Preliminary Remarks
This Appendix is intended to provide some explanation of the lexical difficulties inherent in translating Weber’s text into English, and the decisions made in so doing.1 It presents the principal German concepts that organise this highly structured piece of writing, supplementing points raised in my own footnote apparatus. As such, it is a Translator’s Appendix, working from Weber’s language to the choices made in rendering this into modern English, so that the reader can fully appreciate the gains and losses in this process. It differs therefore from the dictionary prepared by Richard Swedberg and Ola Ogevall, which is organised the other way around, working from English to German.2
In some instances, Weber’s lexical usage produces a classical translator’s dilemma concerning what counts as “appropriate” translation: to render consistently idiosyncratic usage at the cost of clarity; or alternatively, to seek clarity in the translated text at the cost of fidelity to the original? Certainly, some of Weber’s usage is demonstrably idiosyncratic, sometimes indicating more the sources of his ideas than the ideas themselves. And here the idea of “fidelity” is not as straightforward as is sometimes assumed. While we need to think carefully about the terms in which we render Weber’s arguments into English, the idea of “fidelity” is often linked to a merely mechanical conception of the work of translation, a focus on lexeme and collocation, and not on sense, rhythm, or flow.3 How, for example, to be “faithful” when we find that Weber also uses the German Appropriation (which for some of the time means what it looks like it means in English) for what in English is usually termed “allocation,” and so reversing the poles of a bilateral relationship, between taking and giving? Or when he uses Chance in contexts in which in English the sense is “opportunity.” Given the importance of contingency in Weber’s thinking, is it not better to reserve the English “chance” for those points where he writes Chance but is emphasising more simple contingency and less the opportunity that contingency presents? There are examples of all of these issues in what follows. Decisions made have been indicated in footnotes to the body of the preceding text, but some sense of the problems involved can be introduced here by discussion of three economic concepts from Chapter 2, highlighting terminology that had a fixed sense at the time, from which, however, Weber diverged.
The first among these is his use of Nutzleistung for what in English was at the time understood as “utility.” This was an esoteric term introduced by Böhm-Bawerk in the later 1880s but which never caught on; not even his brother-in-law, Friedrich von Wieser, adopted it with any consistency. That Weber persisted with the term indicates his penchant for esoteric terminology, which he then used relentlessly and consistently; the importance of his reading of Böhm-Bawerk in the mid-1890s; and, perhaps most important, that when he drafted chapter 2 in the winter of 1919 / 1920, he drew on reading and ideas from his teaching more than twenty years before. It would be needlessly obscurantist to translate Nutzleistung as anything other than “utility,” as I document below.
The second concerns Weber’s use of Beschaffung to cover both “production” and “procurement.” While the former might be thought to involve the creation of new goods at one particular location (changing the object but not the location), the latter includes the movement of goods to a location where they can be consumed (changing the location but not the object). In truth, the economic concept of “production,” especially as in “means of production,” covers both senses, since of course what are cargo ships, freight trains, and trucks other than “means of production” (of transport services)? The objection that “production” is essentially “making something” can be met by pointing out that even the handloom weaver had to install bobbins on the loom if anything was to be “made,” and that these bobbins of yarn came from somewhere else in the production chain that ran from raw material to finished cloth. Whatever conceptual clarity might be achieved by subsuming “production” under a more general “procurement,” to follow Weber down this particular blind alley would simply render his text more opaque to his English readers than it already is. Much of the text is difficult for good reason, but there is nothing to be gained by adding to the opacity where nothing of consequence follows. Where Weber writes Beschaffungsmittel, therefore, this is consistently rendered as “means of production,” since this is what in English is understood by the term.
A third instance concerns Weber’s use of Verteilung, usually rendered in English as “distribution,” but in German implying the separation of a whole into parts.4 When used in the context of production processes, Weber seeks to emphasise the separation (in space and time) of work performed, and contrast it with the combination of work routines—the endless process of dividing and recombining work performed as economic activity. Herkner’s GdS contribution “Arbeit und Arbeitsteilung,”5 published in 1914, presents a variation on this idea, suggesting that the use of machinery in production divides and displaces labour into new locations, implying further elaboration of the division of labour.6 The underlying idea for both writers is the engine of economic growth outlined in the first few chapters of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which deal with the “division of labour.” Also relevant in this context is Karl Bücher’s treatment of “Arbeitsteilung” in his Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, to which he devotes a separate chapter.7 Here he distinguishes subforms of the division of labour, among them the fragmentation of one branch of production into simple processes (Arbeitszerlegung) and the introduction of new processes and machinery (Arbeitsverschiebung). Bücher therefore develops a special terminology for the various aspects of the division of labour that has no direct parallel in the English literature. Weber does not follow Bücher here, but the latter’s exposition sheds useful light on Weber’s own casuistic practice. If we were to follow Weber’s own terminology, and for Leistungsverteilung write “distribution of activity / output” instead of “division of labour,” the fact that he is in fact talking about the phenomenon known as “division of labour” in English would be needlessly obscured. Leistungsverteilung is therefore rendered more familiarly as “division of labour,” also applying to the use of Verteilung that leads up to chapter 2, §15, “Typen der Leistungsverteilung (Allgemeines).”
Appropriation—In modern English, something can be “appropriated by” a subject or “assigned / allocated to” a subject, which are both active and intentional senses, but Weber employs “appropriation” in a passive sense that does not presuppose direct intent on the part of the subject. This translation retains in most places Weber’s idiosyncratic usage, since in Chapter 2, §24, it becomes rather clearer that he thinks of appropriation as one half of a couple: Expropriation–Appropriation, corresponding to the removal of something from an agent and assignation of something to an agent. There is a strong legal sense here, expressed in English by the term “seize”; in medieval relationships, someone could be “seized of” something, meaning that they had possession of it.
Bedarfsdeckungswirtschaft—Where economic activity meets agents’ immediate needs, but no more: what is generally known in English as a “subsistence economy.” Bedarfdeckung—the “meeting of need”; Parsons (TSEO p. 173) translates this concept as “satisfaction of want,” which is inappropriate on two counts. While needs are subjective, to describe the meeting of need as “satisfaction” presumes an additional subjective quality that is here left open; what an agent “wants” is not the same as what an agent “needs.” The German sense is directed to the latter, not the former, and hence leaves entirely open the basis for the generation of “need.”
Bedürfnis, Bedarf—“Need, object of need.” In English, “want” and “need” are distinct ideas, but the language of English political economy never turned on “need” in the way that early German political economy did, and so there is a danger that English readers will think more of Hegel’s “system of needs” than the more mundane arguments of economists. There is a clear line of development in German economic thinking from “need” (as used in the early nineteenth century)8 to the “useful services” (Nutzleistungen; see below) that meet this need; hence, to the Grenznutzlehre that from the mid-nineteenth century increasingly ordered needs according to marginal degree of satisfaction. Jean-Baptiste Say, the single most influential economic writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, essentially shared this idea regarding subjective needs, and it would be accurate to think of German-Austrian economics as part of a nineteenth-century Continental European tradition heavily influenced by French political economy.9 In early nineteenth-century German economics, “value” was already an essentially subjective concept: that which was needed and acquired had a value. In English-language political economy, “value” was a central conception, but not a subjective concept. Moreover, political economy had a utilitarian underpinning that was not clearly articulated until 1862 when Jevons presented an explicitly utilitarian assessment of marginal utility—set up in terms of pleasure and pain. However, while Jevons rejected the Ricardian version of political economy out of hand, commentary has since followed Alfred Marshall and focussed on degrees of continuity and discontinuity between “classicists” and “postclassicists,” rather than what Ricardo and his contemporaries actually wrote. In his entry “Grenznutzen” for the third edition of the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, von Wieser explicitly associated Menger with Jevons as exponents of the “modern theory,” sharing a common point of departure in marginal utility, and as such, setting their faces against “classical theory.”10 The detailed references that Wieser appended to his entry11 provide a clear overview of parallel international developments in the early twentieth century, citing more books and articles published in Italy (nine) than in Britain (three).
