Of all of Max Weber’s texts, one stands alone for its special significance as an expression of his originality and as the basis for his reputation: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (hereafter in this chapter PESC), a truly canonical book that has been called sociology’s “most famous” work, published in 1930 with Talcott Parsons as the translator. It was the second of Weber’s works to appear in English, following Knight’s translation of General Economic History, and the two were the only translated texts widely available until the postwar cascade of translations, beginning with the selection of writings translated and edited by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. PESC not only appeared early but achieved impressive longevity: for seventy-two years the version attributed to Parsons reigned as the sole authority for the Anglophone world. The situation changed only with the publication of new translations by Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells, based on Weber’s original Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik essays of 1904–5, and by Stephen Kalberg, using Weber’s 1920 revised text, favored by Parsons.
Translation is a risky affair, as devotees of poetry, narrative fiction, and social theory well know. As Vladimir Nabokov once wrote in “On Translating Eugene Onegin”:
O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:
I traveled down your secret stem
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza, patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose—
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.
As someone has remarked, all translations are in some measure a violation and distortion of the original; if we want to know what an author really meant to say then we must read the original work, remove the pain of the thorn for the pleasure of the rose. But the discussion and dissemination of ideas would be a slow and uninspired labor if we were to follow such advice slavishly. Translations, however imperfect, are an indispensable aid to communicating knowledge, even if they may contribute to creative misinterpretation. Indeed, misinterpretations just as much as allegedly faithful readings have always played a role in the reception of an author’s work, the development of a reputation, and the advancement of ideas.
Nowhere among Weber’s writings has the disputation over translation been more sharply joined than with PESC—centered, of course, on the text’s alter ego: the young Talcott Parsons. Acknowledgment of Parsons’s accomplishment, combined in varying degrees of generosity with reservations and complaints about his translation, have been commonplace for some time. Revisionist readings have been encouraged as well by reactions against the “Parsonizing” of Weber that began with The Structure of Social Action (1937), written with the unfortunate guidance of Alexander von Schelting’s methodological critique of Weber. These matters have been given greater urgency recently as the work of translation has expanded in new directions and to new circles of scholars having interests rather different from those of Parsons and his generation. In sum, though the issues of translation will always defy consensus there is surely agreement, citing recent representative judgments, that this first translation of the most famous sociological investigation “has been enormously influential in the reception of Weber’s work in the English-speaking world,” even though today “most scholars accept that Parsons’s translation is seriously defective.” The presence of a text that is both influential and defective, widely authoritative and deeply flawed, should in itself provoke curiosity and demands for an explanation. How could such a situation come about?
The story of the first translation and publication of PESC is a chapter in the sociology of knowledge or, more specifically, the politics and sociology of Weber translations, an unusually complicated episode. The history of the translation provides a lesson in the social construction of a text, and equally important, a precise answer to the questions that are central to any general sociology of translation: Who translated the work, and why? When, and where? As we shall see, the text we know as PESC is a product, to be sure, of intellectual decisions Parsons arrived at as translator, but it is also significantly the result of social forces and relationships at work at the time. Indeed, strictly speaking, it is not actually Parsons’s intended translation tout court, but his proposed text as influenced by social circumstances and modified by editorial fiat and “correction.” The effect of these circumstances and modifications was to create an English-language Weber text that from a contemporary perspective was less satisfactory than Parsons’s original. Thus, some (though not all) of the criticism of Parsons has been misdirected. Those aspects of the translation regarded as “unsatisfactory” today had to do, in part, with a context and relationships beyond the control of the designated translator. Ironically, aspects of the subsequent criticism only echo some of Parsons’s own concerns and criticisms at the time he struggled with the challenges of producing a reliable and readable manuscript.
Talcott Parsons’s effort to translate Weber’s work in the sociology of religion dates from late 1926 and began in earnest early in 1927, as he was writing his dissertation while on a temporary year appointment in economics at Amherst College, his undergraduate alma mater. It ended three years later, following extended negotiations and complications, with the publication of the text in London and New York.
For the young Talcott Parsons in 1920s, whether as a student in London or Heidelberg, or as a young instructor at Amherst College or Harvard University, the problem was, in a word, capitalism. It was not a problem unique to his perceptions, needless to say, but one that was widely shared by many others, including Frank Knight and Allyn Young, among leading economists. Parsons’s own encounter with Weber on this multifaceted “problem” came about as it did entirely as a matter of chance. Having graduated from Amherst and spent a year at the London School of Economics, attending lectures by R. H. Tawney, Morris Ginsberg, L. T. Hobhouse, and Bronislaw Malinowski, he was fortunate to receive a fellowship in a new post–World War I exchange program with Germany for the 1925–26 academic year and was simply assigned to the University of Heidelberg, having no say in the matter and knowing little about the faculty. As he acknowledged later, “I had never heard Weber’s name mentioned during the whole year I was in London, but he still was clearly the dominant figure at Heidelberg and I got extraordinarily interested in him very fast.” Though Tawney was working on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, he apparently had avoided any discussion of Weber’s work in his lectures. Thus, in Parsons’s words, “the decisive turning point for me was going to Germany and falling under the aegis of Weber. If I had gone to either Columbia or Chicago in the late 1920s, I don’t think I would have absorbed Weber, at least not for another ten or fifteen years. Among other things, I wouldn’t have known German well enough to read Weber in German, and the translations would not have begun coming out for quite a while.”
