Introduction to Max Weber’s Economy and Society
THE BOOK KNOWN IN ENGLISH as Economy and Society was first published in four instalments during 1921 and 1922,1 and then in 1922 as a single book under the title Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. This book was divided into three unequal parts, WuG I2 being the first and shortest, and also the only section of the work that had been revised by Weber and typeset before he died in June 1920. That is the part translated here.3 The rest of the book had been assembled from drafts written before 1914 that Marianne Weber had found in Weber’s study, papers that she collated and assembled with the assistance of Melchior Palyi. The sheer bulk of the resulting text—over eight hundred pages of small print in a large-format book—has always presented something of an obstacle to an understanding of Weber’s purposes in composing it, although the book itself has long been regarded as a canonical work. Attention has usually been directed to individual sections—to the account of the sociology of law, or to the sociology of religion, and especially to the programmatic first chapter on basic sociological concepts. And it was in this fragmented form that the first English translations were made, beginning in 1947 with the publication of WuG I under the title The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, edited by Talcott Parsons.4 During the 1950s, there followed various translations into English from later sections of the book, most of which were then incorporated and synthesised in 1968 into a complete three-volume edition edited by Gunther Roth and Claus Wittich under the title Economy and Society.5
This final English publication of the “complete text” was not quite so straightforward as it might seem, however. Editorial changes had been made to the German editions subsequent to 1922, so that among other things the 1968 English edition, based on Winckelmann’s fourth German edition of 1956, no longer entirely corresponds to the 1922 German edition, and while Roth and Wittich used the 1947 Parsons and Henderson translation of WuG I, they introduced revisions that rendered it rather less useful than the version printed in 1947 as Theory of Social and Economic Organization. For this reason, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization is treated here as the reference translated text rather than the version of that translation published in 1968 as part of Economy and Society. But why should we need a new English translation of Economy and Society, chapters 1–4? What are the particular problems in Parsons’s presentation of Weber’s text that would make a new translation desirable?
The answer can be simply put: Parsons’s translation and presentation of what turned out to be Weber’s last word on the concepts and methods of the social sciences tends to conceal what Weber was doing in this text. If I claim that Parsons has hidden something from us, however, I also need to identify what he has hidden. Criticism of Parsons’s translation is not enough: there are the usual issues of lexical or stylistic choices made in translation, but this is only one part of the problem. Nor can it be argued that detaching WuG I from the remainder of the book limits our perspective since, rather confusingly, part I of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft chronologically postdates parts II and III, and so is more conclusion than introduction. If it were only a matter of correcting Parsons’s choice of terminology, one could indeed question whether lexical revision would justify the claim that an entirely new translation transforms our understanding of the text. The following discussion is dedicated primarily to a presentation of what Weber is doing in the text, but before approaching this, we also need to know what Parsons made of it, since his reading of Weber has largely shaped understanding of this text ever since, in any language. The problems with Parsons’s translation can be summarised in the following five points.
First, throughout WuG I Weber employs a consistent, idiosyncratic, and very compressed terminology that lends emphasis to the sense of structure in his text.6 Parsons, and following him, Roth and Wittich, often opt to elaborate single terms or phrases, blurring the sharpness of the conceptual structure. The Translation Appendix A includes discussion of some of the problems that Weber’s lexical usage raises, and in footnotes to the translation, comment on Parsons’s choices. Here it might also be pointed out that in the 1968 edition, Roth and Wittich also eliminated many of Parsons’s own footnote discussions of translation difficulties, obscuring Parsons’s recognition of the problems he faced in making Weber’s text intelligible in English.
This practice of elaborating expressions and phrases rather than seeking a more direct translation is related to a more familiar issue: that some of Parsons’s lexical translation choices—for example, “authority” for Herrschaft, “corporate group” for Verband—conceal internal linkages in the conceptual armoury that Weber so painstakingly assembles. As Edith Hanke demonstrates in her introduction to MWG I / 22-4, it took several years for Weber to refine the category of Herrschaft into a central concept of his social analysis—carrying the implication that all social organisation requires rule, direction, and command. It eventually became a generic and neutral concept, complemented in chapter 1 with Verband, here translated simply as “organisation,” a social framework that comes to life only when coupled with “rule,” such that Herrschaft is present in every Verband, thus becoming the defining character of organised social structure. As will be discussed below, there are key terms that Weber relentlessly uses whose neutrality gains substance only in a particular context, gaining function or purpose as specific types of social order. This is a central feature of Weber’s sociology that is exposed in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, but which is so easily overlooked.
