Max Weber’s present reputation is dependent importantly on his reception in the English-speaking world. Yet the American reception—the translation, publication, reading, and diffusion of his work, and its effect on the disciplines, on scholarship, and intellectual life generally in the United States—was a lengthy and unusually complex affair, one that continues to this day. His writings were essentially unknown during his lifetime. Then, in the 1920s, the beginnings of an interest in Weber’s work led to the gradual translation and incorporation of his thought into the social science disciplines, college and university curricula, and even public discourse. Leaving aside professional publications, today it is no longer uncommon to have Weber appear in popular literature, such as John le Carré’s Absolute Friends, or to find his ideas mentioned on editorial pages, in the blogosphere, or in places like the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, or the Chronicle of Higher Education, much as Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud might have been in previous decades. Only Alexis de Tocqueville seems to have survived in this public sphere of discourse as well. Perhaps it goes without saying that Weber would have been astounded by such a development. He did not seek this kind of reputation himself, nor would he or anyone else have thought it possible in 1920. A true “combination of circumstances”—to speak with Weber, both intended results and entirely fortuitous events, or readings of his work that some time ago Guenther Roth aptly called “creative misinterpretations”—have contributed to bringing about this success.
Of course, fascination with Weber’s writings or the popularization of some of his ideas, such as charisma and “charismatic authority,” bureaucracy and bureaucratic rule, or the ubiquitous “work ethic,” does not necessarily translate into widespread positive “influence” or “paradigmatic” status in disciplines like sociology and political science, characterized today by seemingly intractable disagreements, fragmentation, and compartmentalization of specialties. Even to speak of a “successful” reception is problematic and points to the complexities inherent in assessing what contemporary disciplines credit to a predecessor like Weber. Not surprisingly, there is a full range of opinion about what or how much the social science disciplines—and sociology, in particular—actually do owe to Weber’s work. Some have argued for the vitality of a distinctive “Weberian” perspective, paradigm, or research program while others have seen little substance behind such claims and categories. Such disagreements point to confusion on two fronts: First, there is lack of agreement about the application and use of words like reception, influence, dissemination or diffusion. Commentaries are vague regarding the kind of evidence that would support claims attached to such vocabularies. Second, in the American disciplines the nature of Weber’s contribution itself is still contested or poorly formulated. This circumstance surely reflects in part the complicated history of the translation and incorporation of his work into the social science canon, and disputes over the division of labor within the emerging social science disciplines themselves.
As an initial step toward clarity, one can suggest that there were minimally three necessary conditions for the successful reception and propagation of Weber’s work: the development of professional networks for cultivating and sustaining interest in his writings; the translation and publication of the most important parts of the work; and the “institutionalization” of his thought, research problems, and conceptual language in curricula, undergraduate courses, and advanced graduate research seminars in American colleges and universities. In addition, to these three conditions one must add two further considerations that have a special character in the American context: the disciplinary needs of the newly emergent social sciences—especially sociology—in the modern research university and in a professional context in which Weber’s work seemed to supply answers and guidance; and a certain resonance or convergence of Weber’s basic assumptions and questions with American conditions and with issues having prominence in American social and intellectual life, including an extraordinarily potent cultural narrative of achievement and atonement.
The last consideration cannot be underestimated; one of the most remarkable features of the work was that it unintentionally tapped the most fundamental of American narratives: the possibility of emancipation in pursuit of a better life—remaking the self, gaining a second chance, atoning for past failure, striving for a lasting reconciliation with God and world. Weber described the pattern in exacting detail especially in the pages of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Astute readers could not miss the moments of recognition. The characters were all too familiar. It was a story about ourselves. For that reason the cultural narrative was the deepest source of attachment to Weber’s words and of fascination for his work.
To assist in understanding the reception and dissemination of Weber’s work into the important decade of the 1960s, it is useful to bear in mind developments at the center of American university life and intellectual culture in the social sciences, as well as developments that were more peripheral to the established disciplines and institutions. Both were equally important in their own way. It is also essential to identify and distinguish among the important “clusters” of scholars who came to constitute the larger network of academics, teachers, and intellectuals who contributed to diffusion of knowledge about Weber. The effectiveness of these clusters came about through their location in the topography of American intellectual life, their institutional prestige, their leadership in educational policy, and their role in educating and supporting successive generations of teachers and scholars. The clusters also played a part in the formation of a larger educated public. Such schematic generalizations probably oversimplify a complex set of relationships, to be sure, but they are nevertheless helpful for orienting our discussion.