Beschaffungsmittel—Strictly, “means of procurement / provision.” The root schaffen means “making” or “creating,” but it is also employed to refer to making something accessible, or inaccessible, through movement—herschaffen and wegschaffen. And anschaffen means “to purchase,” “to provide,” or “to supply.” The sense therefore goes beyond “means of production” to cover provision through transporting materials to a location where they are consumed (Chapter 2, §6.2). In this case, the object becomes a utility by virtue of this movement, the transformation being of location, rather than form (see Chapter 2, §17). There is no single term in English that captures this sense, apart from “capital,” understood as the totality of intermediate goods that create utilities. Hence, Weber, in using the term Beschaffungsmittel, is in part seeking to avoid using the term “capital,” as some Austrians were inclined to do (e.g., Otto Neurath argued during his trial in 1919 that reports of his speeches used in evidence were inaccurate since he made a point of never using the term “capital”). But not even Böhm-Bawerk, whose work is otherwise characterised by a pedantic insistence on idiosyncratic terminological usage, sought to insist on this—his major work is, after all, Positive Theorie des Kapitals (1889). For want of an English term that conveys this sense of “procurement” / “provision,” the translation uses “means of production” where it is clear that this is the prime sense of the text.
Betrieb—As a noun in modern everyday usage, this is used for a “firm” or “enterprise” (see also Fabrik below). However, while im Betrieb could mean that someone is at a place of work, it would more usually be used to indicate that something is functioning—for example, the computer12 is “processing,” or more simply “working,” if it is im Betrieb. This highlights the fact that the verb betreiben, to which Betrieb is related, translates as “to purposively do something,” “to practice something,” “to engage in something.” Of course, in English “an enterprise” can refer to conduct in this way, too—for example, “free enterprise,” or someone shows “enterprise.” In Weber’s usage, these two senses converge: when in Chapter 2, §1, he refers to Wirtschaftsbetrieb, this does not mean “an economic enterprise” in the sense of a factory or a firm (which would, in any event, involve redundancy of expression), but rather “economic enterprise” in the sense of generic conduct. As he goes on to state, this is “continuous economic activity,” and the paragraph as a whole is about economic action, not economic structures. Weber actively employs this latter sense of Betrieb while also occasionally using the term in its more restricted, everyday sense; to make this clear, some variation in translation is required.
Brauch—Translated as “practice” or “usage,” this word has overtones relating to “custom,” but is in fact distinguished from this term. See Sitte below.
Chance—A central and consistently recurring term in the text that draws attention to Weber’s emphasis on contingency.13 It is, however, used in rather different ways. Primarily it covers the senses of both “chance” and “opportunity.” A “future chance” can best be understood as an “option” in the technical financial sense with which Weber would, of course, have been quite at home, given his study of commodity markets in the 1890s. A fourth sense is that of “calculable probability,” which is clearly what Weber often has in mind. Taking advantage of the fact that the singular of this term is the same in both languages, the term has been left untranslated throughout the text to draw attention to the regularity with which Weber uses it. The plural in German is Chancen.
Deutung, deuten—Translated as “construal,” “construction,” or the act of construing empirical reality.” This term has often been translated as “interpretation” or “interpretive,” but interpretation implies the use of a target language grid through which a source language is understood: A is understood in terms of B. By contrast, “construing” something is a more open process, not confined to the translation of a language, since a statement or an action can be open to variant construals and constructions within the same language or semiotic apparatus. As argued by Hans Henrik Bruun, Deutung is the medium through which the goal, Verstehen, is achieved.14 See the discussion under Verstehen below.
Erfahrung—Relates to “external experience,” the encounter with everyday, empirical processes that, being external to the subject, possess an external, verifiable reality. As contrasted with Erlebnis.
Erlebnis—The lived sensation of Erfahrung, or how the subject encounters the external, everyday and empirical world. While the distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis is clear, in English these are two senses of “experience” that are distinguished in context, and not lexically. A linked term is einfühlen, for which “empathy,” “sympathy,” and “appreciation” are used rather interchangeably, on the grounds that Einfühlen lends access to a replica of an Erlebnis for someone capable of the appropriate degree of empathy. Both are clearly distinct from the sense of Erfahrung.
Erwerb—Strictly translated as “acquisition,” Weber uses this term to refer to externalised, gainful transactions. Parsons (TSEO p. 191, n. 31) notes that the best translation of Erwerben is possibly “acquisition,” but decides on “profit making” to set against “householding.” However, the sense here is not the presence or absence of profit (which is not a simple gain, but a return on invested capital and time), but the presence or absence of gainful exchange as a means of securing the existence of an economic agent. Householding presumes an internal economy of subsistence, in which exchange can play a part; “acquisition” is a contrasting way of life, in which the existence of the economic agent or unit depends in part or wholly on exchange, an external economy of subsistence. Nonetheless, this externalised exchange, while gainful, is not inherently “profitable” in the capitalist sense. It is entirely conceivable for household economies to function in this way, exchanging with other households for the purpose of maintaining, rather than extending, the household, as Weber suggests in his discussion of the division of labour in Chapter 2, §18, and elsewhere.
Erwerbswirtschaft—Translated literally as an “acquisitive economy,” where gainful exchange is dominant and the economy depends for its development on continuous interaction with other units in a network of exchanges. The orientation is explicitly to buying and selling—for example, the sale of labour in return for an income that can then be used to buy goods. It is an economy whose maintenance is based on exchanges between economic units for the purpose of gain, one that is therefore distinct from Tauschwirtschaft, or “exchange economy,” in which exchange might, or might not, be gainful. Weber also uses Verkehrswirtschaft, in which the entire economy depends on networks of acquisitive exchange. We therefore have three terms that cover different degrees of “exchange” economies and some distinction is necessary. While Verkehrswirtschaft—an economy based on communication and commerce—is usually translated here as “commercial economy,” this last term is sometimes used for Erwerbswirtschaft where the context demands it. The essential distinction here is between exchange for gain and exchange without such an aim; Verkehrswirtschaft adds the idea to gainful exchange that this has become systemic and dominates all economic relationships.
Evidenz—Carries the meaning of “transparency,” “obviousness,” or “self-evidence.” Here it is equivalent to the English usage of the word “evident,” but not entirely homologous with “evidence.” That these two terms are semantically related would not normally strike an English speaker as noteworthy when using the words, since “evidence” is used mainly to denote material in support of a proposition or argument; it becomes “evidence” in these terms not by virtue of its “transparency,” but on the contrary because of its relationship to a proposition or argument. Just as there are no “facts” without some kind of context that renders them so, what might be “evidence” is in English usage not necessarily obvious. To compensate for this gap, English speakers use the apparently redundant construction “self-evident.” The problem here is that in German Evidenz does unproblematically carry this meaning of “obviousness,”15 and the word used for “evidence” in the legal or scientific sense is instead Beweismittel, or “means of proof,” and so is clearly distinct. To get around this problem lexically, one would need to introduce a clumsy construction such as “evidentiality,” that is, the quality of being evident. Rather than doing this, I have glossed instances of Weber’s usage to correspond with his sense but added the original term in brackets where appropriate to draw attention to this.
Fabrik—Weber’s terminology of factory, manufacture, enterprise, and undertaking requires clarification not because Weber employed this terminology in any especially idiosyncratic way, but to clarify the way that German distinctions relate to English distinctions. Weber’s definition of this and related terms is “evolutionary”: he defines terms according to the conditions under which the economic structures that they express formed, and which therefore represent their conceptual conditions of possibility. He seeks to establish conceptual distinctions that both map and express the differentiation of activities in developing economies. It is for this reason that his General Economic History has to be read as a commentary on the definitions elaborated in Chapter 2. In English, the use of “factory” to refer to a single closed site where industrial processes are applied to raw materials and labour to produce new products dates from the nineteenth century (The Factory Acts). For most of the eighteenth century, a “factory” was a colonial agency run by a “factor” and had little to do with industrial production as would later be understood. In the early years of the nineteenth century, such plants as existed were almost overwhelmingly cotton and wool processors, and were called “mills” (named as such because of the water that provided their principal source of power). Most metal or woodworking was done in a workshop or foundry (as, for example, with the Birmingham small-arms industry), and large-scale enterprise, such as the weaving of woollen cloth, was not concentrated in one site, but distributed among domestic households that worked for a “manufacturer” who distributed raw materials to them and then collected the finished product (also known as “domestic industry” or the “putting-out” system). In Chapter 2, §15.2, Weber distinguishes between the physical organisation of the “enterprise” and the legal form of the “undertaking,” both of which are distinct from the “factory” since each may be based on several sites. Hence, his use of “enterprise” is closer to what in English is a “unit of production,” while it is more usual today to think of an “undertaking” as an “enterprise.” The translation does, however, follow Weber’s usage, since it is clearly defined and intelligible.