Second, Parsons’s translation practice emphasised structure over process. Added to Weber’s deliberate use of generic, neutral concepts, which only gain explanatory value in definite and specifiable contexts, is another layer of processual terminology, most noticeable in the opening paragraphs of chapter 2.7 As the author of The Structure of Social Action, it is perhaps no surprise that Parsons would impose his own methodological choices on the text,8 and this much is clear in the introduction to Theory of Social and Economic Organization.9 Weber is not an analyst of social structures, however, but primarily an analyst of social processes, and this is embedded in the terminology that he selects. This feature is already obvious in the 1904 / 1905 essays on the Protestant Ethic, whose guiding interest is the idea of Lebensführung, or “life conduct,” that is, the process of leading one’s life. Similarly, while the term Gesellschaft is of course part of the book’s title, “society” as an entity, that is, a structure for itself, is not of any great analytical interest for Weber: instead, he talks of Vergesellschaftung, or the forming of society, that is, “sociation.” Analogously, despite the word forming part of the title, he is not so much interested in Wirtschaft as in das Wirtschaften: not in an “economy” or an enterprise, but in economic activity or action, the flow of this activity, and the placement of the individual in this flow. When Weber becomes diverted in chapter 2 by Knapp’s monetary terminology, progressively derailed by a casuistry more deliberately impenetrable than his own, the fact of this derailment also brings to our attention a need to consider what he is deviating from—why is it that this extended diversion into monetary systems is a diversion? A diversion from what?
Third, from 1913 Weber regularly referred to Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft as “his sociology.”10 Parsons in effect presents Weber in terms of his own sociology, the guise in which Weber did become a “founding father” of sociology in the 1950s and 1960s, and the discipline to which his work became routinely ascribed.11 The problem continues: Wolfgang Schluchter, an editor of MWG I / 23, has published a book entitled Max Weber’s Late Sociology,12 as though there ever was an “early” Weberian sociology. Wilhelm Hennis’s vigorous denial of the idea that Weber was ever “a sociologist”13 of this kind successfully detached Weber from this American heritage and brought about a reconnection to more classical political foundations, added to which it could also be said that for virtually all of his academic life Weber self-identified as a political economist—this was “our discipline,” as he quite frequently stated.
Having shed these preconceptions, we can turn to the work on which Weber was engaged at his death and ask the question: If this is “his sociology,” what kind of sociology is it? This new translation suggests that it was certainly not anything like sociology as understood by his peers; nor was it anything like the sociology into which Weber was fitted in the mid-twentieth century or the sociology of the early twenty-first century. It was something more interesting than any of these, and this point will be addressed in conclusion.
Fourth, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft was never a book in its own right; it was part of an extensive handbook that Weber had been editing since 1908, the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik.14 While Parsons does note this in his preface,15 he makes no further mention in his lengthy introduction of this large-scale collective handbook that Weber had overseen and coordinated for many years, and whose guiding theme was the structure of modern capitalism.16 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft was eventually Weber’s only direct contribution to the GdS, although early plans show that he had originally intended to write several pieces for it. Moreover, over the years he had changed his mind about what Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft would contain. While working on WuG I in 1919 and early 1920, evidently Weber was once again changing his mind about the shape the text would take, since there remain in it numerous references to material that had not yet been drafted, and never would be—material that was neither found among surviving drafts nor corresponds to any of the plans that he had previously made.17 Understanding what Weber had in mind while writing WuG I means having some sense of his perspective on the handbook for which it was intended and which Weber himself had planned. WuG I develops ideas whose anticipations can be traced through the various plans drawn up for the GdS, in the structuring of parts, in the choice of contributors, in his struggles to win over contributors, and in his irritation with some of the eventual submissions. If we are to understand Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, we need to form some idea of the project for which it was written, the course that it took, and the motivation of the text, so that we might better understand why it eventually turned out the way that it did.
