The first of Sombart’s works to combine economic history with romantic anti-capitalism was Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (The German Economy in the Nineteenth Century), published in 1903. He portrayed the pre-capitalist economy of the artisan and peasant as “natural” and the modern capitalist economy as “artificial.” Sombart shared the romantic prejudice that identified the archaic with the authentic. He treated the forms of life characteristic of the less modernized groups in the population as primordial, though they were in fact the product of earlier historical development.
For Sombart, capitalism’s dissolution of the traditional way of life of the Volk was leading to the “graveyard of culture.” While capitalism marked a quantitative gain— he recognized that it was more productive and created a higher material standard of living—it meant a loss in the quality of life, robbing men of inner peace, of their relationship to nature, and of the faith of their fathers. It led to overvaluing the things of this world. (Like many romantic conservatives, Sombart was not religious, but he thought it a pity that others were not.) Capitalism, according to Sombart, destroyed the soul and led to the standardization or “massification” of cultural life. Though he lived his entire life in major cities, Sombart saw nothing positive in the process of urbanization: he stigmatized city life as an artificial, inauthentic form of existence, producing what he dismissively dubbed “asphalt culture.”
– Muller, Jerry Z. in Capitalism and the Jews