With regard to the early work on Weber, five core institutions were important: the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University, and the New School for Social Research—three well-established private universities, one distinguished land-grant public university, and a small new urban institution. Each of the different “clusters” of scholars in which intensive discussion occurred had a base in one or more of these universities.
The first grouping of any significance, forming in the second half of the 1920s, were the scholars at Chicago and Harvard: Frank Knight in economics and Louis Wirth in sociology at Chicago, joined by Edward Shils as a graduate student, and Talcott Parsons at Harvard starting in 1927. To this quartet one should add Melchoir Palyi and Alexander von Schelting, both of whom were at the University of Chicago by 1933, Palyi as a lecturer in economics and Schelting as a Rockefeller fellow. In addition, one should include Edward Hartshorne, an undergraduate with Parsons and a graduate student at Chicago who served as a kind of go-between, bringing Schelting into Parsons’s orbit once again. Parsons had met Schelting earlier while studying in Heidelberg, and the renewed intellectual exchanges proved unusually fruitful because Parsons was writing The Structure of Social Action, first published in 1937.
Within this circle, Parsons had written his Heidelberg dissertation on Weber, Sombart, and the problem of capitalism, so was well-versed in the debates in German scholarship. Wirth played a role primarily as an activist in professional circles and as a teacher, mentoring both Shils and later Reinhard Bendix. Knight’s interest in matters Weberian reached its apogee in the mid-1930s, but then declined as he turned more attention to disputes in economic theory, and after a parting of the ways with Parsons in 1940, his presence became less significant. Schelting was affiliated briefly with Howard Becker at the University of Wisconsin, and then settled into the Columbia University faculty. Among these scholars, it was particularly Parsons and Shils who continued to carry the Weber torch to the end of their lives.
The second notable cluster, essential for the work of translation, formed around Hans Gerth, who arrived at the University of Wisconsin in 1940. Assisted by his association earlier with Karl Mannheim in Heidelberg and Frankfurt, then in exile in London, Gerth was befriended by both Parsons and Shils, arriving in the United States first in December 1937 for the American Sociological Society annual meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey, for what has been called “refugee conversations.” Gerth brought with him a wealth of knowledge about social thought that included involvement with the Mannheim circle, a year studying with Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, and engagement with Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and others at the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. After some temporary lectureships, arranged in part with Shils’s assistance, Gerth attracted the attention of Howard Becker and arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, with the unfortunate and ambiguous legal status of “enemy alien.” His brilliant idiosyncrasies and learning quickly attracted the attention of two ambitious sociology graduate students, C. Wright Mills and Don Martindale. As Martindale recalls the encounter,
During the lecture the majority of students had experienced a mixture of bewilderment and frustration. They sat with notebooks open and pens poised, realizing the something momentous was happening but unable to find a beginning or a stopping place—some had been unable to take a single note. During the lecture a powerfully built young man sitting near me, however, had no trouble. He watched the lecturer with bright, hard, appraising eyes and, though never missing a word or gesture, was taking quick careful notes. On the way out of class we found ourselves side by side. I observed, “That was the most extraordinary performance I have ever seen.” “Gerth,” [Mills] replied, “is the only man worth listening to in this department.”
This episode prefigured the pattern and the roles played by each member of this dynamic threesome that evolved into two unusual and productive partnerships. Subsequently, after a brief stint at the University of Maryland, Mills moved on to Columbia with Robert Merton and Theodore Abel as colleagues, while Martindale had a lengthy career at the University of Minnesota.
The third, more loosely knit group one should mention is the émigré scholars of the 1930s—particularly those in New York affiliated with the New School for Social Research, such as Emil Lederer, Albert Salomon, or Hannah Arendt, where Weber’s work was widely cited and discussed. There is inevitably some overlap with these émigré scholars and the previously identified clusters, most obviously in the case of Hans Gerth. It was generally the case that as late arrivals these intellectuals were also more marginal to the social science disciplines, not having had American roots or strong institutional and professional connections in the United States. They were also quite widely dispersed, especially through the state university systems—for example, Paul Honigsheim at Michigan State, Arthur Salz at Ohio State, Eric Voegelin at Louisiana State and the University of Alabama, and Karl Loewenstein at the University of Massachusetts. However, some were recruited later to prestigious locations, such as Franz Neumann to Columbia University or Leo Lowenthal to the University of California–Berkeley. Notwithstanding their dispersion and relative marginality, these scholars still served the purpose of spreading knowledge of Weber’s work more widely than would have been the case otherwise, particularly among the regional public universities.