Finally, there is a materiality to the book as originally set that helps the reader follow Weber’s arguments. Not only is Weber’s text very densely argued, it was also laid out in a very particular way, but Theory of Social and Economic Organization and the Roth and Wittich E & S version of that translation simply discard Weber’s layout. Chapter 1 is organised in all German editions as seventeen main paragraphs in a larger font asserting basic principles and introducing conceptual distinctions that are then elaborated more discursively in smaller print. In addition, these elaborations are often developed as a series of nested distinctions using the Roman and Greek alphabet. Combined, this is what Weber called his casuistry, or what could more generally be viewed as a catechism,18 with chapter 1 especially providing evidence of its development from lectures delivered in Vienna and Munich. While the strict division between statement and exposition becomes weaker in the course of chapters 2 and 3, the nested subparagraphs there become a much more prominent feature. Given the large format (page size 10½ inches by 7) and small typefaces employed in the 1921 / 1922 edition, here a large amount is crammed on to every page.19 The MWG editions conform to this basic format, albeit with a much more readable typeface, but since the page size is now smaller (9 inches by 6), with editorial footnotes often taking up a significant amount of space on any one page, this means that there is much less of Weber’s text on each page and its structure is not so evident to the reader. The page size of Theory of Social and Economic Organization is smaller yet (8 inches by 5½), resulting in a very striking optical difference between that text and the 1922 edition.
Direct comparison of p. 80 of the German 1922 text and p. 250 of Theory of Social and Economic Organization highlights the real impact of Parsons’s changes in format. On p. 80, we can see a clear difference in font size between the statement of chapter 2, §24, and its subsequent exposition, the increasingly complex subcategorisations, and the function of the emphases that Weber scatters across the page. On this page, Weber is unusually restrained in making such emphases, but Verkehrswirtschaft and Wirtschaften, for example, jump off the page.20 The material presented on p. 80 covers the equivalent of two entire pages in Parsons’s version; although Parsons preserved some of the numbering, the differences between the presentation of the two texts has some very significant repercussions.
The form of presentation for the 1922 edition was perfectly normal in German works of the time, marking a didactic rather than narrative function—and more generally, font and layout were not something peculiar to Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft as such but were simply dictated by the GdS’s house style. Parsons, on the other hand, regarded this alternation of statement and exposition as “somewhat unusual,” and in the same footnote in which he explains why he altered the text’s layout he goes on to suggest that the original was “relatively fragmentary” and that Weber did not, apparently, intend “this material to be ‘read’ in the ordinary sense, but rather to serve as a reference work for the clarification and systematization of theoretical concepts and their implications.”21 And so Parsons conveys to the reader the idea that Weber was constructing sets of definitions rather than a systematic didactic structure; he then obscures the sense of system one gets from scanning the original German pages by converting what Weber designed into a continuous narrative, interpolating subheadings for each paragraph to create a structure of his own.22 Weber’s customary heavy use of emphasis is also discarded, further obscuring the strict formality of the exposition. The reader can no longer so clearly see how Weber’s arguments are constructed, progressing definition by definition, category by category.23 While it may be conceded that Parsons’s version is easier to read than the original, this simplification has a severe impact on what a reader is able understand of what Weber wrote. To highlight this feature of Weber’s presentation, Appendix B reduces chapter 1 to the seventeen main paragraphs stripped of the intervening exposition, allowing the reader to see quite clearly the developing sequence in which Weber presents his central concepts.
Chapter 1 is the most finished of all the chapters; suppression of the relentless formality of Weber’s approach here makes it much harder for a reader to grasp exactly what Weber is doing. Conversely, in chapter 2 the suppression of Weber’s format and the substitution of a continuous narrative conceals something different: that part way through the text begins to run out of control, with the definitional paragraphs becoming increasingly discursive, and the nesting of sections and subsections becoming increasingly complex and problematic. In chapter 3, even the numbering of subheadings goes astray in places, and the sequencing of paragraphs and subsections is sometimes so ramified that, for instance, I have inserted a footnote pointing out where §7a.3 can be found, to which §7a.4 relates. The implications of these issues will be discussed below.
