From Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (The Jews and Economic Life, 1911) to Deutscher Sozialismus (German Socialism, 1934), Werner Sombart contributed to the reactionary modernist tradition by translating social and historical categories into racial archetypes. Sombart shared the aesthetic and philosophical assumptions that Spengler, Jünger, Schmitt, and Freyer relied on to incorporate technology into German Kultur. But more than any of these other leading figures of Weimar's conservative revolution, he translated the rhetoric of anticapitalism and antimodernism, the lament over money, abstraction, economic parasites, and commercial opportunists into both an attack on the “Jewish spirit” and a defense of supposedly primordial German virtues, among which he included productive labor and technical “creation.” He reconciled “German socialism” to technical advance by defending what he described as the realm of the concrete and productive against the tentacles of abstraction and unproductive circulation.

Before examining Sombart's views on technology in more detail, it will be useful to introduce the following brief comments on explanations of anti-Semitism in Germany. In particular, I want to comment on Horkheimer and Adorno's analyses in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The least convincing aspect of Horkheimer and Adorno's theory was their assertion that modern anti-Semitism was connected to the transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism. They argued that power had shifted to the corporations, yet the economic power of the Jews remained in finance. As the circulation sphere declined in power and influence, the attacks on it as the source of Germany's problems grew. “Bourgeois anti-Semitism has a specific economic reason,” they wrote, namely, “the concealment of domination in production.” According to Horkheimer and Adorno, although the capitalists called themselves productive, “everyone knew the truth.”