Fürsorge—Usually translated as “welfare,” “solicitude,” or “providence.” Sorge means “care,” “worry,” or “trouble,” and Weber uses two further variants on this root: Vorsorge, meaning “anticipation of a need,” and Versorgung, meaning “the provision of goods to meet a need.”
Geltung—This term is usually related to the empirical validity of something, and in this respect it is closely linked to “legitimacy.” However, it can also carry a related sense of “enactment,” “realisation,” “value” or “worth,” “the currency of something,” or “counting for” something. Or if something is geltend, then it is simply “prevailing” or “in force.” It is not a central concept as such, but reflects the empirical and processual nature of Weber’s terminology. Hence, the “validity” of legitimacy is not a fixed state, but something requiring constant renewal. Accordingly, the translation seeks to reflect these various senses rather than impose a single translation.
Gesellschaft—As discussed in the Translator’s Introduction, despite Weber’s contribution to the GdS being called Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft from 1913 onwards, the latter term was never a central concept of “his sociology”: it is neither an object of analysis nor a term that often appears in that work. The basic structural unit of “his sociology” was not society, but the Verband (see below).
Handeln—“Sociology” is defined in Chapter 1, §1, as a science of soziales Handeln. In the second sentence of Chapter 1, §1, Handeln is distinguished from menschliches Verhalten. It is appropriate here to contrast these as “social action” and “human behaviour,” respectively. Soziales Handeln is therefore consistently translated here as social “action”; the alternative, “behaviour,” does not necessarily imply intentionality, “action” doing so more strongly—this is the distinction that Weber himself makes. Furthermore, since “social action” is by definition for Weber meaningful, intentional action, the use of “behaviour” fails to capture his sense. For example, while one talks routinely of “animal behaviour,” it is evident that to talk of “animal action” as a synonym for this could only make sense anthropomorphically. The related term Sichverhalten is here translated as “comportment.”
There is an argument for translating Handeln as “conduct,” since the latter implies deliberation and choice, neither of which are so firmly located in the idea of “action.” In the Protestant Ethic, Weber seeks to account for the way life conduct (Lebensführung) informed by Puritan values fostered the adoption of practices conducive to the development of capitalism—and so a form of conduct, not the more restricted sense of “action.” “Action” implies singularity more strongly than “conduct,” however, which is better conceived as a sequence or constellation of related “actions.” Accordingly, “conduct” will be treated as the appropriate translation of Benehmen, which in German is used in a sense that is similar to “conduct” in English.
Moreover, in Chapter 2 there is an inflection in Weber’s discussion of “action,” since this chapter is devoted to the categories of das Wirtschaften, conveying the same sense of ongoing purposive action, but where “economic conduct” would clearly imply ongoing action, not a singular event. The institutional framework that Weber constructs in this chapter makes it more fitting to render das Wirtschaften sometimes as “economic action,” as in the chapter title, and at other places as a more generic “economic activity.” By opting for “action” rather than “conduct,” it is possible to keep a clear link between the “social action” of Chapter 1 and the “economic action” of Chapter 2. While this usage conforms to that of Talcott Parsons, in drafting the translation for Chapters 1 and 2 I originally opted for “conduct,” and was only later persuaded to change my practice. So although the text now conforms to Talcott Parsons’s practice, his reason for making this choice was distinct from mine. He had already developed his “action frame of reference” in The Structure of Social Action, and this framework was imposed on his approach to translating Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft without, however, conceiving of this as a way to link the arguments of chapters 1 and 2.
Handlung—This is translated as generic, purposive “action”; its range includes the story line of a play as well as the more specific action of an individual. As such, it is distinct from “behaviour” (Verhalten), “comportment” (Sichverhalten), and one’s “personal conduct” (Benehmen). Taking up the point made in the previous entry, while we can talk of animal “behaviour” or “activity,” it is a different thing to talk of “animal action,” the former implying a lack of, or unspecified, intention, and the latter implying intentionality.
Haushalt, haushalten—Weber uses this initially with reference to the conception of “household economy,” a primarily subsistence economy oriented to maintenance rather than profitability, the oikos of classical Greece.16 While a classical concept, Weber usually related his usage to the work of Rodbertus, who had in the 1860s published a series of “investigations on the domain of the national economy of classical Antiquity,” in six parts. In the second of these essays, he referred to the way that free trade was a force that had riven society apart and brought about the decline of the oikos, the self-sufficient ancient household that in the third essay he called “the real existing basis, the living, pulsating elementary organism … of what the ancients themselves called polis. The consequences of this foundation permeate the entire Staatswesen and dominate its economic aspect.”17 The way that Rodbertus presents the oikos as a model with which later forms of production can be compared is especially clear in the fourth and sixth parts.18 Not only did Weber draw on Rodbertus’s conception of the oikos; he drew on the use Rodbertus made of it in the analysis of economic organisation.
Today, the contrast between household economy and other forms of production and consumption is usually related to Chayanov’s Theory of Peasant Economy,19 which presents essentially the same idea: decision making in the household is driven by the need to feed and sustain its members, a balance constantly needing to be struck between “hands” and “mouths.” Activity is directed by this imperative, not by profitability and efficiency defined with respect to opportunity costs. The household economy, drawing on Rodbertus, plays an important part in Weber’s account of economic organisation in Chapters 2 and 3.
However, there is also a quite separate sense of the term in English that in places gives rise to ambiguity. Noun and verb are also used in modern German to cover “budget” and “budgeting,” terms also applicable to enterprises and national economies. Parsons more or less consistently translates haushalten as “budgeting” rather than “householding” in the sense of Rodbertus; this is rarely appropriate, although there are some passages that remain ambiguous.
Herrschaft—This is a central term in Weber’s vocabulary, translated here as “rule” or “rulership.” It designates the manner in which social, economic, and political orders are characterised by a governing hierarchy in which decisions are made and executed by a ruling person, or group of persons. It is, of course, related to Macht, the means used to exert rule, which, however, can be unproblematically translated as “power,” as Parsons notes (p. 152, n. 83). In this footnote, Parsons explains that his preferred choice for the translation of Herrschaft is “imperative control,” borrowed from N. S. Timasheff, Introduction to the Sociology of Law,20 but he notes that in many cases the concept involves legitime Herrschaft. He therefore suggests that “authority” can be employed as a translation of Herrschaft, which he describes as an “accurate and far less cumbersome translation.” He had explained this choice in an earlier footnote (p. 131, n. 59). This line of argument is no longer accepted, the current view being that Herrschaft is a term related to, but distinct from, Macht, Autorität, and Legitimität.
The standard English translation of Herrschaft, dating from Gerth and Mills, has been “domination,” in preference to “rulership” or “leadership,”21 but this use of “domination” to translate Weber’s usage of Herrschaft tends to overemphasise the coercive aspect of rule. Where Weber wished to place emphasis on coercion, he had other terms: Gewalt, oktroyieren—degrees of force that flow through the basic relationship of Herrschaft. Coupled with Macht, domination is a possibility, but this shows that to use “domination” as a translation for Herrschaft runs together two ideas that Weber strove to keep separate. Combined with the essential presence of legitimacy, we get “legitimate rule” rather than “legitimate domination.” Weber used a different term for “illegitimate domination”: oktroyieren, meaning “to force something on a person or group against their will.” Parsons translated the title of chapter 3, “Typen der Herrschaft,” as “The Types of Authority and Imperative Co-ordination,” but Roth and Wittich changed this in 1968 to “The Types of Legitimate Domination.” In light of recent discussion of legitimacy and the state,22 this idea of “legitimate domination” places together two ideas that Weber sought to separate in what became his Herrschaftssoziologie.