All the same, it has to be said that Parsons’s conversion of the very difficult later sections of chapter 2 into continuous narrative does render the text much more readable, and the skill with which he moderates the larger excesses of the monetary terminology that Weber here took over from Knapp is quite admirable. Parsons’s glossing of Weber, rather than strict translation, continues on into chapter 3, where the German text in places gives the impression that Weber is interpolating notes for later elaboration, and the argument becomes quite fragmentary. Parsons’s response to this is therefore very helpful in making the text more readable, although in improving readability we lose sight of its provisional nature. Also relevant here is the way that Weber inserts pointers to elaborations of his argument that he never drafted; when combined with the simple listing of cases and examples, the text in places reads in German more like a set of stubs than a continuous narrative.24
These five points will be elaborated as follows. First, I will present a brief account of the genesis of the GdS project, how Weber envisaged his direct contribution to it, the architecture he gave it, his recruitment of contributors, and the frustrations he inevitably encountered in managing its execution. Then I will turn to the history of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft itself, relating the initial construction placed on it by Marianne Weber to its subsequent reorganisation by the editors of the MWG. Next I will describe how the first four chapters ended up as Theory of Social and Economic Organization. This is followed by a more strictly textual history of WuG I that considers the composition of the individual chapters in relation to material and arguments presented in earlier work by Weber. I will then focus on some aspects of the intellectual context, that is, the writings of contemporaries who are sometimes considered to be influences on the text, providing a means of assessing the degree to which Weber borrowed from or developed others’ ideas. Here a central paradox will become apparent: Weber rarely acknowledges explicitly such influences, and where he does so, it is often more misdirection than any indication of his real intellectual debts. Whenever Weber directly acknowledges a writer, we need to be on our guard and not presume continuity of influence, for Weber’s registration of his intellectual influences often marks out where, rather than adapting and developing his contemporaries’ ideas, he systematically and productively deviated from them. He would borrow something only to invert it, that is, to turn it into something else.25 Recognition of this procedure then provides a pathway into a consideration of what “his sociology” might have been and how this related to his choice of Sozialökonomik as the field to which Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft was addressed.
This is a complex, incomplete text with a tortuous history; I begin with the project for which it was conceived and written.
The Grundriss der Sozialökonomik
Weber’s most enduring institutional engagement in his lifetime was neither his work as a university teacher (after his appointment in Freiburg in 1894, he completed only ten full teaching semesters)26 nor as an editor of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (while much of his published work from 1904 to 1920 appeared in its pages, his direct involvement diminished after three or four years).27 Instead, the principal ongoing academic task with which he was preoccupied from 1908 to 1920 was the organisation of a handbook on the structure of modern capitalism—the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft was the third section out of nine in total for a work that began publication in 1914 and concluded in 1930. Some idea of the scope of this project is conveyed by the fact that the other section published in 1922 along with Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft represented parts B (“Production in Agriculture and Forestry”) and C (“Insurance”) of book III: “The Individual Sectors of the Capitalist Economy and the Domestic Economic Policy of the Modern State.”28
In his Protestant Ethic, Max Weber had developed a conception of capitalism that was recognisably synonymous with what was also becoming known as “modernity,” although the chronological focus of that book was the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.29 Werner Sombart had in 1902 published Der moderne Kapitalismus, but that work, as was conventional in works on economic history of the period, brought its narrative only up to the early part of the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on small-scale production and craft industry far removed from the forces of modernity that Weber alluded to in the closing pages of the Protestant Ethic. The GdS, as planned and executed, was a very different project from that of Sombart: it was a review of contemporary capitalist organisation that comprehended technology, agriculture, industry, finance, commerce, classes, and social policy. It was directed primarily at students of economics and commerce, and in this regard, it proved timely: in 1923, a new university qualification in economics of Diplom-Volkswirt was added to the existing commercial qualification of Diplom-Kaufmann, ending the restriction of systematic study of economics to doctoral students.30 Students of commerce and economics were possibly more numerous in Germany during the 1920s than anywhere else,31 and the GdS was the most up-to-date reference work for their studies. While the only direct contribution that Max Weber (eventually) made to this project was his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, he conceived, planned, and led the project, reflecting his familiarity with contemporary research on the German and international economy.32