Arriving in Heidelberg in the fall after language preparation in Vienna, not having read Max Weber’s work before, Parsons was thrown into courses with Alfred Weber, Karl Jaspers (on Immanuel Kant), and Karl Mannheim, who was teaching a seminar on Weber. During the year he also studied with the two economists, Emil Lederer and Edgar Salin, eventually choosing the latter as his major advisor for a dissertation on the concept of “capitalism,” a degree opportunity he had not even imagined during his first months in residence. Advised early on by Arnold Bergstraesser, he immediately got the point that Weber was the person to read.
Parsons began reading Weber when the university semester began, first during long hours in the library. But he quickly purchased the first edition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922), the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (1922), and at least the first volume of the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (also the 1922 printing). The marginalia and extensive underlining in these books and his notes from the period suggest that Parsons was a voracious and careful reader, devouring the Weber texts and establishing the direction for his early labors if not his entire career. As he later commented, through such texts a spiritually present Weber “served, in a very real sense, as my teacher.” Like Edward Shils, he carried with him a vivid memory of this initial encounter, writing, “I don’t think it was mere chance that the first of Weber’s works which I read was his study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I don’t know how surprising it will be for others, however, that this reading had an immediate and powerful impact on me. It gripped my intense interest immediately and I read it straight through—that is, subject to the limits of library hours, since I did not yet own a copy—as if it were a detective story.” Whose footprints and which clues was Parsons following? In his personal copy, among the copious marginalia that he wrote, one in particular points to the answer—a simple “Uncle Frank” that he scribbled alongside a sentence Weber quoted from Benjamin Franklin’s Advice to a Young Tradesman, which Parsons had underlined: “Neben Fleiß und Mäßigkeit trägt nichts so sehr dazu bei, einen jungen Mann in der Welt vorwärts zu bringen, als Punktlichkeit und Gerechtigkeit bei allen seinen Geschäften,” or, in his later original typescript translation, “After industry and frugality, nothing contributes more to the raising of a young man in the world than punctuality and justice in all his dealings.” (Parenthetically, he reproduced Weber’s italics, inserting a note that they were Weber’s emphasis, not Franklin’s; but the published text, as occurred throughout, eliminated the italics and the footnote, following the editorial recommendations of Tawney.) Immersed in the text, Parsons was now on the trail of the people he knew, their ethos, their moral personalities, himself among them. The author’s message to his detective-reader should have been de te narratur fabula (this story is about you), a line Weber actually did use elsewhere. The cultural significance of the “Protestant ethic” and the “spirit of capitalism” for Americans like Parsons, this retelling of the most compelling narrative of the founding of “America” and its moral order, its “habits of the heart” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s words, is one of the essential clues to understanding the Weber phenomenon in the United States.
For Parsons what emerged from this extraordinarily productive year, most obviously, was the D. Phil. dissertation under Salin, defended on a return to Heidelberg the following year on July 29, 1927 (though awarded only in April 1929), and the publication soon afterward of its third chapter in two parts, “‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature,” in the Journal of Political Economy, edited at the University of Chicago. But the foundation for translating Weber and working toward The Structure of Social Action (1937) was laid in Heidelberg as well. The proposal to translate Weber actually surfaced in late 1926 or early 1927, before Parsons had completed his dissertation, with the stimulus coming not from a publisher but from professor Harry Elmer Barnes, the sociologist-historian then at Smith College and later on the New School for Social Research faculty. Parsons’s serious interest in the idea was first expressed in an informative handwritten letter he sent to Marianne Weber (whom he knew already from the year in Heidelberg) that contained a courteous and important request for support—one he was to repeat seven months later. He wrote in German in April 1927 (undated):
Sehr verehrte Frau Professor:
Vor mehreren Monaten ist mir vorgeschlagen worden etwas von Max Weber ins Englische zu übersetzen. Der Vorschlag war mir ausserordentlich angenehm und ich habe Verhandlungen mit verschiedenen Leuten darüber aufgenommen.
Eine Reihe von Büchern wird jetzt herausgegeben unter dem Titel “History of Civilization Series” die in England vom Verlag Kegan, Paul & Co. Ltd, London, und in den Vereinigten Staaten vom Verlag Alfred Knopf, New York publiziert wird. Man schlägt vor die “Protestantische Ethik” von Max Weber mit der “Vorbemerkung” und wahrscheinlich auch dem Aufsatz “Die protestantischen Sekten usw”, d.h. die ersten 236 Seiten vom Band I der Religionssoziologie darin als ein Band für sich erscheinen zu lassen.
Neulich habe ich mit dem Redakteur der Reihe, Mr. C. K. Ogden und auch mit dem Verlagshaus Knopf gesprochen und beide haben dem Vorschlag genehmigt. Jetzt hängt alles davon ab wie die Sache von deutscher Seite angesehen wird.
