ABSTRACT
To investigate the influence of the Berlin historian Otto Hintze (1861-1940) on Max Weber is to pursue a rather fruitless line of inquiry. To my knowledge, Weber did not make a serious study of Hintze; it is not clear how familiar he was with Hintze's work; doubtless Hintze was not one of the writers who made any special impression on Weber. Conversely, Hintze had sceptically taken note of Weber's critique of bureaucracy even before 1914. Weber's articles on constitutional politics in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1917 might have influenced Hintze, because in the same year he began to draw closer to parliamentary ideas, also owing to the influence of the war and the domestic political situation. After the First World War, Hintze's concept of the state grew closer to Weber's - the state as 'enterprise' (Betrieb) and 'institution' (Anstalt). Certainly Weber's works may have played a part here, but probably the experiences of the war, the German defeat and the collapse of the Wilhelmine Empire were of greater importance. In 1927, Hintze wrote briefly but admiringly about Max Weber, in the form of a review of Marianne Weber's biography. Around 1930 he refined his views on historical type formationemphasizing the 'real type' (Realtypus)- by moving away from Max Weber, whose ideal type seemed too nominalistic to him. Weber thus influenced Hintze, but we shall not inquire into that any further in this chapter.