As Reinhart Koselleck emphasises, Herrschaft emerged in old German quite separately from the existing Latin term dominium,23 and it was still in the seventeenth century a relatively indeterminate term translatable into English as “dominion,” but then also as “authority” “command,” “empire,” “lordship,” “manorial estate,” mastery,” “reign,” “rule,” and “sovereignty.”24 In her introduction to MWG I / 22-4, Hanke traces the genesis of Weber’s use of Herrschaft, noting first that in a letter to Roberto Michels dating from 1910 Weber suggested that the term remained flexible, ambiguous.25 At the time, this was a legal and not a social term (Gierke, for example, linked Herrschaft to Verband), but it involved personal rule, not impersonal organisation. In Weber’s hands, it eventually became a generic property of any Verband, the “organising principle” of all “organisations.”
A problem does arise in the historical dimension of this concept, for “rule” has been exercised by quite varying historical institutions, from early kingships, through feudal estates and manors, to the modern factory, with varying degrees and forms of compulsion. Here again, it is evident that “domination” is too uniform and blunt an idea to convey Weber’s meaning. Herrschaft is therefore generally translated here as “rule” or “rulership,” with, for example, Herren as “lords” when the context is medieval Europe, and “masters” when Weber is discussing the early stages of industrial production.
Herstellung, herschaffen—See also Beschaffungsmittel above. While it is quite usual in modern German to use these terms, literally, “make” / “place here,” as synonyms for “production,” Weber couples the “here” with “move here.” His usage is complicated by the fact that schaffen also means “to make” or “to create,” and is also part of a couple, hinschaffen and herschaffen, to “move [something] away” and to “move [something] here.” By using the root schaffen for a number of economic functions—production, means of production, trade, and transport—Weber is able to establish a connection between these functions that cannot be replicated directly in English. Herstellung is therefore translated conventionally as “production,” and Herschaffen as transport.
Idealer Typus—The Weberian “ideal type” is not actually an idealisation of a given form or institution, but rather a Gedankenbild, a thought-image of the leading characteristics associated with a form or institution employed in ordering historical reality. As such, it is a heuristic instrument used in historical investigation, and not the outcome of such investigation. It is not a model of a given historical reality, nor is it the essential nature of that reality; it is far looser, unhierarchised, and preliminary than that would suggest. Weber wrote to Rickert in 1904 suggesting that he had taken the term from Jellinek’s Allgemeine Staatslehre,26 noting, however, that while Jellinek’s usage was perfect “in a logical sense,” it was not serviceable as a “model.” In fact, Weber’s own use of the “ideal type” is closer to what Jellinek himself called an “average type,” a distillation from the variety of phenomena. Jellinek himself defined the “ideal type” normatively, as the “best state” of a given form or institution, that is, an idealisation of an institution rather than a delineation, and so consequently not an analytical category.27
Kampf—Literally, “struggle.” This is a central conception for Weber introduced in Chapter 1, §8. As he there makes clear, there is a Spencerian tinge to this idea of a “social struggle,” but the broad use that he makes of the term means that the simple use of “struggle” as a translation would exaggerate these contemporary echoes of Social Darwinism. The term is therefore translated variously as “conflict” or “contest,” retaining the sense of struggle, but limiting the martial overtones. This is itself warranted by the way that in the paragraphs following Chapter 1, §8, Weber opens out his usage.
Leistung—This covers a wide range of performative qualities, such as the proficiency or achievement of a person, so that eine schlechte Leistung would be “a poor effort.” Correspondingly, the plural form, Leistungen, can be translated positively as “accomplishments.” Alternatively, the term refers to the power output of a machine, a payment, a service, a social benefit, or the efficiency of a machine or person. In addition, what in economic terms are treated as “services” are today referred to in German as Dienstleistungen, literally, “services performed,” but for want of an alternative when Weber writes of Leistungen in this context it is likewise translated as “services,” since these are necessarily “performed.” In Chapter 2, §16, Weber discusses the division and combination of Leistungen, which in this context is what in English and French (e.g., Adam Smith and Emile Durkheim) is understood as the division and combination of labour. Here “work” is also employed as a measurable output from given inputs, as in classical physics. See Nutzleistung below.
Naturalwirtschaft, Naturalrechnung—“Natural economy,” “accounting in natura” refers to the conduct of economic action without the use of money, either as a means of exchange or of account. Normal English usage refers to this concept as “in kind,” but to adopt this consistently would lead to some rather clumsy formulations, especially with regard to “goods in kind,” which in German are simply Naturalien. Although “natural economy” would not be immediately understood in English as specifically a moneyless economy, and has undesirable echoes of a “state of nature,” this usage is in places followed here because it is plays such a central role in Weber’s argument in Chapter 2 and it is important that its compounds be clearly related. I therefore sometimes use the suffix in natura rather than “in kind” to preserve this link.
Nutzleistung—This is mostly used today in its technical sense, related to machinery or electrical equipment, as “usable output” or “effective capacity” (see Leistung above). Weber took the term over from his reading of early Böhm-Bawerk, who sought in this way to make a sharp differentiation between what a good materially provides in satisfying a need and the value attached to this provision.28 Böhm-Bawerk’s Rechte und Verhältnisse, chapter 3, is devoted to this concept, where he argues that a good has a value because of the qualities associated with its Nutzleistung, and not the other way around.29 The issue is then taken up again and elaborated in Kapital und Kapitalzins Abt. I.30 Weber makes the same point in Chapter 2, §2.2, referring explicitly to Böhm-Bawerk. It can be argued, however, that for all the emphasis that Böhm-Bawerk places on this concept, he succeeds in doing little more than recapitulate a distinction implicitly made in the second edition of Say’s Traité, where Say emphasised that the consumption of a good involved the destruction of utility rather than of matter.31 For Say, it was not the material object itself that was significant, but what that object provided to its consumer; Böhm-Bawerk makes the same kind of distinction.32 William Smart, Böhm-Bawerk’s translator, noted the difficulty of rendering this term succinctly, and opted for “material services,” discussing the issue at some length in a translator’s note.33 But any modern reader must be sceptical of the result.34
Böhm-Bawerk was clearly quite smitten with his neologism, but quickly retreated from the idea that it was of central importance; there is a lengthy discussion of the term in Positive Theorie des Kapitales,35 but not as a central element in his exposition of capital. The term is not at all prominent in the many expository accounts of the “new economics” appearing during the 1890s and, it is important to note, it was never adopted by Wieser. He had used the term in his 1884 book Über den Ursprung und die Hauptgesetze des wirthschaftlichen Werthes, suddenly introducing the word precisely at the point where he introduces for the first time the concept of Grenznutzen, meaning “of marginal utility”—but it quickly becomes clear that Nutzen and Nutzeffekt are for him synonymous and interchangeable with Nutzleistung.36 There is furthermore no entry for Nutzleistung in the first three (pre-1914) editions of the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, which rather suggests that it was not generally regarded as a central concept. The principal significance of Weber’s usage of this term in WuG K. 2 is not therefore that he is making an important distinction that must be reflected in translation, but that it is a mark of how much the text written in 1919–1920 draws directly on material he had last worked through in the 1890s.37 This is pointed up by the fact that, for example, von Wieser’s 1914 GdS exposition of economic theory does not place any emphasis on this term, consistent with his earlier writing. When Weber introduces the term in WuG, chapter 2, §2, it is defined synonymously with “utility” as employed by Menger and others—material Nutzleistungen are goods, human Nutzleistungen are services. Apart from the term being directly untranslatable, as Smart noted, it is highly questionable whether Weber in his usage thereby adds anything to the existing conception of “utility,” Nützlichkeit, the quality of being useful to someone. Whereas engineers would be interested in the efficiency of a machine’s output, there is no direct analogy in this respect with regard to goods: economics is an account of what is used and how, not what might be used but is not. Reviewing the new Austrian terminology, Lehr stated in 1889, “When I refer here to Nützlichkeit, I am not thinking of some kind of ‘philosophical’ or ‘objective’ utility, nor of some technical usability, of physiological effects, a utility for ‘humanity in general,’ or something that a third party considers suitable and useful to me. Rather, I have in mind a utility recognised by my very personal sovereign judgement, and since this only involves comparisons, simply the value that a particular quantity of goods has for me. It is initially a matter of no consequence whether my judgement is founded on sufficient knowledge, or on error.”38 Weber included Lehr’s Grundbegriffe und Grundlagen der Volkswirtschaft (1893) in his 1898 reading list.39 We have little choice but to translate Nutzleistung as “utility,” since the alternative use of “services” (personal and material) would directly mislead,40 bearing in mind that while “utility” became a generic term for modern economics, it did follow two distinct paths of development, and that Weber’s usage is most definitely in the German-Austrian (and French) tradition, not the English.