Hätten Sie gerne dass diese Arbeit Max Webers im Englischen erscheinen solle? Ich weiss nicht ob ich genügend in der Arbeit Max Webers und in der deutschen Sprache eingewachsen bin um der Aufgabe gewachsen zu sein. Trotzdem werde ich mein Bestes tun da ich glaube dass gerade diese Schrift für uns in Amerika von ausserordentlicher Wichtigkeit ist und viel weiter bekannt zu werden verdient.
Die Angelegenheit der Übersetzungsrechte bleibt, wie ich verstehe, in den Händen der Englischen Firma, Kegan Paul. Sie ist bereit die üblichen Betrag für die Rechte eines wissenschaftlichen Werkes, etwa $100 zu bezahlen. Mehr können Sie nicht leisten da dies ja keine kommerzielle Unternehmung ist. Glauben Sie dass der Verlag Mohr damit einverstanden sein wird? Und wenn Sie die Übersetzung gern sehen würden könnten Sie vielleicht so freundlich sein ein Wort an den Verlag zu schreiben? Ich glaube es würde die Verhandlungen sehr erleichtern.
Mit vorzüglicher Hochachtung
Ihr Ergebener, Talcott Parsons
[Several months ago it was proposed to me to translate something from Max Weber into English. The proposal was extremely attractive to me and I started negotiations with several people. A series of books with the title “History of Civilization Series” will be published now in England by Kegan, Paul & Co. Ltd, London, and in the United States by Alfred Knopf, New York. They are proposing to print as a single volume Max Weber’s “Protestant Ethic” with the “Introduction” and probably also the essay “The Protestant Sects etc,” i.e. the first 236 pages of volume 1 of the Sociology of Religion. Recently I have spoken with the series editor, Mr C. K. Ogden, and also with Knopf Publishers, and both have approved the proposal. Now everything depends on how the matter will be viewed from the German side. Would you like to see this work of Max Weber appear in English? I do not know whether I am sufficiently well-versed in Max Weber’s work and the German language to be equal to the task. Nevertheless I will do my best, as I believe that precisely this text is extraordinarily important for us in America and deserves to be more widely known. The matter of translation rights remains, as I understand, in the hands of the English firm, Kegan Paul. The firm is prepared to pay the amount of about $100 for the rights to a scientific work. More than that is not possible, as this is not a commercial undertaking. Do you think that Mohr Publishers will agree to this? And if you would like to see the translation appear, would you perhaps be good enough to send a supportive note to the publisher? I believe it would make the negotiations a lot easier.] (TPP)
Parsons threw himself into this project with enthusiasm and determination, speaking with Ogden, who was then in the United States, and with Paul B. Thomas at Knopf. He already sensed that difficulties might arise and therefore enlisted Marianne Weber’s assistance, perhaps with the knowledge that earlier in 1922 a proposal from Routledge had foundered on the Siebeck/Mohr preference for an English-language edition of all three volumes of the Religionssoziologie. The other obvious weakness was his status and bona fides: barely out of graduate study in 1927 at the age of twenty-four, an unknown and very junior scholar, not a published word to his name, without a doctoral degree, without permanent university employment. Under the circumstances it is remarkable he was considered at all! And in fact, at first he barely was, and even to the very end other unnamed “expert translators” were invited by the publishers to intervene and evaluate his work.
For her part, when Parsons informed her, Marianne Weber was interested in moving the project forward, inviting him to Sunday afternoon tea when he arrived in Heidelberg that summer to complete and defend the dissertation. Their meeting occurred on June 26, 1927, and it led Parsons to a follow-up conversation with Oskar Siebeck, who reportedly “had a very good impression of him” (August 22, 1927; VAMS). Both Marianne Weber and Oskar Siebeck were committed to finding the best possible translator, with Marianne especially concerned about using someone unschooled in the sociology of religion discussions and fretting over the dismal experience of her friend Marie Luise Gothein, whose book A History of Garden Art had been mangled in translation. Siebeck considered himself not only a representative of the firm but also an advocate for Marianne Weber’s editorial and financial interests. Parsons quickly became Marianne’s candidate and her support was strong and consistent; indeed, she spoke of him with great warmth to the end of her life in 1954. What they shared throughout decades of contact and friendship, interrupted only by the war, was the love for Max Weber and his work. Without this special relationship—without Parsons’s stubborn dedication and Marianne Weber’s unwavering support, accepted by Siebeck—it is highly improbable the translation would have appeared at all, and certainly not when it did.
Aside from the obvious matters of the choice of a translator, legal rights, and financial terms, the questions raised for translating the text that came to be known as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism were set very early: Which text or texts would be translated? Who would write the introduction, and what kind of introduction to the work and the author would it be? Who would have overall editorial control? The publication rights had to be negotiated with English and American firms: Kegan Paul and Allen and Unwin in London, Alfred A. Knopf in New York, and eventually, at the very end, Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York. The first three publishing houses figured in the discussions with Mohr/Siebeck from the very beginning. Among the editors from these firms, it is important to note that Oskar Siebeck had close ties only with Stanley Unwin, a factor that turned out to be decisive.