As one might anticipate, patterns of cooperation and competition relating to Weber and his work began to take shape within this network and its three main clusters of ambitious scholars. There was some sharing of knowledge and texts, but also interpretative disagreement and competition over access to texts, with mastery of the German language as a mechanism of control and a source of disagreement and criticism. There were also “priority” disputes, typical of the sciences, and rivalries over informal “rights” to translations. The situation involving both cooperation and competition was rendered more complex by the fact that knowledge of Weber and translation of his work proceeded at two distinct levels: at the level of the publicly accessible discourse over his thought, fed by published, copyrighted work; and at the level of privately or semipublicly produced texts and knowledge about Weber, accessible to select audiences and giving rise to a kind of hidden or “fugitive” literature.
There is only one notable outlier and exception among these clusters: Lowell Bennion, a man who is scarcely remembered, though he corresponded with Becker and Schelting, and Parsons knew his work. Bennion had studied with Eric Voegelin in Vienna, the context for his first encounter with Weber’s work. In 1933 he published the first book on Max Weber in English, Max Weber’s Methodology, a well-informed discussion of the subject written as a dissertation under Maurice Halbwachs at the Université de Strasbourg, the man who helped introduce Weber in France. Returning to the United States, Bennion sought an academic home in sociology and failing to find one in the years of the Depression, instead took up an administrative position in the Mormon Church, where he sought to reform and liberalize its practices in the spirit, as he saw it, of Weber’s rectitude and defense of the individual against authoritarian control. Resigning finally in disappointment, Bennion resurfaced in the 1960s at the University of Utah and for a decade returned to his first love, annually teaching a well-received Weber seminar that exercised a grip on the imagination of a new generation of students. Remarkable in its own terms, Bennion’s intellectual journey illustrates the larger point about the scholarly networks: it evokes the pattern of engagement that characterized the entire generation of scholars which emerged in the late 1920s and ’30s.
These generalizations are illustrated by the record of publication. Over slightly more than three decades leading up to 1960, eleven major texts by Max Weber had been translated into English, all by six scholars at the center of these networks: Knight, Parsons, Shils, Gerth, Mills, and Martindale—one economist and five sociologists—only occasionally with assistance from other specialists (see table 1).
Max Weber’s Work in English Translation: The Main Publications, 1927–58
Year |
Title |
Translator(s) |
1927 |
General Economic History |
Frank Knight |
1930 |
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (GARS 1:1–206) |
Talcott Parsons |
1946 |
From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology |
Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills |
1947 |
The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (EaS, part 1, chaps. 1–4) |
A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons |
1949 |
The Methodology of the Social Sciences (GAW, 146–290, 451–502) |
Edward Shils and Henry Finch |
1951 |
The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (GARS 1:276–536) |
Hans Gerth |
1952 |
Ancient Judaism (GARS 3) |
Hans Gerth and Don Martindale |
1954 |
On Law in Economy and Society (EaS, part 2, chap. 8) |
Max Rheinstein and Edward Shils |
1958 |
The Religion of India (GARS 2) |
Hans Gerth and Don Martindale |
1958 |
The City (EaS, part 2, chap. 16) |
Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth |
1958 |
The Rational and Social Foundations of Music |
Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrud Neuwirth |
A few shorter Weber texts were also available, published separately as articles or chapters: “Class, Status and Party” and selections on bureaucracy and charisma from Economy and Society, and “The Hindu Social System” from Weber’s sociology of religion. These translations meant that after more than three decades, the English-language readership could devour all of Max Weber’s Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion); some sections of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society); major portions of Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Collected Essays in the Philosophy of Science); and a few miscellaneous texts, such as the two essential lectures “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation” and, of course, Knight’s version of Wirtschaftsgeschichte (General Economic History), though without Weber’s conceptual introduction. These texts appeared without a clear understanding of the sequence and context of the work, a fact bemoaned by the translator-authors themselves, and a regrettable source of confusion that persists to this day, especially for the sociology of religion.