Sitte—Translated as “custom,” which in English today, however, is very close to a neutral “usage” or “practice.” But the proximity of this term to Sittlichkeit, and the fact that Kant’s Metaphysik der Sitten (1785) has been translated both as the “metaphysics of morals” and as the “metaphysics of ethics” alerts us to ethical overtones. Hence, in translating Sitte as “custom” we should not lose sight of the way that, for Weber, the point of such practices was not merely that they were long-established, but that they had thereby acquired an ethical force for those whose customs they were.
Stab—Literally, “staff,” more in the military sense of an organisational core rather than simply the members of the organisation. The “staff” of a school, for example, refers primarily to its teachers and core managers, not to ancillary workers, nor strictly to teaching staff on temporary contracts. The distinction is, however, fading in the English language, reflecting the delayering of organisations and the aspiration, or even pretence, that organisations are becoming less hierarchical. When Weber uses the term “staff” with respect to an economic organisation, for instance, this sense is close to what might today be referred to as a “management team,” reflecting this idea that strict hierarchy is giving way to joint decision making. But to translate Stab as “team” would subvert Weber’s sense entirely. It is for this reason that Weber’s usage has a military ring, given that the armed forces are perhaps today the last bastion of formal distinctions by rank and in which “staff officers” still have a clear function.
Stand, Stände—In early modern Germany, the Stände, local groups based on family and social rank, controlled the right to taxation, so that a monarch seeking to raise money had first to reach agreement with the different Stände. The term persists in modern German: the Beamtenstand, for example, being public officials and civil servants as a social group. Early modern England had no such equivalent—the right to taxation ran through parliament, which, although assuming different forms through the centuries, combined territorial and social representation in the Commons and Lords, respectively, constituent “houses” of a Parliament since the early fifteenth century. Hence, the idea that power lay in the hands of specific, nonterritorial social groups was inconceivable, or more exactly, was consigned to the past once Henry Tudor brought the rivalry of the Houses of York and Lancaster to an end in 1485. Our problem, then, is that the social distinction implied by Stand has no conceptual corollary in modern English, for since early modern times society has not been organised in this way. In seeking an appropriate translation, we must also pay attention to modern usage: “status,” the translation Parsons employs in places, is today far too diffuse an idea to convey the precise sense of social positioning that Stand implies. It is therefore for the most part translated as “social rank,” apart from passages where “social status,” “hierarchical,” or “social hierarchy” seems more appropriate.
Technik—The boundary between “technique” and “technology” is not the same in German as in English, and the decision has been made here to translate this term in Chapter 2, §1, as “technology,” since the sense employed by Weber refers more to a framework of knowledge, devices, and practices (a technology) than to one specific action (a technique). The difficulties here are evident in Weber’s usage in Chapter 2, §1.4, where he refers in the same sentence to technologische Entwickung and the Geschichte der Technik.41
Weber drew heavily for his understanding here on Gottl’s entry in the GdS, where he states that while Technik is here meant in the sense used in “technical progress,” “technical achievements,” and “technical knowledge,” it did, in fact, include all forms of human activity, for which there must be some general concept, a Gattungsbegriff.42 He then suggests that Technik and action belong together, but with a dual sense: subjectively, as a capacity or skill, the art of finding the proper path to an end; objectively, it is an object in itself, separate from the actor, but always related to a particular human activity. Common to all senses of Technik is that it secures success for our actions, and so can be understood as the “totality of procedures and resources of action seeking to dominate nature.” From this, Weber moves to demarcate Wirtschaft and Technik as, respectively, ordered action directed to the satisfaction of needs, and the orderly execution of this action.43 Later, discussing technological and economic progress, he states:
Technologically, one forwards movement follows another, whereas economically one move forwards determines another, creates it of itself, or the extension of production in its spirit. But their interplay is not everything; technical progress only becomes a living whole through the interrelationship of technical problems.44
As Eric Schatzberg has shown, Thorstein Veblen had a major influence on the translation of Technik into “technology” as “material practices and craft knowledge,” developing his ideas from Sombart in particular.45
Typisch—This translates as “typical,” and this is the practice in the text, but when Weber uses the term the reference is to his typology, and not in the usual English sense that something is usual, or to be expected. For Weber, something that is “typical” relates directly to one of the types that he has elaborated.
Verband—This term is first formally introduced in Chapter 1, §10.1.d). Initially in Chapter 1, Weber uses the term Kreis for “a social grouping” (as in the second paragraph of §4; §4.2; §5.3; §6.II.a; §6.1; and §6.4), or Gruppe(n) in §9.4, and in the second paragraph of §10. But from Chapter 1, §10.1.d), Verband displaces Kreis or Gruppe as a generic term for a social group, although at this point Verband has not yet been defined. Hence, up to Chapter 1, §12, Weber’s generic terms for a social group are translated as seems most fitting to the context, since he has not yet in any case introduced the defining characteristic of a Verband. This translation practice changes once he does so.
As defined in Chapter 1, §12, a Verband is a generally organised set of social relations structured by a staff (see the entry for Stab) that can act in its name; the term is provided with various prefixes to specify what particular kind of organisation it might be. The German root Band is clearly the source for the English “band,” an “organised company” of men and women, which usage the OED first records in 1490 as “Mesapus wyth a goode bande of folke” (Chaucer), a social group or company of “companions,” united by a common bond (the band that binds them together). Today, this sense carries a sense of archaism (“Band of Brothers” making positive use of this) and the sense of a social group is now dominated by its musical cognate, a “band of musicians.” If anyone said they were in a band, it would be assumed that this most probably meant a (popular) musical group, or a brass band. “Band” cannot, therefore, be used unproblematically as an English translation of the German Verband (the prefix simply denoting the sense of association, i.e., “the bonded,” although backtranslating this we would get die Verbundene). It seems most appropriate therefore to translate Verband consistently with the neutral “organisation,”46 since other possibilities (union, federation, association) carry overtones that lead us away from the idea that this is a generic form of social order. While Weber could have used “organisation,” but did not, justification for this lies in the doubling of Germanic and Latinate roots: Verband is Germanic, “organisation” is Latinate. “Group” is inappropriate, since missing here is the implication of internal structure that “organisation” implies, and this is essential to Weber’s concept of Verband.
Weber did, however, systematically distinguish Verband from Verein (association) and Gesellschaft (society). Indeed, his passion for clear definitions of this type is evident very early on in his career. The first chapter of Robert Liefmann’s 1897 dissertation on cartels is entitled “Der Begriff des wirtschaftlichen Verbandes,” introducing a distinction between Verband, Verein, and Gesellschaft of such striking clarity that it can only have originated with his supervisor Max Weber, given that Liefmann never again in his voluminous and rambling works sought to demarcate concepts in such a systematic manner. All three terms involve relationships between economic subjects pursuing the same end, but with differing degrees of formalisation of that joint purpose. An economic Verein is defined as a Verbindung, a “binding together,” of several economic subjects for a common purpose whose pursuit is external to their occupational economic activity—the example given is of shopkeepers who band together to make an appeal for Sunday closing. By contrast, a Verband exists if the same shopkeepers come to a common agreement to keep their shops closed on Sunday, without agitation or petition. This involves joint action directly engaging with their economic activity, but binding only those who are party to this agreement. A Gesellschaft unites these two elements: it involves joint action aimed at bringing about changes that will directly affect the economic activity of all shopkeepers.
