# Review of: "Werner Sombart's Longue Durée"

Peter Morgan¹

1 University of Sydney

**Potential competing interests:** No potential competing interests to declare.

The point made in the abstract regarding Sombart's place in economics and sociology is correct, but it needs much greater focus: what is this place, why is Sombart overlooked/problematic/controversial? If that is addressed, the choice of topics from Sombart's writings that have contributed to this might then be identified and worked through in a more structured way.

This piece covers a lot of material and shows considerable knowledge of the sociological theory around the figure of Werner Sombart. However it takes on far too much for the form of an academic journal article. It reads more like an overview of Sombart's work, or part of it.

The title is already problematic in this sense: "Sombart's *longue durée* ... what is that meant to indicate to the reader? There is no subtitle to identify the point of focus.

The introductory paragraphs fail to identify and contextualize the aim and this leads to a very peripatetic trip through Sombart's work.

Moreover the points made regarding Sombart's work in relation to other major sociological thinkers are made in a very allusive, oblique and/or referential way: they need to be clearly foregrounded in terms of Sombart's theory and/or in terms of why they occupy such a questioned place in sociological theory, and then compared and contrasted in terms of the other thinkers mentioned. This is partly a problem arising from the lack of focus or aim in the article. But even in relation to, for example, Sombart's major controversial points regarding the role of luxury, these points need to be stated more clearly and the controversy/disagreement with other thinkers made more succinctly and less obliquely. Many of these point, moreover, are certainly defensible and in most cases not even controversial: hence one finds oneself wondering what is the point being made ...

The English needs thorough revision by a competent native speaker or copy-editor. For example in the opening line "rather famous" is a curious formulation. 'Sombart is well-known but occupies a problematic/controversial place in the history of sociological theory ...' It is for the most part correct but has some very quaint expressions and in places is completely non-idiomatic, if still grammatically correct.