As for the text itself, Siebeck had for some time favored translating all three volumes of Weber’s Religionssoziologie and, interesting enough, Parsons agreed with him on scholarly grounds, commenting later to Frank Knight, “The Protestant Ethic is quite impossible to understand apart from its place in the wider framework” of Weber’s Religionssoziologie, a view he always held and repeated over the years (June 5, 1936; TPP). From his standpoint, the more of the three volumes one could translate, the better. But repeated attempts to convince Kegan Paul and Knopf ended in failure, marked finally in the summer of 1927 by an apparent agreement on a reduced format of Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (hereafter, GARS) volumes 1 and 2 in Kegan Paul’s series, the publication outlet favored initially by Harry Barnes and proposed to C. K. Ogden, the series editor, now back in London: “We shall be willing to publish in English translation (with the American market) at least the equivalent of the two volumes out of the three volumes of Max Weber’s ‘Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie’ in the History of Civilization Series on the terms you name,” read the press’s communication to Siebeck (July 26, 1927; VAMS).
A series of tortured negotiations through the rest of the year led to the collapse of this apparent agreement. The reasons for the failure are difficult to fathom, as the parties were not far apart. The correspondence among Parsons, Ogden, Thomas, Siebeck, and Marianne Weber suggests there was a clash between “material” commercial and “ideal” academic interests, and an irresolvable dispute over the ownership of translation rights. The correspondence also suggests that the politics of interwar publishing played a role, with a certain amount of suspicion, obfuscation, and “buck passing” among the English and American firms. Caution was combined with scarcely concealed hostility concerning the translation of European authors, especially German and French ones—a legacy of World War I. Explaining the situation to Parsons, Ogden once remarked that “it is impossible to pay more for a German book than an English one as we do at present, except on a non-commercial basis (‘in order to have some of these foreigners’)” (June 23, 1927; TPP)! Misgivings persisted about using an American translator. To make matters worse, Ogden eventually concluded that Siebeck was a “hopeless” negotiating partner, provoking Parsons’s defense of the publisher with “I still think that he [Oskar Siebeck] is right on that [not publishing “The Protestant Ethic” alone in translation]. I do think that the work as a whole is essentially a unit, and that for the proper understanding of Weber’s work it would be too bad to break it up. Also I think that it would prove to be popular and that when the one part became known there would be a considerable demand for the rest. Around here people are talking about it a good deal and I think it would be widely read” (November 12, 1927; TPP). It is true that Oskar Siebeck made every effort to negotiate the most favorable terms, partially to protect Marianne Weber’s financial interests during this period of economic uncertainty. While in the process he may have sacrificed some good will, there is no evidence that he was incapable of reaching a reasonable agreement. In the end he did exactly that, acceding to terms with Stanley Unwin at Allen and Unwin close to those initially proposed by Ogden at Kegan Paul, with one key exception: the decision concerning what to translate.
This failure and the backtracking by Kegan Paul and Knopf could have terminated the entire project. Instead, Parsons persisted, urging that the proposed translation be scaled back to GARS volume 1 (1–275): the Vorbemerkung, or prefatory remarks, from 1920; the “Protestant Ethic” essays; the essay on the Protestant sects; and the Einleitung, or introduction, to the subsequent series of essays on the world religions. But the Einleitung was eventually dropped, and then the essay on the sects—a process of textual “downsizing” under editorial pressure that left what we now have. Even retaining the Vorbemerkung required a special defense. With Marianne Weber arguing the case, and Oskar Siebeck using his relationship with Stanley Unwin to advantage, finally in September 1928—nearly two years after the idea surfaced—Parsons submitted a rough draft (or as the publisher called it, a “specimen” or “sample translation”) of the first “Protestant Ethic” essay (GARS 1:17–62) to Allen and Unwin in London. He explained that he was aiming for what we could call a “semantic” translation, urging that the unavoidable problems of textual meaning and the work’s larger significance be addressed in a critical introdution:
In general I have tried to be faithful to the text rather than to present a work of art as far as English style is concerned. It would be impossible to do anything else without almost completely recasting the whole manner of exposition.… It also seems to me it would be very undesirable to have the thing published without a critical introduction which set forth its significance for Weber’s sociological work as a whole and Weber’s place in the social thought of Germany. In Germany itself it has been very gravely misunderstood, and I fear that without such a safeguard the same process would be repeated for English readers. (September 24, 1928; TPP)
Because of R. H. Tawney’s reputation and following, assisted by the publication in 1926 of his Holland Memorial Lectures as Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Stanley Unwin had from the beginning viewed him as the best choice for the introduction or foreword, urging Siebeck that Tawney’s presence “should help materially in securing an adequate reception for the book both in the press and scholastic circles” (July 22, 1927; VAMS). So the nod went to Tawney, who unfortunately appears not to have kept abreast of developments in German scholarship. His exchange of letters with Unwin and Siebeck in 1930, for example, shows that he was entirely unaware of Marianne Weber’s major biography of her husband published in 1926.