Early Translations of Weber’s Work, in Typescript, Mimeograph, or Microform Format
Year |
Title |
Translator(s) |
c. 1934–35 |
*“Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy” (GAW, 146–214) *“The Meaning of Ethical Neutrality” (GAW, 451–502) “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences” (GAW, 215–90) “Roscher and Knies” (GAW, 1–145) “Critique of Stammler” (GAW, 291–357) *“Science as a Vocation” (GAW, 524–55) *“Politics as a Vocation” (GPS, 493–548) “Socialism” (GASS, 492–518) “The Reichspraesident” (GPS, 486–89) *“Parties” (from EaS, part 2, chap. 3) *“Classes, Estates, Parties” (from EaS, part 2, chap. 9) |
Edward Shils |
c. 1935 |
“Sociology of the Press and Associations” (DGS 1910, in GASS, 431–49) |
Everett Hughes |
1937–38 |
Economy and Society, part 1, ch. 1 (Soziologische Grundbegriffe) |
Alexander von Schelting and Camilla Kample; Edward Shils and Alexander von Schelting; Talcott Parsons |
1938 |
Sociology of Law (EaS, part 2, chap. 8) |
(Frank Knight), Edward Shils |
1939 |
Economy and Society, part 1, chaps. 1–4 |
A. M. Henderson, Talcott Parsons |
c. 1940 |
“Politics as a Vocation” (partial) |
Gabriel Almond |
*Texts introduced in 1939 at the University of Chicago as required reading in the second year (sophomore) required social science survey course.
The major project left unfinished by this first wave of translations was, of course, the complete text of Economy and Society, published in three volumes by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich in 1968, based largely on the previous partial translations, including Parsons’s influential version of part 1, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1947). The editors’ lengthy introduction and the inclusion as an appendix of most of the wartime essay “Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany” (1917) linked Weber’s work to a larger intellectual and political context. What has occurred since then is a piecemeal filling in of the textual gaps: mainly Weber’s dissertation on commercial partnerships in the Middle Ages, his essays on Russia, the debates over the “Protestant Ethic” thesis with Karl Fischer and Felix Rachfahl, his commentaries on the universities, the treatises on the stock and commodities exchanges, the lengthy handbook article on agrarian relations in antiquity, and the remaining essays on methodological issues in the social sciences that had been avoided by Edward Shils and Henry Finch. This outpouring may have lacked coordination and coherence, but it succeeded in extending and deepening the reach of Weber’s ideas.
With regard to the early translations, the neat tabulation of activity is somewhat misleading, for the actual history of these translations and their availability is far more complex than it may appear. Following publication of Parsons’s rendition of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1930, there were several efforts at translation over the next decade. By his own account, Shils began translating several texts, ending with a total of at least eleven, drawn mainly from the Wissenschaftslehre but including two selections from Economy and Society and three political writings (see table 2).
Recalling his motivations, Shils noted retrospectively,
It is difficult for me to explain why I began to translate the essays from the Wissenschaftslehre. Perhaps I was just too lazy to do something more serious on my own. The truth is that I adored those writings. I could never understand why people said that Max Weber was an obscure and difficult writer, except for the treatment of Sinn—which I found, and still find, unsatisfactory! For the rest, his sentences were sometimes very strenuous to master, but once mastered, one felt one had solved a problem. It was gratifying to see the parts fall into place. …
I had no particular reason to translate these writings of Max Weber. I had no arrangements or plans for publishing them; I just did them. (ESP)
Shils was not alone in his enthusiasm. Everett Hughes translated Weber’s 1910 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie commentary on a sociology of the press and associations; Gabriel Almond, the political scientist, tried his hand at “Politics as a Vocation”; and several other people began translating parts of Economy and Society: Schelting teamed with Camilla Kample to work on the famous first chapter, then collaborated with Shils on the task, and their work was in turn passed along to Parsons at his request as he labored over the draft text produced by Alexander M. Henderson of the first two chapters. Most surprising of all, while on leave from teaching in 1938, Frank Knight had hired a graduate student to translate the sociology of law (Rechtssoziologie) chapter in Economy and Society, a rough copy transferred to Shils and later Max Rheinstein, professor in the University of Chicago law faculty, thus becoming the basis for the 1954 publication under the title On Law in Economy and Society.