Weber’s involvement with the GdS developed out of his association with the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.33 This had begun publication in April 1904 as the continuation of Heinrich Braun’s Archiv für soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik, purchased from Braun with funds provided by Edgar Jaffé, and with Paul Siebeck as the publisher.34 Much of Weber’s work in the coming years would appear in its pages. He began with his essay on “The ‘Objectivity’ of Social Scientific and Socio-political Knowledge,” which appeared in the first issue, delineating the purpose of the new journal and serving as a rubric for the acceptance and rejection of papers. His long essay on Prussian entailed estates appeared in the third issue of 1904; the two essays on the Protestant Ethic in 1904 / 1905; two very long essays on the political situation in Russia in 1906; and his critique of Stammler and the first of his defences of his essays on the Protestant Ethic, the “Antikritik” in 1907. Engagement with the Archiv coincided with his emergence from the fallow period that followed his breakdown in the summer of 1898, and his eventual definitive resignation from his Heidelberg appointment in the early spring of 1903. Freed of the teaching and administrative obligations of university employment, Weber felt himself more capable of devoting his efforts to scholarly pursuits. Later the same year, the way that he brought Jaffé and Siebeck together is suggestive both of the networks in which Weber was involved at that time and his active engagement with them. The resignation was a positive move, not a negative one, made at a time that he was actively developing new plans.
In April 1905, Siebeck turned to Weber for advice with a publishing problem. Siebeck was the publisher of Gustav von Schönberg’s Handbuch der politischen Ökonomie, a reference work that had first appeared in 1882 with twenty-one contributors in two volumes, but which had successively expanded to a fourth edition of five volumes and twenty-eight contributors by 1896. Rather than bring out yet another, larger edition, Siebeck wanted to cut it back to two volumes and commission new contributors, effecting a thorough revision of the work. Further, Siebeck wanted the content to be revised to reflect contemporary conditions, while at the same time reinforcing the textbook format. And very important, he was insistent that capitalism be given much more emphasis as the dominating economic form—he complained to Weber in a letter of 11 / 12 April 1905 that the term “does not even appear in the index” of the fourth edition.35
However, not only was Schönberg now in his midsixties, he was not in the best of health. In his letter of April 1905, Siebeck also sought legal advice from Weber, since the contract that Siebeck’s brother-in-law had concluded with Schönberg in 1895 regarding the fourth and all subsequent editions36 included onerous clauses creating special rights for his heirs and obliging Siebeck to continue publishing Schönberg’s own contributions in any further edition.37 As if this was not itself bad enough, Siebeck suspected that owing to Schönberg’s ill health, someone other than Schönberg had signed the contract on his behalf. Furthermore, in suggesting to Weber that the best solution would be to engage a younger academic to effect a thorough revision fronted by Schönberg, he feared that if he proposed this to Schönberg, the latter would insist on the appointment of Bernhard Harms.38 As we shall see, Siebeck was quite right to worry about all these legal technicalities, since they would eventually blow up into a crisis that Max Weber sought to settle at the point of a duelling sabre. What to do?
In response to Siebeck’s letter, Weber first of all pointed out that in 1896 Carl Knies had recommended to the Baden Ministry that Schönberg be appointed as his successor in the Heidelberg chair. This advice had been ignored and Weber was duly appointed, but this itself ruled out any idea that Weber might be acceptable to Schönberg as an executive editor, quite apart from Weber’s admission that he found keeping deadlines a problem.39 Nonetheless, this stated, he moved straight on to list a number of possible contributors, all of them economists—for example, that Schumacher in Bonn would be “very good” on transport, and that Wittich in Strasbourg would write something excellent on agrarian policy if he could be persuaded. He had no idea about insurance and fisheries, but among the younger candidates he expressly recommended Spiethoff, “one of the most gifted and astute of all.”40 If there were time, he wrote in conclusion, he would also perhaps suggest a different structure.