Furthermore, Tawney paid little attention to Weber’s actual arguments, with his own interests ascendant instead in the uninspired and modest fourteen-page foreword that he did produce at the last minute, delaying publication of the translation while Stanley Unwin waited impatiently for his introductory comments. Indeed, Tawney appears to have been slow to grasp Weber’s significance, with his most incisive commentary on Weber coming not in the foreword to Parsons’s translation of PESC but in the 1937 preface to the second edition of his own book. This outcome confirmed Parsons’s fears about the consequences of not publishing a critical introduction. As Lutz Kaelber, a skilled translator, has noted, “Tawney’s misrepresentations set a precedent for careless reading of Weber’s work among sociologists and scholars in neighboring disciplines alike, especially until other writings by Weber became available in English translations and Tawney’s foreword became replaced with one that actually presented Weber’s argument in its strengths and weaknesses and addressed the argument’s contexts.”
Notwithstanding the completion of a first installment, the nourishment and birth of Parsons’s complete translation was still far from assured. Stanley Unwin had initially consulted Tawney about a suitable translator, had ruled out Frank Knight, whose translation of the General Economic History he had agreed to distribute in Britain, and then wondered about other possible “expert” translators. Despite his favorable impression of Knight’s achievement, “It is not our intention,” Unwin had written Siebeck, “to turn to America for a translator of ‘Die Protestantische Ethik’” (July 25, 1927; VAMS). Nevertheless, that is what occurred. But Unwin never reconciled himself to Marianne Weber’s choice of Parsons, as becomes evident through the continuous exchange of questioning and complaints, as if to remind her and Oskar Siebeck of the risk of acceding to her wishes and his generosity in doing so. As late as the end of October 1929, Unwin accompanied Tawney’s report on the translation to Siebeck with an affirmation of its purpose—namely, “to show you some of the difficulties with which you have presented us by insisting upon an American translator. It bears out our repeated experience, viz. that a knowledge of the technique of translation is necessary as well as a knowledge of the subject and a mastery of the language. We shall no doubt eventually pull through, but we think you will now more readily understand our reluctance to employ translator[s] of whose work we have no previous experience” (October 29, 1929; VAMS). Parsons must have sensed the doubts and tensions, as he took the highly unusual step of having his friend and London School of Economics compatriot, the economist Arthur R. Burns, appear at the Allen and Unwin offices to check on the situation while vacationing in England. Burns provided some measure of reassurance, although he acknowledged to Parsons having been quizzed about his friend’s reputation and accomplishments. On his side, to protect editorial discretion, Unwin recruited R. H. Tawney as the final arbiter of any disputes that might arise, actually writing that provision into the contract Parsons signed, and in addition reserving the right to revise the text at the translator’s expense.
Parsons’s “sample translation” in typescript was in reality a test of his merits. It was read by at least six people: three unidentified in-house readers for Allen and Unwin, plus Stanley Unwin himself, Oskar Siebeck, and, most surprising, Marianne Weber. The publishers’ response was at best grudging acceptance of a rough draft badly in need of revision, at worst a challenge to the entire enterprise. A translator with less fortitude and thinner skin might have walked away at this point. Marianne Weber’s reply to Siebeck (forwarded to Unwin) revealed her own frustration, which must have been matched by that of Parsons:
It is very difficult for me to judge Parsons’s translation, as I read it with a feel for the German rather than the English language. For me it is thoroughly readable and stylistically acceptable, and in any case it should be considered a basis for revision. In a number of places better formulations might be found, but doubtless only with a translator who is at home in history and political economy. I notice immediately on p. 1 of section 2 a question mark about the concept “historical individual.” The German word “historisches Individuum” is a familiar philosophical concept in Germany, given its character by H. Rickert, that in my view cannot be translated differently. But if Parsons’s text is not understandable to readers of English, then in my opinion we must authorize the English firm to have it revised, to be sure by someone schooled in the science who takes on the task of remaining as true to the content as possible. Of course it is the concentrated content of the sentences that produces such difficulties (1) of understanding and (2) of translation. (November 26, 1928; VAMS).
Such questioning of standard conceptual language says a great deal about the level of complaint concerning the quality of Parsons’s work. But Unwin had made his point and agreed to proceed, though with the insertion of Tawney for protection.
When the completed translation arrived at the offices of Allen and Unwin in mid-1929, criticism resumed, of course. By now, well into the third year after Barnes’s initial contact, Parsons was aiming for a readable and reliable text, avoiding complex formulations and conceptual terminology that might be misunderstood and lead to further delay. Even the previous summer he had become frustrated, writing to Ogden, “it has dragged out so long that I shall be willing to take any publisher who will bring the matter to a decision” (June 10, 1928; TPP). But he also sought accuracy, so was careful to include almost all of Weber’s many italicized words and phrases, as well as his legendary and copious use of quotation marks or inverted commas around key words and phrases. Whenever possible, he kept Weber’s paragraphs intact, and for good measure he included in the margins the page references to the original GARS, volume 1, text, thus facilitating a kind of dual language comparison by the curious reader.