How were these texts used? The record is not entirely clear, nor can we be certain that these were the only works that constituted a kind of subterranean shelter for Weber’s writings. To cite two examples, in corresponding with Frank Knight, Marianne Weber noted that “a few years ago the publisher [Mohr/Siebeck] and I granted permission to an American to translate the sociological categories section (Part I [of Economy and Society]). I wrote an introduction for it, but the translator apparently couldn’t find a publisher, and the work never appeared” (March 13, 1937; FKP). According to Edith Hanke, the Mohr/Siebeck Archiv reveals the mystery translator as the well-known American sociologist George Simpson. Shils recalled that while serving as Wirth’s research assistant he lent copies of some of his own translations to an unnamed friend, who proceeded to make additional copies and circulate them among graduate students, alarming the ever-cautious Shils to the extent that he recalled his translations!
Clearly there was growing interest in these materials when Knight taught his seminar on the German text of Economy and Society in 1936, attended by Shils and a handful of other Knight devotees, including at least some of the time Milton Friedman, as Shils remembered. The seminar preparations prompted Knight to ask Parsons about his further plans concerning Weber:
[Melchoir] Palyi has just told me that you are definitely engaged in translating Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. I had been meaning to write & learn what might be back of rumors. I’m putting a seminar through the work (as far as we get!) and have been thinking toward making the substance available in English in the best way, which I thought would not be by complete & close translation, anyway I’d like to know what your plans are and how far they are advanced, especially whether you now have any considerable part of it in MS and if we could get hold of this just to enable us to make faster progress. It would be helpful even if not in finished form and I could have copies made and possibly make suggestions on specifically economic problems. And in this connection, what about the essays on Wissenschaftslehre? I have been “thinking” about doing something about some of those also. (April 13, 1936; TPP)
Palyi was mistaken about Parsons’s scholarship at this stage; engagement with Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft translations came three years later. Replying to Parsons’s disappointing response, Knight noted, “I had already tentatively arranged with a couple of students to make rough translations of parts of it, which I hope to have for use in my class in economic institutions” (May 1, 1936; TPP). Pursuing the pedagogic utility of the translations, Knight had already taken the opportunity to identify one of his neophyte translators, noting, “there is a youngster here [Edward Shils] in sociology who is working on a book of selections from Weber for a wider audience. Do you know about him?” (April 13, 1936; TPP). Through this offhand query Talcott Parsons was introduced to Edward Shils. Knight’s mediation is also the earliest indication of Shils’s intentions well before his priority dispute with Gerth and Mills.
Notwithstanding his instinctive caution, Shils did circulate some translations among colleagues, including Hans Gerth. When the Economy and Society chapters became available, Parsons seems to have been generous, sharing drafts and even a microfilm copy at least with Howard Becker, Robert Merton, and Eric Voegelin (not to mention Shils and Schelting, whose work he had used), all of whom appear to have provided access to students. Of these colleagues, Becker’s position at the University of Wisconsin would have been especially useful for encouraging a new and important audience, beyond the established circles at Chicago and Harvard.
Clearly the most crucial development to emerge from these activities was the outcome at Chicago of the discussion of reforming the undergraduate social science curriculum in the college (the first two years of undergraduate education), advanced by the celebrated educator and the university’s president, Robert Hutchins. Frank Knight had already engaged with this issue in 1936, remarking to Parsons that “the ‘talk’ hereabouts runs largely in terms of breaking down and bridging over the departmentalization of social science. It seems obvious to me that if the talkers mean anything of what they say, this matter of doing something about Max Weber to make his material available for students ought to be a leading item in the actual program” (May 1, 1936; TPP). Knight thought the climate was encouraging, with support coming from Robert Redfield, the anthropologist who then served as dean for social sciences. And indeed, three years later six Weber texts, translated by Shils and mimeographed for student use, became part of the general education curriculum for the required social sciences core course for sophomores.
The Chicago reforms were the first true “institutionalization” of Weber’s thought in an American university. Given Chicago’s prominence in American higher education, it served as a kind of model for subsequent instructional and curricular innovations. At the university itself the incorporation of Weber texts affected students like Reinhard Bendix, who as an undergraduate was reading Weber’s original articles in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, and it provided a laboratory for instructors recruited to the college, among them Daniel Bell, Milton Singer, Morris Janowitz, and David Riesman.
Yet Max Weber’s emergence as a thinker worthy of attention—worth translating, studying in graduate seminars, teaching in the undergraduate curriculum, citing in the public forum—was by no means a certainty in the American university and beyond. How did the emergence and growing prominence of Weber come about?