Siebeck thanked Weber by presenting him with a handsome four-volume work; in response, Weber confessed that he had no real further suggestions, and that as Siebeck must know, the root of the problem was Schönberg himself. Later in the year, Weber responded in greater detail about the legal issues, suggesting that, given the rate at which economics as a discipline was advancing, the most that Schönberg might reasonably expect was that his name be retained for a work written by others. As it stood, the Handbuch was now either too big, or too small; in fact, there could well be a need in the future for a large encyclopedic work. He agreed with Siebeck that Harms would be unsuitable as an executive editor, given his lack of experience, and went on to suggest four other names for the post, beyond which he could not think of anyone “who was at the same time suitable and not a non-entity.”41
In May 1906, Siebeck visited Weber and evidently suggested that he take over the role of executive editor, assuring him that Schönberg had given the idea his blessing, but Weber refused, citing his poor health. Weber wrote once more to Siebeck about the proposed new edition—“a pity that Sch has so long to live” he added—really something that should not be said of course, besides between themselves.42 But then Schönberg did die on 3 January 1908, removing one major obstacle to Siebeck’s plans.
Nonetheless, Siebeck now did not even have an editor he did not want, while Schönberg’s heirs were under the impression that that they had some kind of title to any future edition. The first issue was resolved by August 1908: Weber agreed to assume direction of the project but declined to be named as editor, even though he would in fact be solely responsible for its planning and execution. Siebeck suggested that the old title be retained but the contents be entirely revamped. This Weber began to do, formulating in September and October 1908 a plan along the lines that Siebeck had suggested in 1905.43 In a letter of 26 December 1908, Weber emphasised that the manner in which economic theory was dealt with was central, identifying Friedrich von Wieser and Wilhelm Lexis as the two principal candidates for the key article on this. Karl Bücher agreed to take on the first article, “Volkswirtschaft, Wirtschaftsstufen,”44 and supported the idea that Wieser should be approached to write on economic theory, noting also the importance of Joseph Schumpeter.45 In the event, the first section, “Foundations of the Economy. A. Economy and Economic Science,” was when published in 1914 made up of Bücher’s brief outline of economic stages; Schumpeter’s treatment of the development of economic thought; and Wieser’s outline of the theory of social economy. Correspondence shows that Weber left it entirely up to Wieser to organise his contribution as he wished, and when Wieser accepted in July 1909, he sketched a plan that corresponded to what he did eventually produce.46
In May 1909, Weber presented Siebeck with a preliminary plan—for three, not two volumes, and with one-third more pages. In his letter of 20 April 1909, Weber had noted that he would probably contribute on “methodology,” as well as provide the conclusion to the entire text as a “Sozialphilosophie,”47 but as Wolfgang Schluchter comments, at this point there was no talk of Weber’s “sociology.”48 Discussion of the title in August 1909 led to Weber proposing “Siebeck’s Handbuch der Sozialökonomik,” the first mention of this last term by Weber, but without any explanation for his choice.
When the first draft plan was typeset in May 1910, however, it still bore the older title of the Schönberg edition, and had thirty-five different contributors for eighty-one entries, with some slots still to be filled. Weber had put himself down for twelve separate contributions, including “The General Significance of Modern Transport Communications and Media for the Capitalist Economy” (book II, 8.1); “The Limits of Capitalism in Agriculture” (book III, 6.7); and “Nature and Social Situation of the Working Class” (book V, 7.2). He still had not thought of anyone to write about fisheries and hunting (book III, 8).49 Some of the other twelve contributions Weber listed for himself had a clear affinity with what eventually became the 1921 / 1922 edition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, but which were currently scattered through the 1910 plan for the Handbuch. It was not until the final plan was drawn up in March 1914,50 shortly before publication began in the summer and after Weber had drafted a large amount of manuscript material, that his sole contribution was titled Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, comprising section C (division III) of the first book for which Weber estimated 30 sheets, or around 480 pages.51 Moreover, the first of eight broad subdivisions here runs as follows:52
- 1. Categories of Social Orders
- Economy and Law in Their Principal Relationship
- Economic Relationships of Organisations in General
While programmatically recognisable, these subdivisions bear little expositional relationship to the first three chapters eventually drafted in 1919–1920.53 Nonetheless, this was the plan Marianne Weber used as a guide in her initial work constructing Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft from the materials she found after Weber’s death.