Tawney read the typescript first, followed by two more professional translators (copy editors were an invention for the future). The American publisher of record, now Charles Scribner’s Sons, was thankfully absent from these discussions, as arrangements with that firm had been initiated not by Allen and Unwin but surprisingly by Ralph Barton Perry, Parsons’s senior Harvard colleague in philosophy and a series advisor for Scribner’s, who was on the lookout for an inexpensive student-friendly “Weber source book” in a new social science series. In any case, for contractual reasons it was Tawney’s judgments that were binding. “With regard to Parsons’ translation of Weber,” he wrote,
I have read more of this. I cannot, as I told you, assume responsibility for the accuracy of the translation, as to compare the English and German sentence by sentence would be a very long job.
I think that, as a piece of English, it will pass, provided that certain alterations are made, viz. (1) The translator has reproduced the German italics throughout. This, I fear, must be altered. German writers use italics for emphasis where they are unnecessary, and, indeed, would appear quite out of place in English. The effect on the English reader of finding them in every other line, on some pages, would not be good. I suggest that the translation should be read by someone who will delete them, wherever, in English eyes, they are unnecessary.
(2) Somewhere the same comment applies to the use of inverted commas, though not to the same extent.
(3) The paragraphing and stopping require attention.
(4) Sometimes, though not very often, Mr. Parsons’ English appears to me shaky. Here, again, the changes required are usually quite simple. The alteration of the order of the words would, in some cases, put the matter right.
Much the weakest part of the translation, as a piece of English, is the Introduction, the reason presumably being that the German of it is the more abstract and difficult. I think this needs particular attention. (September 28, 1929; TPP)
With the advantage of hindsight, Tawney’s alarm over “Mr. Parsons’ English” and the 1920 introduction or prefatory remarks appears somewhat overstated. As a representative example of the issues, consider the original typescript form of 1929 and Parsons’s rendition of Weber’s first two sentences:
A child of modern European civilization will necessarily and rightly treat problems of universal history in terms of this question: [to] what combination of circumstances may the fact be attributed that in western civilization and only in it, cultural phenomena have appeared, which—nevertheless as we like to think at least—lie in a line of development having universal significance and value?
Only in the west does “science” exist at a stage of development which we recognize today as “valid.”
The editorial correction in the actually published text then read:
A PRODUCT of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value.
Only in the West does science exist at a stage of development which we recognize to-day as valid.
What is the result of this intervention? One simple change in syntax introduces a first sentence that is easier to scan, but Parsons’s more precise statement of Weber’s central question, the all-important Fragestellung, is needlessly sacrificed. Equally telling, the carefully crafted typography or form of Weber’s text, faithfully reproduced in Parsons’s second sentence, has now been seriously compromised.
The changes to the typography of Parsons’s draft were indeed considerable and extensive. Most significant, following Tawney’s suggestions, nearly all of Parsons’s faithfully rendered italics and inverted commas were eliminated. For example, in the Vorbemerkung alone, to use a quantitative measure, Weber had italicized eighty-three words and used inverted commas fifty times, nearly all reproduced by Parsons. But the published text retained only ten of the former, and it eliminated all of Weber’s and Parsons’s use of inverted commas. Paragraphs and sentences were divided and simplified further. And finally, the marginal pagination references to the German original were dropped on the grounds that by shifting Weber’s voluminous footnotes to endnotes (an editorial decision that seems not to have been discussed with Parsons at all!), such a reference system became confusing. Alteration of Parsons’s intended textual typography was not a trivial matter, for in the end the text that was actually published, compared with his original submission, had lost something of the emphasis, qualification, nuance, and meaning of Weber’s text that it otherwise would have had, as present-day scholars have noted.
As for the celebrated conceptual terminology, after all these readings—probably at least nine people altogether orchestrated by the press, plus unspecified others Parsons said he consulted—the basic vocabulary for which Parsons is so famous remained intact: typically “conduct” or simply “life” for Lebensführung, “life” or “way (also ‘type’ and ‘manner’) of life” for Lebensstil, “elimination of magic from the world” for Entzauberung der Welt, “historical individual” for historisches Individuum, the egregious “correlations” for Wahlverwandtschaften (“elective affinities”), and. most important, “iron cage” for stahlhartes Gehäuse (literally, “a casing as hard as steel”). The familiar concise and powerful drum-beat cadences, such as those found in the concluding pages, were authentically Parsons’s invention as well; for example, “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so,” or “No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For, of the last stage of this cultural development [Dann allerdings könnte für die “letzten Menschen” dieser Kulturentwicklung], it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’ No editor would want to revise that language, steeped in pathos. For once, even the inverted commas survived, though not the italics. But all readers still overlooked with the translator Weber’s crucial philosophical-cultural reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s “last men” who “invented happiness,” an integral part of his argument, with Parsons’s revisionist phrasing (viz. “the last stage of this cultural development”) signaling the limits of his imagination and interests. It remains a striking paradox nevertheless that Parsons’s English prose often achieved a level of clarity, power, and concision while engaging with Weber’s German text that was unmatched in the much-maligned leaden style of his subsequent work. It is as if Weber’s language and thought had fired his imagination and provoked a more vivid and supple style. The fortunate beneficiaries in this specific respect were, of course, Weber and his English-language audience.