To answer this question is like piecing together parts of a puzzle. When Max Weber’s work began to attract attention in the mid-1920s, it was appropriately at the University of Chicago, home to one of the oldest sociology departments in the United States and to the world’s oldest sociology journal, the American Journal of Sociology. Before then, early American sociology in the Midwest had paid considerable attention not to Weber but to Georg Simmel. Albion Small, chair of the Chicago department, was responsible for translating and publishing nine of Simmel’s essays in the American Journal of Sociology between 1896 and 1910. By contrast, the only major article of Weber’s to appear in English before 1927 was his presentation to the Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904, buried in the conference proceedings. We have learned only recently that two brief articles under Weber’s name also appeared, in English, in the Encyclopedia Americana for 1907–8—minor essays that passed unnoticed for nearly a century. It is difficult to believe that Small, as an organizer of the St. Louis Congress and host to Weber and the other delegates from Europe who visited Chicago beforehand, would have missed Weber’s work appearing at the time and afterward, such as the important essay on “Objectivity” or The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism. Nevertheless, no translation projects or committed readership emerged in these early decades.
The change in fortune for Weber’s work had to do partly with the improved availability of his texts in German, thanks to the labors of Marianne Weber and others such as Oskar Siebeck and Melchoir Palyi. It also had to do in part with increasing interest at Chicago in the methodological foundations of social science and large-scale comparative work, an impatient reaction in some quarters to the parochialism and triviality of narrowly focused, unsystematic, and atheoretical observational reporting. In their retrospective assessments from the 1960s, both Hugh Duncan and Irving Louis Horowitz noted the earlier “rather parochial world of American social science,” the dramatic postwar improvements due partly to the availability of inexpensive translations in social theory, and Weber’s oppositional role as an alternative to mere localism and provincialism and as a “cosmopolitan” scholar who “sees things in grand world historic terms.” This view was apparent earlier among the key figures at Chicago; in his 1926 review of modern German conceptions of sociology, for instance, Wirth maintained that Weber was the “best-known and certainly most quoted sociologist in Germany,” citing with approval especially his work in the comparative sociology of religion and his efforts to advance the cause of science and to define the subject matter and methodology of sociological inquiry. Heeding his colleague’s comment about Weber’s “most quoted” status, the following year Knight published his translation of the General Economic History, based on the lecture notes published in 1923 by Hellmann and Palyi, whose preface he also translated.
Wirth, an immigrant himself as a teenager in 1911 and fluent in German, would certainly have followed developments on the Continent with interest, although his scholarly contributions were mainly to American urban studies and social policy. He also played an important role as a teacher, organizer and public figure of note. Knight, on the other hand, was a skilled economic theorist and critic of institutional economics, drawn to Weber because of his own eclectic interest in methodological issues, the social context of economic action, the uses and limits of analytic theoretical approaches for understanding Homo economicus, and the distinctiveness and origins of modern capitalism and the market economy. Though religiously “unmusical,” as Weber said of himself, through his evangelical Christian upbringing Knight was also fascinated by religion and its socioeconomic effects. Weber must have seemed in some ways a kindred spirit. Knight was also a Germanist, having written his master’s thesis at the University of Tennessee on Gerhart Hauptmann. With his excellent command of German, he translated the General Economic History on his own, consulting the economic historian A. P. Usher, his former teacher. Encouraged in the project by Allyn Young, his economics dissertation director at Harvard, Knight published the translation with the small firm of Greenberg in New York in its Adelphi economic series. Having this accomplishment to his name, Knight attracted Oskar Siebeck’s attention as a possible translator for The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, although he was never asked and was not interested in assuming responsibility for a second translation. When Parsons inquired about Knight’s commitments, it was actually through Paul Douglas, Knight’s Chicago economics colleague, an inquiry that led to more than a decade of fruitful exchanges between the two scholars.
