If one conceives of “nature” as Kant did, as “the existence of things as far as it is determined according to universal laws,”91  and if one says, in agreement with Rickert, “Empirical reality becomes nature when we view it with respect to the universal; it becomes history when we view it with respect to

The battle of the proponents of historicism against the nomothetic science of human action was absurd and preposterous, and the rejection of the demand of naturalism that historical investigations, pursued with the methods of the natural sciences, should seek for “historical laws” was necessary and fully justified.

Anti-Marxism fully subscribes to Marxism’s hostility towards capitalism. And it resents Marxism’s political pro­gram, especially its presumed internationalism and pacifism. But resentment does not lend itself to scientific work, or even to politics. At best it lends itself to demagoguery.

Werner Sombart himself proudly confessed that he gave a good part of his life to fight for Marx.23 It was Sombart, not the wretched pedants of the ilk of Kautsky and Bernstein, who introduced Marx to German science and familiarized German thought with Marxist doctrines.

Max Weber did not want merely to outline a program and methodology for a science of social phenomena. In addition to excellent treatises on history, he himself published extensive works that he termed sociological. We, of course, cannot recognize their claim to this designation. This is not meant as an unfavorable criticism. The investigations collected in Weber’s posthumously published major work, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, belong to the best that German scientific literature of the last decades has produced.

We call the method of scientific work that examines the effect, ceteris paribus, of change in one factor, the static method.74  Nearly everything that sociology and its hitherto best developed branch, economics, have thus far accomplished is due to the use of the static method.

Marxian socialism is beckoning: “Class war, not national war!” It is proclaiming: “Never again [imperialistic] war.” But it is adding in thought: “Civil war forever, revolution.”

National socialism is beckoning: “National unity! Peace among classes!” And it is adding in thought: “War on the foreign enemy!”17

In postwar Germany and Austria, a movement has been steadily gaining significance in politics and the social sciences that can best be described as Anti-Marxism.1 Occa­sionally its followers also use this label.

Usually only those writers can be called Marxists who, as members of a Marxian party, are obliged to indicate approval in their writings of the Marxian doctrines as canon­ized by party conventions. Their scholarship can be no more than “scholasticism.” Their writings aim at preserving the “purity” of the true doctrine, and their proofs consist of quotations from authorities—in the final analysis Marx and Engels. Again and again they conclude that “bourgeois” science has completely collapsed, and that truth can be sought only in Marxism.