While the Verein requires no economic activity of its members, nor influences it, but is aimed only at the creation of circumstances that will have an impact on the activity of individuals, and while the Verband regulates the occupational activity of its members in their common interest insofar as such regulation furthers the objectives of the Verband, so a Gesellschaft is a Verbindung of economic subjects for the purposes of direct, communal (gemeinschaftlicher) activity.47
These distinctions can also be made in terms of the economic subjects involved. A Verein might include shopkeepers, but any other interested person could also join. Membership of a Verband, by contrast, would require that the member be a shopkeeper. Another way of defining them is by their relation to external parties. In a Verein, it is a matter of indifference whether all those who can join do—the existence of the Verein is independent of those who are not members. But a Verband is only viable if in the long run most of those to which it relates become members. “Association,” “organisation,” and “society” therefore seem the appropriate translations for these three terms, even though Organisation was a term that Weber could have used here, but did not.
Verein—See Verband.
Verfügungsgewalt—A recurring concept that can be translated as “power of disposition”; Parsons (p. 150, n. 7) notes this and suggests that it represents the point of contact between economic and legal discourse, but it involves more than the right of disposition over resources; it also implies a capacity to employ available resources. In fact, the term is frequently used by Menger, and is explained as follows: “A good is verfügbar to someone in the economic sense of the word when he is in a position to obtain it for the satisfaction of his needs. Physical or legal obstacles can stand in the way of this. The wealth of a ward of court, for example, is not at the disposition of a guardian in the above sense of the word.”48 Menger argued that four qualities were necessary for an object to become a good:
1. a human need,
2. property of a thing that makes it suitable for the satisfaction of this need,
3. recognition of this causal relationship on the part of a person, and
4. disposal over the thing so that it can actually be employed to satisfy the need.49
This last element is covered by this conception of “power of disposal,” in monetary terms equivalent to “effective demand,” but in fact a far broader conception. This “power of disposal” also covered the dimensions of time and space: the good might be a future good, not yet existing but on which an option might be exercised, or it might be spatially removed from the subject, so that the power of the subject to immediately employ the services provided by the good was limited geographically. Weber would make use of both these senses in the exposition of Chapter 2.
Vergemeinschaftung—This is part of the couple Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung, which is obviously taken from Tönnies (chapter 1, §9.1), but where the initial (mis)translation of the title of his book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft into English as Community and Association is only one of the obstacles with which we have to deal. Moreover, the prefix Ver makes these processes of “communitisation and societisation,” and not static conditions. In the hands of Tönnies, this process was a one-way street away from the security and stability of rural family life; Durkheim’s idea that society moved from mechanical to organic solidarity is analogous, but lacks Tönnies’s conservative baggage. Weber was quite explicitly not seeking to develop a general theory of social development of this kind, but instead used this terminology to explain individual processes. Parsons obviously borrowed from Tönnies’s translation by translating Vergemeinschaftung as “communal,” as contrasted with translations of Vergesellschaftung as “associative.”50 Lawrence Scaff translates a Vergemeinschaftung as a “communal social relationship,”51 hence not implying that this is a formal social order, but which does not transmit the important dynamic, processual sense that suffuses Weber’s terminology. A “communalised order” and the process of “communalisation” are admittedly somewhat clumsy solutions, but moderated if we do not insist on going on to create a truly clumsy pairing with “societisation.” The cost of translating Vergemeinschaftung as “communalisation” and Vergesellschaftung as “sociation” is that we lose a link that is manifest in German, but since Weber was contrasting two processes, and not linking them, the benefit is greater than the cost.
Vergesellschaftung—As noted above, this term would somewhat clumsily, if accurately, be rendered as “societisation,” but if we follow Lawrence Scaff’s usage and choose “sociation,”52 it becomes easier to form the compounds that Weber developed around this idea. Weber borrowed the idea from Simmel’s sociology, gave it a content related to Tönnies’s account of the movement from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, while at the same time jettisoning the linearity of Tönnies’s usage. As Klaus Lichtblau has shown,53 for Simmel the relevant opposition was individual to society, not community and society, and so to translate this term as “socialisation,” as might seem the obvious course, leads the sense directly back to Simmel, since this was, and still is, a process generally understood as applying to individuals. Part of the significance of Vergesellschaftung is that Weber does not, in fact, have a central concept of Gesellschaft / society, despite the work’s title. However, note should be made that this term was in use in the later nineteenth century and Weber actually uses it in the closing passage of Zur Geschichte der Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter (1889), where he is discussing the manner in which legal partnerships are constituted; Knies also uses the term in the 1883 textbook that Weber would have known.54 This processual usage therefore conforms to the manner in which Weber finally came to use it in 1920, although of course it is not yet in 1889 one element articulated into a set of basic sociological concepts.
Verkehrswirtschaft—This is translated as “commercial economy” (see the discussion above under Erwerbswirtschaft). Parsons (see the opening of §14, p. 196) translates it as “market economy”; Weber, however, could quite conceivably have used the word Marktwirtschaft, but he did not. Some other solution is necessary that implies the sense of a network of exchanges. Verkehr can be translated as “communication,” “traffic,” “intercourse,” or “commerce”—it seems most suitable therefore to draw on the term that was current in the eighteenth century, “commercial society,” and translate Verkehrswirtschaft as “commercial economy,” representing a more explicitly developed form of exchange economy. Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, among others, used “commercial society” to refer to a sense of economic modernity that went beyond the presence or absence of market relationships; this is the most appropriate translation in this context.
Vermögen—Parsons (p. 172, n. 3) notes that there is no direct translation of this term. The word would usually be translated as “property,” perhaps here more appropriately “economic property,” but this would raise further problems. Parsons opts for “resources” where appropriate, but this ignores Menger’s contention that Vermögen is “the totality of economic goods at the disposal of an economising subject.”55 Menger introduces a lengthy discussion, beginning with Malthus’s definition of “wealth” and then moving to Say’s concept of “richesse.” The term is therefore consistently translated as “wealth.”
Vorsorge—Literally, in a precautionary sense “to anticipate and provide for a need” (vor-sorgen); it links to Verfügungsgewalt as the power of disposition over objects that this “anticipation” has made available. It contrasts with Fürsorge (see above), meaning “caring for” in the sense of solicitude, or welfare.
Verstehen—Generally here rendered as “understanding,” its standard meaning in German. This concept plays a central role in Chapter 1 where Weber argues for a verstehende Soziologie; the term, however, first emerges in Weber’s writings in 1897.56 This collocation is often rendered as “interpretive sociology,” running together the act of interpretation and the condition of understanding, and also interfering with the translation of Deutung (see above). Parsons (pp. 87–89, nn. 2, 3) notes that he does not adhere to a consistent translation of the term, using also “subjectively understandable,” “interpretation in subjective terms,” and “comprehension.” These synonyms bring with them serious problems and are here eschewed; as far as possible, the term Verstehen is translated as “understanding” or “understandable,” and where absolutely necessary, the German term is allowed to stand.
As Peter Ghosh makes clear, there are allusions here that can be misleading: there is an everyday sense of “understanding” meaning grasping what someone has just said, thus implying a communicative match between what was intended and what was “understood,” as opposed to the more complex retrospective “understanding” of conduct in terms of a particular context that addresses itself not to the agent’s intentionality but to the context in which such an intentionality can be formulated. It does not therefore necessarily imply that the agent is “understood” in the first sense. Ghosh also points out that Weber routinely qualified his use of the term (nacherlebend, erklärend, deutend), and suggests that he actually favoured Deutung as less ambiguous. Ghosh himself favours translating Deutung as “construction” or “construal,”57 such that deuten refers to a process and verstehen to its outcome. This is a helpful distinction that is followed here, given the strongly processual character of Weber’s conceptual armoury.