Wirth’s reference to Weber as a sociologist rather than an economist or economic historian was an important choice, for it reflected changes occurring at Chicago in the social science disciplines, and in particular the separation of sociology from economics, followed somewhat later by further differentiation between sociology and anthropology and between political science and history. The nascent interest in Weber’s role in sociology, fueled by methodological concerns, was apparent in Theodore Abel’s Systematic Sociology in Germany (1929). Indeed, the changes in the disciplines were felt generally in major American teaching and research universities by the late 1920s and early ’30s. At Harvard, for example, we should remember that Talcott Parsons’s first appointment was as a tutor in economics (1927–30) followed by an instructorship in sociology, which emerged as a new department from the Committee on Sociology and Social Ethics (only in 1931), amid a debate over whether it should be considered a social science discipline at all. The shift in disciplinary boundaries, in general more highly articulated in American universities compared with European institutions, permitted or even encouraged assimilating Weber’s work to some newly emergent lines of inquiry.
In this period of transition within economics, and with economic history already ceding ground to economic theory, Weber’s General Economic History might well have had a limited appeal. However, these late lectures did contribute to the contemporary discussion of capitalism and the kind of “rationality” associated with capital accumulation and market exchange. Thus, in his article comparing Sombart and Weber on “modern capitalism,” a brief treatment of the same topic as Parsons’s dissertation, Knight underscored the significance of the discovery by these two economists of what he labeled “quantitative rationality as a phase of the modern social mind,” a concept more commonly discussed today by Jürgen Habermas and others as “instrumental” rationality. Briefly reviewing the “Protestant ethic” debate, Knight summed up his assessment of Weber’s importance:
Whatever one may think of his Puritanism theory, there is surely one respect in which Max Weber towers above all the other writers noticed; he is the only one who really deals with the problem of causes, or approaches the material from that angle which alone can yield an answer to such questions, that is, the angle of comparative history in the broad sense. It seems to the writer that the question of the origin of capitalism would gain by being stated in negative form: why did capitalism not develop (in the sense in which it did not) in other times and places than modern Western Europe? Especially, why was there no development comparable to that of modern times in the classical and ancient civilizations? Max Weber discusses these questions. His General Economic History is a mere sketch, available only in an editorial patchwork from students’ lecture notes, but in this fundamental regard it stands in a class by itself.
It was in the spirit enunciated by Knight that Weber was read at the time as an economist and economic historian.
Even as an economist, however, Knight later taught his Weber seminar not on topics in economic history and the nature and origins of capitalism but on Economy and Society. By then the perspective had shifted, and it was the “interdisciplinary” Weber bridging the social science disciplines who now attracted attention.
Described by Shils as a close analysis of the text, Knight’s 1936 seminar became an intense intellectual engagement and for an enthusiast like Shils a powerful formative experience:
We read a fair amount of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, line by line, commenting on it as we went along, raising questions about it, trying to understand the text. It was a serious intellectual experience. In its way, the seminar was almost as intense as the discussions about Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft which von Schelting and I had some years later in New York when we scrutinized that first chapter. In a very important respect it was much better because Frank Knight repeatedly made very profound observations about matters which Weber’s text called to his mind. Sometimes, too, he would break out in his old-fashioned rustic wonderment with, “That’s mighty fine stuff.” (Undated, ESP)
It was this particular seminar encounter, reading Weber through Knight’s eyes, that provoked Shils’s important and revealing later self-reflection. “I was overpowered when the perspectives opened up by Weber’s concepts brought together things which hitherto had never seemed to me to have any affinity with each other,” he commented. “I could not assimilate it all or bring it into a satisfying order. But reading Max Weber was literally breathtaking. Sometimes, in the midst of reading him I had to stand up and walk around for a minute or two until my exhilaration died down.” Precisely this kind of experience in reading Weber’s work far from its point of origin—in Chicago or elsewhere, in German and then as part of an English-language discourse—is essential to understanding the fascination with Weber, the effect on his readers, and the character of his American reception. The same intense response appears repeatedly, best exemplified in Knight, Shils, and Parsons.
The experience of reading transcended the pedagogical debates over the uses of the work and the disputes over disciplinary boundaries. Immersion in Weber’s writings set off the kind of intellectual enthusiasm that led to sustained engagement, encouraging a movement of thought beyond routine inquiry and parochial perspectives and satisfying the thirst for large questions and unanticipated and novel connections. The work seemed to offer something for a wide range of readers—the economist, sociologist, historian, political scientist, anthropologist, classicist, or methodologist. Multivalent and open-textured, it refused to conform to a standard disciplinary nomenclature. But more than that, in Shils’s telling the work was overwhelming and disorienting, yet exhilarating and compelling. It promised intellectual emancipation. Like the New World itself, it opened onto new possibilities for the journey of the intellect.