. The essays show how anarchisms - sexual, political and social - provided a creative solution to authoritarianism. The book will lead to a re-consideration of Weber's realist theory of power.