When considering what we regard today as key Weberian concepts, it is important to point out that in his reading notes from his student days in Heidelberg, written in German, Parsons often enough (but not always!) wrote out phrases like “Systematik der Lebensführung,” “Entzauberung der Welt,” or “Methodische Lebensführung in USA” when reading PESC or the ensuing essay “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism.” It is not as though he missed this terminology altogether or failed to see it as part of the text. Rather, his problem from the very beginning was “capitalism”—the concept of capitalism—or, as he wrote in his notes, the problem of the “breeding of capitalist qualities” (Züchtung kapitalistischer Qualitäten), and much later in print, “‘capitalism’ as a socioeconomic system.” Parsons’s central question was thus framed unsurprisingly through the intellectual discourse and economics of his time, instead of through formulations such as “the discourse of the modern” or the problematics of the cultural sociology and cultural criticism of our own age.
More specifically, Parsons suggested in his dissertation chapter that one rationale for making Weber’s text available was to explore an alternative to the “individualistic,” “rationalistic,” and “unilinear” evolutionary assumptions operative in Anglo-American economic thought, a framing of the issue derived from the work of his dissertation director, Edgar Salin. Salin, however, a grand nephew of Jacob Schiff who as a teenager had sojourned with the wealthy in New York at his uncle’s invitation, was known not only as an economist but also as an esthete and follower of Stefan George. The aesthetic sensibility becomes apparent in his overdrawn distinction between two mutually exclusive points of view in economics: one abstract and individualistic, the other concretely historical and “organic” with roots in German romanticism. For Salin both Karl Marx and Max Weber emerged from the latter orientation. Yet neither could be squeezed into such a highly schematic format without considerable distortion, and indeed Parsons completely abandoned it a few years later when writing The Structure of Social Action. When translating PESC, moreover, these framing dichotomies could hardly have assisted his choice of language and categorical distinctions.
With respect to the problem of capitalism itself, Weber’s treatise had two major advantages for Parsons. First, it critically addressed the “economic interpretation of history” and demonstrated that the problems of modern capitalism must be grasped not only with tools of abstract economic theory, but also with the intellectual resources and methods of comparative history and sociological investigation. Second, it gave a clarifying answer to the “problem” of capitalism itself, which for Parsons (as for Weber) was a matter of understanding modern capitalism’s “peculiar rationality.” That rationality consisted in Parsons’s brief retelling of Weber’s account in (1) rational organizational and institutional forms, such as bureaucracy, rational law, rational accounting practices, and the rational organization of formally “free” labor; and (2) the distinctive “adaptation of the whole way of life of modern man to a particular set of values” summed up in the phrase “the spirit of capitalism.” The result was a socioeconomic system that Parsons described in his dissertation as “objective”—that is, existing independently of our individual will; “mechanistic,” or based on contractual relationships; “ascetic” in the sense of affirming supra-personal norms of action, such as “productivity” and “service”; “autonomous” because it followed its own laws of development; and “rational” in the dual sense of adapting means to ends, and demanding “the extreme discipline and self-control of the whole life of every individual.”
The more “psychologically” and “culturally” resonant language that Weber sometimes used was subordinated to the purpose of ferreting out modern capitalism’s special features and rationale, as Parsons’s own notational outline of the “Vorbemerkung” (GARS 1:1–12) reveals, complete with page references to the German text, transcribed exactly as he wrote it (TPP):
Staatsbegriff: 4
Kap. die schicksalsvollste Macht unsres modernen Lebens, 4
Unmittelbar danach
Charakteristik des Kapitalismus 4–5
Anmerkung gegen Brentano 4–5
Simmel, Sombart
Begriff des Kapitalismus überhaupt 6
Spezifische Eigenart des modernen Kapitalismus 6–7
Rationale Organisation 7
Trennung von Haushalt u. Betrieb 8
Rationale Buchführung 9
Kap. Arbeitsorganisation 9
Rat. Sozialismus 9
Das Zentrale Problem 10
Entstehung des Bürgertums
Eigenart der mod. Wissenschaft
Wichtige Quellen des Kapitalismus 11
Recht
Rationalismus des okzidentalen Kultur, 11
Religiöse und magische Mächte 12
Asketischer Protestantismus
The concept of Lebensführung, or “life conduct,” does indeed appear in these revised pages that Weber published in 1920, though in this instance not in Parsons’s notes, where it is implicitly subordinated to the “rationalism of occidental culture.” In this respect the modern objections to Parsons’s intellectual choices are important and correct: they alert us to a level of meaning he obscured. All the rich conceptual language Weber constructed in compound nouns based on “life,” so essential to the fifth chapter of PESC—life conduct (Lebensführung), lifestyle (Lebensstil), life ideal (Lebensideal), life outlook (Lebensanschauung), life conception (Lebensauffassung), life atmosphere (Lebensluft), life mood (Lebensstimmung)—was played down in Parsons’s more muted vocabulary. Perhaps it was the Simmelian cast to this terminology, a reminder of the last chapter on the “Style of Life” in Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, that suggested to Parsons the advisability of sharpening a theoretical boundary, in these instances by using a less culturally and psychologically suggestive terminology or by ignoring Weber’s inventions altogether.