Wirtschaft—Straightforwardly, the “economy,” usually today, however, understood as a national economy. Weber, however, employed the term to refer to any economic unit, whatever the scale. It should also be noted that the term is still used in southern Germany as a synonym for an inn or restaurant, for of course a Wirt is an innkeeper.
Wirtschaften—This is translated as “economic action.” The new economics that gained ground in the later 1880s and 1890s was subjectivist and centred on economic agents’ perceptions, decisions, and actions. Such agents thereby engaged in “economising activity,” a conception conveyed in the verb wirtschaften. Literally, this means “to economise,” but even at the time the meaning of this was in English broadly understood in its more restricted, “parsimonious” sense. In Chapter 2, §1.5, Weber contrasts “economy” with “technique,” a distinction that he explicitly aligns with that between “ends” and “means,” respectively. If we follow this line of thought, we can note that in English “economising” is clearly a technique employed as a means in relation to an end and that this therefore falls outside Weber’s own conception of wirtschaften, for “economising” in this sense does not involve any direct consideration of ends. We could say that in German, wirtschaften is strongly intransitive, whereas in English “economise” is a strongly transitive verb, since even when used intransitively it implies that something has to be economised. Neville Keynes noted the same distinction that Weber makes between technique and economy, means and ends, in the very first paragraph of his Scope and Method of Political Economy:
§1. Nature and importance of the enquiry into the scope and method of political economy.—In the terms economy and economic there is an ambiguity that underlies much of the current confusion as to the nature of political economy. Any line of action is commonly termed economic, when it attains its end with the least possible expenditure of money, time, and effort; and by economy is meant the employment of our resources with prudence and discretion, so that we may derive from them the maximum net return of utility.
But the words are also used in a sense not implying any specially reasonable adaptation of means to ends; and in works on political economy, the term economic is generally employed simply as an adjective corresponding to the substantive wealth. By an economic fact, accordingly, is understood any fact relating to the phenomena of wealth. By economic activities are meant those human activities that direct themselves towards the creation, appropriation, and accumulation of wealth; and by economic customs and institutions, the customs and institutions of human society in regard to wealth.58
Clearly, Weber followed Austrian usage and employed the term in this second sense, but it was already overshadowed in English usage by the first sense, and this formed such a stumbling block that Keynes sought to clarify the point on the very first page of his exposition. In the same year, William Smart, the foremost English-language exponent of Austrian economics, published a short introduction to the work of Menger, von Wieser, and Böhm-Bawerk, which also confirms the existence of the problem. Discussing the nature of value and utility, he stated, “The only goods we ‘economise’—the goods which alone are objects of economic attention—are the goods which are insufficient, or just sufficient, to meet our wants,”59 clearly linking “economise” to the first, rather than the second, of Neville Keynes’s meanings, since here “economising” is linked to the idea of scarcity. Smart then elaborates Menger’s definitions of “economic” and “economise” in a footnote, citing Grundsätze, chapter 2, §3 (see especially pp. 52–53 and the footnote on p. 53, which runs to p. 55).
Zweckrational—This is rendered as “purposively rational” rather than “instrumentally rational,” since the latter translation misdirects our attention to means employed rather than the end (Zweck) governing the rationality of the choice of means. Zweck can mean variously “end,” “aim,” or “purpose,” as distinct from Mittel, more directly and unambiguously translated as “means.” The couple “means and ends” could therefore be more directly related to Zweckrational by using “end-rational,” but unfortunately the English “end” has a semantic range unrelated to that of Zweck and the use of “end-rational” would in some contexts introduce confusion and obscurity.
1. I would like to thank Peter Ghosh for his comments on this Appendix.
2. Richard Swedberg and Ola Ogevall, The Max Weber Dictionary. Key Words and Central Concepts, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). The problems inherent in their approach can be seen, for example, on p. 171, where the two successive entries, “interpretive sociology” and “interpretive understanding” here use the English “interpretive” for two distinct adjectives, verstehend and deutend (see the entries for these below). Although Swedberg and Ogevall do indicate the root terminology, systematic discussion of translation issues is obstructed rather than facilitated in this approach.
3. For an extended treatment of these issues, see Tim Parks, A Literary Approach to Translation—A Translation Approach to Literature, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014).
4. Not a forceful separation—that would be Zerlegung.
5. “Labour and the Division of Labour.”
6. “As Karl Bücher has very rightly shown, all use of machines also involves the displacement of labour [Arbeitsverschiebung], and in this respect also a form of the division of labour [Arbeitsteilung]. One part of the work that originally had to be done directly in the production [Herstellung] of a material good is to some extent displaced by machine technology to a greater or lesser number of other enterprises.” Heinrich Herkner, “Arbeit und Arbeitsteilung,” in Grundriss der Sozialökonomik II. Abteilung. Erstes Buch: Grundlagen der Wirtschaft. B. Die natürlichen und technischen Beziehungen der Wirtschaft (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1914), p. 190.
7. Karl Bücher, Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, 7th ed. (Tübingen: H. Laupp’sche Buchhandlung, 1910), chapter 8.
8. See the discussion in my Governing Economy. The Reformation of German Economic Discourse, 1750–1840, 2nd ed. (Newbury, U.K.: Threshold Press, 2017), pp. 208ff.
9. This is outlined in Roger E. Backhouse and Keith Tribe, The History of Economics. A Course for Students and Teachers (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda, 2017), lectures 6 and 7.
10. F. von Wieser, “Grenznutzen,” in Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, Bd. 5, 3rd ed. (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1910), p. 56.
11. von Wieser, “Grenznutzen,” p. 66.
12. EDV as a name for computing equipment means “electronic data processing.”
13. See Luca Mori, Chance. Max Weber e la filosofia politica (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2016).
14. Hans Henrik Bruun, “Weber’s Sociology—‘verstehend’ or ‘deutend’?,” Max Weber Studies 16, no. 1 (2016): 44–46.
15. See Franz Brentano, Wahrheit und Evidenz, ed. Oskar Kraus (Leipzig: Verlag von Felix Meiner, 1930), pp. 140–50.
16. See my discussion of the classical Greek sense of household management in my The Economy of the Word. Language, History, and Economics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 24–27.
17. Rodbertus, “Untersuchungen auf dem Gebiete der Nationalökonomie des klassischen Alterthums. II. Zur Geschichte der römischen Tributsteuern seit Augustus,” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, Bd. 4 (1865): 139, citation on p. 343n3.
18. Rodbertus, “Untersuchungen,” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, Bd. 5 (1865): 280–81, 285, 293, 297–300, 303, 314; see also the final part, in Bd. 8 (1867): 387f., 400, 405, 446, 448, 450.
19. See Daniel Thorner, Basile Kerblay, and R. E. F. Smith, eds., A. V. Chayanov on the Theory of Peasant Economy (Homewood, IL: Irwin, 1966). Alexander Chayanov’s first study of peasant farming was published in Russian in 1912, and during the next few years he published further work that bears a striking similarity to the principles advanced in Weber’s account of the household economy. See Susan G. Solomon, The Soviet Agrarian Debate (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977), pp. 40–44. However, the first general account of these principles was published in 1923 as Die Lehre von der bauerlichen Wirtschaft. Versuch der Familienwirtschaft im Landbau (Berlin: Paul Parey). Russian agronomists did draw strongly on the work of their major German contemporaries, as well as on the new discipline of Betriebswirtschaftslehre that had developed in the Handelshochschulen since the turn of the century, and Weber had of course taught himself Russian at the time of the 1905 Revolution. It is possible that Weber had later come to hear of the new Russian research since it was linked to the reform of Russian agricultural holdings.
20. Nicholas Sergeyevitch Timasheff (1886–1970), Introduction to the Sociology of Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Committee on Research in the Social Sciences, 1939). This work is based on an abstract, published in Russian in 1922, of lectures on sociological jurisprudence given in Petrograd.