Notwithstanding such choices as a translator, it is also the case that Parsons’s reading captured accurately the overarching terminology of rationalism, rationality, and rationalization that was central to Weber’s account of asceticism and the capitalist “spirit.” This was the theoretical language that has survived as one of the most distinctive signposts of Weberian thought, having achieved by now a life of its own. In this respect Parsons’s orientation was perspicacious: it remained true to what Weber would have called the “culturally relevant” problem complex of the modern world—namely, the “peculiar rationalism” of Western capitalist culture and the problematic character of modern capitalism as a “fateful force,” a dynamic socioeconomic system in the age of, as we now say, “globalization.”
For Parsons the translation of PESC was an episode at the very beginning of his career, like a military boot camp best forgotten and left behind. His only later reflection on the three-year project was dramatically understated; after receiving Marianne Weber’s support and introduction to Oskar Siebeck, he noted, “I went to see Siebeck and worked out the arrangement. He in turn arranged publication of the English version by Allen and Unwin of London. It appeared, after a few vicissitudes, in the early summer of 1930.”
The result of these “few vicissitudes,” however, was a text, strictly speaking, that was not Parsons’s intended version but an intervention that had made matters worse, a true Verschlimmbesserung, an “incorrect correction” or “disimprovement” in the fine German oxymoron. But the text had been created, an enduring accomplishment, though an untimely one, for just as it was published its problem focus—capitalism and its “spirit”—seemed headed for self-destruction. The New York Stock Exchange crash in October 1929 coincided with the final proofreading, complaints from the typesetters, and Parsons’s last attempts to correct the corrections, provoking a warning “that your allowance of 10 per cent for author’s corrections will be exceeded” (January 27, 1930; TPP). While the worldly problem of capitalism had arrived in full force, a scholarly exploration of the “work ethic” and its cultural-religious sources by a German author may well have seemed a distraction with excessive panache. Capitalism’s “spirit” had assumed too sinister a form. Allen and Unwin’s London director subsequently reported total sales of only 1,009 through 1933. “There is now very little demand for the book,” he mused, “and it is unlikely that we shall ever sell as many as 2,500 copies”—a Depression-era prognosis wildly off the mark in light of postwar developments. Parsons’s work of translation, also representing an unintended interpretation, awaited a new generation of readers in vastly changed circumstances.
Today we should reassess Parsons’s PESC, but not simply because it is riddled with errors. We should do so because it is important as a socially constructed artifact, an exemplar of the vagaries of “authorship.” Of course, each generation reads a text with its own problems in mind, and a new generation will read it differently and feel the need understandably to render the original more intelligible, more vivid and more accessible to the zeitgeist. But what does this adverb more conceal? Are new readings to be preferred to their predecessors? Would a different text with fidelity to Parsons’s original italics, inverted commas, and pagination to GARS, volume 1, in the margins have altered the understanding and interpretation of Weber, even to a slight degree? In the actually existing translation attributed to Parsons, Weber’s text has certainly lost something in subtlety, texture, emphasis, conceptual precision, and meaning. It became accessible to new English-language readers, but as a simpler and more mechanical treatise that it otherwise would have been. The careful reader could not be alerted to the kind of linguistic qualifications, problematic or borrowed notions, and authorial distance that Weber wished to convey in developing his cultural history and “explanation” of the relationship, the “elective affinity” between the “Protestant ethic” and the “spirit” of capitalism. Side-by-side comparison of original and translation was rendered extremely difficult, as anyone knows who has made the effort to find, say, the four places in which Weber used the phrase Entzauberung der Welt (disenchantment of the world) that Parsons actually translated in slightly different ways. Perhaps with Parsons’s original and more faithful typography we would have come sooner to the kind of questioning that has breathed life into Weber’s ideas. Perhaps we would have avoided fruitless debates over positions attributed to Weber that he actually never advocated and sometimes explicitly repudiated. Perhaps, perhaps …
Yet, hold on! Since we have Parsons’s original typescript, bearing an anonymous archivist’s scribbled notation, “This should be preserved as a historical document of considerable value,” some enterprising spirit could even now issue the authentic Parsons translation of Weber’s text, which with truly minor alterations in response to his posthumous critics—a word here, a phrase there—might well become the definitive version of sociology’s most famous work. And why would we want to do this? What purpose—intellectual, scientific, social, cultural, historical, or personal—would such an exercise serve? In defense of the labor of translation, long on labor and short on appreciation, perhaps it is sufficient to answer, paraphrasing our authors, that even the detectives among us can never know with certainty when the light of the great cultural problems will shift and move on, and with which as yet unexpressed textual resources and innovative readings, misreadings, and rereadings.