21. See the discussion in Richard Swedberg and Ola Agevall, The Max Weber Dictionary. Key Words and Central Concepts, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), p. 90. Curiously, however, while Herrschaft is certainly one of Weber’s key concepts, “domination” does not appear as a central concept in Gerth and Mills’s selections and translations, and is indexed neither under “domination” nor Herrschaft. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948).
22. See Andreas Anter, Max Weber’s Theory of the Modern State. Origins, Structure and Significance (Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), chapter 2.
23. Reinhart Koselleck, Einleitung to entry on “Herrschaft” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Bd. 3 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), p. 1
24. Horst Günther, “III. ‘Herrschaft’ von der frühen Neuzeit bis zur französischen Revolution. 1. Begriff, Bedeutung und Gebrauch,” in “Herrschaft,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Bd. 3, p. 14.
25. Edith Hanke, Einleitung to MWG I / 22-4, p. 4, referring to a letter of 21 December 1910.
26. Max Weber to Heinrich Rickert, 14 June 1904, Heidelberg, in MWG, Bd. II / 4, p. 230.
28. The term appears in the manuscript of the paper Böhm-Bawerk presented as a student in Knies’s Heidelberg seminar during 1876. Knies then used the term himself in the second part of vol. 2 of Geld und Kredit, published in 1879, contrasting Nutzleistung to Nutzwirkung exactly as had Böhm-Bawerk, but without acknowledgement. He later apologised for the oversight in failing to acknowledge that he had borrowed the term from Böhm-Bawerk. See Kiichiro Yagi, “Böhm-Bawerk’s First Interest Theory, with C. Menger-Böhm-Bawerk Correspondence, 1884–85,” Tokyo Study Series No. 3, Centre for Historical Social Science Literature, Hitotsubashi University, March 1983, p. 3. The Böhm-Bawerk 1876 manuscript is reprinted here in its entirety, pp. 16–35, with the definition of Nutzleistung on p. 23.
29. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Rechte und Verhältnisse vom Standpunkte der volkswirthschaftlichen Güterlehre (Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagner’schen Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1881), p. 63.
30. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Kapital und Kapitalzins. Erst Abtheilung: Geschichte und Kritik der Kapitalzins-Theorieen (Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagner’schen Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1884), p. 266.
31. Jean-Baptiste Say, Traité d’économie politique, vol. 1.2 of Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Economica, 2006), p. 855. The clarification in question was added to the second (1814) edition. While in Rechte und Verhältnisse Böhm-Bawerk does not refer directly to Say in this context, having earlier discussed Say’s related distinction between material and immaterial products, in his second book he discusses Say’s use of services productifs and rejects such usage for his own purposes on the grounds that services can only be supplied by persons, not things. This, he suggests, is not an objection that can be made against his use of Nutzleistungen. See von Böhm-Bawerk, Kapital und Kapitalzins, p. 270n1.
32. von Böhm-Bawerk, Rechte und Verhältnisse, p. 59: “The exhaustion of the Nutzleistungsfähigkeit brought about by the use of a good is often called the Verbrauch or Konsumption of the same.” The connection to Say was well established. Lorenz von Stein noted that both Rau and Roscher adhered to Say’s conception of consumption as the destruction of value, not of a material good or service. See Lorenz von Stein, Lehrbuch der Volkswirthschaft (Vienna: Wilhelm Braunmüller, 1858), p. 28.
33. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest: A Critical History of Economic Theory (London: Macmillan, 1890), book III, chapter 5.
34. “The individual useful forthputtings of natural powers that are obtainable from material goods I propose to designate as ‘Material Services.’ In itself, indeed, the word ‘Use’ (Nutzung) would not be inappropriate; but to adopt it would be to surrender our conception to all the obscurity that now, unfortunately, hangs over that ambiguous expression.” Böhm-Bawerk goes on in the following paragraph: “The conception of Material Services is, in my opinion, destined to be one of the most important elementary conceptions in economic theory. In importance it does not come behind the conception of the economic Good.” Capital and Interest, book III, chapter 5, para. 9, 10; cf. Kapital und Kapitalzins, pp. 269–70. The pointlessness of proceeding in this way can be shown by asking a simple question: What, then, are “immaterial services”? Services are normally thought to be “immaterial” as in “goods and services,” a distinction that runs back to Adam Smith’s distinction between productive and unproductive labour on the basis that the former produce tangible products (a coat), and the latter, intangible ones (like a court judgement).
35. Kapital und Kapitalzins. Zweite Abtheilung. Positive Theorie des Kapitales (Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagner’schen Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1889), pp. 362–63n1. Smart follows Böhm-Bawerk here in simply equating the term with material and personal services. See The Positive Theory of Capital, trans. William Smart (London: Macmillan, 1891), pp. 339–42n2.
36. Friedrich von Wieser, Über den Ursprung und die Hauptgesetze des wirthschaftlichen Werthes (Vienna: Alfred Hölder, 1884), pp. 127–28.
37. “ ‘Güter’ im Sinne der Theorie sind Nutzleistungen von Menschen und sachlichen Objekten …,” Grundriss zu den Vorlesungen über Allgemeine (“theoretische”) Nationalökonomie (Heidelberg 1898). “Erstes Buch: Die begrifflichen Grundlagen der Volkswirtschaftslehre” §2. Die Wirtschaft und ihre elementare Erscheinungen: 4. Die ‘Güter.’ ” MWG III / 1, p. 124.
38. J. Lehr, “Wert, Grenzwert und Preis,” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, Neue Folge Bd. 19 (1889): 41–42.
39. See my “Max Weber and the ‘New Economics,’ ” in Austrian Economics in Transition. From Carl Menger to Friedrich von Hayek, ed. Harald Hagemann, Tamotsu Nishizawa, and Yukihiro Ikeda (Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 76.
40. Smart himself uses the term “services” to refer to that which a machine produces; see his “The New Theory of Interest,” Economic Journal 1 (1891): 685.
41. WuG 1922, p. 33; MWG I / 23, p. 222.
42. Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, “Wirtschaft und Technik,” in Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. Erstes Buch: Grundlagen der Wirtschaft: Abt. II Die natürlichen und technischen Beziehungen der Wirtschaft (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1914), p. 205.
43. Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, “Wirtschaft und Technik,” pp. 207–8.
44. Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, p. 343.
45. Eric Schatzberg, “Technik Comes to America: Changing Meanings of Technology before 1930,” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 486–512, especially pp. 495–96 (for Weber and Sombart), p. 497 (Seligman), and pp. 500–503 (Veblen).
46. As does Guenther Roth, arguing against Parsons’s use of “corporate group.” E & S, p. 61n.27.
47. Robert Liefmann, Die Unternehmerverbände (Konventionen, Kartelle). Ihr Wesen und Ihre Bedeutung (Tübingen: C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1897), p. 12.
48. Carl Menger, Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1871), p. 70n.
49. Menger, Grundsätze, p. 3.
50. Roth and Wittich follow Parsons here: E & S, pp. 40ff.V
51. Lawrence Scaff, Max Weber in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 114.
52. Scaff, Max Weber in America, p. 133.
53. Klaus Lichtblau, “Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung in Max Weber: A Reconstruction of His Linguistic Usage,” History of Economic Ideas 37 (2011): 454–65.
54. See The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages, trans. Lutz Kaelber (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p. 181, and Carl Knies, Die politische Oekonomie vom geschichtlichen Standpuncte, Neue Auflage (Brunswick: C. A. Schwetschke und Sohn [M. Bruhn], 1883), p. 6.
55. Menger, Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre, p. 70.
56. Peter Ghosh, Max Weber and ‘The Protestant Ethic’: Twin Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 130.
57. Ghosh, Max Weber, pp. 41, 130–31.
58. J. N. Keynes, The Scope and Method of Political Economy (London: Macmillan, 1891), pp. 1–2.
59. William Smart, An Introduction to the Theory of Value on the Lines of Menger, Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk, new ed. (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 17. The book was first published in 1891.