Wieser had undertaken to deliver his contribution in 1912, and since this belonged to the first part that would be published, the schedule for delivery and printing had come to turn on this. As it happened, Wieser delayed, but in 1912 a quite different problem arose. The heirs of Schönberg had got wind of the project and took the view that they had been unlawfully excluded. Siebeck pointed out to them in March 1912 that this was a new project that replaced the Schönberg Handbuch and was therefore unrelated to any contractual obligations previously entered into. All that survived from the older Handbuch was the title, and so in March 1912 Weber proposed altering politische Ökonomie to Sozialökonomik: this was “in my opinion not only the ‘most modern,’ but also the best name for the discipline.”54
Matters were not so simple, however: Bernhard Harms sprang to the defence of the Schönberg family, claiming in April 1912 that he had been forced out of his position as Schönberg’s executive editor—he now claimed to have had a right to the position to which Siebeck had been anxious to preempt Schönberg nominating him when Siebeck first approached Weber in 1905. There is not space here to detail the entire course of this affair,55 but Harms attributed the sharp response Weber made to him on 6 May 1912 to Weber’s poor health and consequent loss of mental capacity, his “insulting outbursts” being therefore only too understandable. Only eight days previously, Harms went on, he had assured Fräulein Schönberg that “when Weber gets to hear about this he will do everything he can for you,” underscoring his role as advocate for the family. Weber and Siebeck circulated a joint letter to all contributors in June emphasising that the new work was most certainly not a new edition of the Schönberg Handbuch, and the exact title was presently a matter under discussion with the publisher.56 But Harms was not deterred; he circulated his own letter in Kiel claiming that after Schönberg had died in January 1908, he had “tacitly” taken Schönberg’s place in the existing contract and, together with Siebeck, sought to recruit new contributors.57 Harms clearly not only had a vivid imagination; his grasp of the law of contract was also very shaky. As Weber had already intimated in the spring, there was only one way to settle this: in December, seconds were nominated and a date was fixed for a duel—4 January 1913. While Harms “fundamentally” accepted the challenge, however, he pleaded pressure of professional duties and asked that it be put off until the Easter holidays.58 Weber gave the matter up in disgust. Out of all this did at least come a change of title, the last remnant of the Schönberg Handbuch; from early 1914, the title was formally the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, a usage for which Weber had in March 1912 already expressed his strong approval.
In the New Year of 1913, Weber wrote a very long letter to the Sociological Circle in Kiel, among whose members Harms had been spreading his stories; he detailed the dealing Harms had actually had with Siebeck, all of which had been concluded before the death of Schönberg, but conceded that Harms was right on one point: taking on the new work had been a mistake, he had been urged on by colleagues, but he should never have become involved:
Some of these same colleagues then left the project in the lurch, some fell ill, through all this an enormous amount of time was lost and I have been unreasonably distracted from what I regard as a proper way of working, while at the same time during these years my capacity for work unexpectedly declined once again.59
As he wrote to Plenge shortly afterwards, “this damned treadmill has cost me a year of my life just in writing letters.”60
And it was about to get worse. Writing to Siebeck, he stated that once he saw Bücher’s contribution, he would be able to form a view on his own major contribution, now entitled “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft—inc. Staat und Recht,” which, he thought, outlined a “comprehensive sociological Staatslehre [theory of the state].”61 Plenge had just responded to Weber’s editorial pleas by writing, “What a really lovely, nice man that Max Weber is!”62 but then Weber received Bücher’s scrappy piece that would stand at the head of the entire project. Instead of the five sheets reserved for it (i.e., 80 printed pages), Bücher had delivered barely more than one to one and a quarter sheets (i.e., 16–20 printed pages).63
Now I will have to spring into the breach! That will take two months at least, so my article will be finished in May.64
Weber complained bitterly about the failure of others to keep deadlines—Wieser ran more than a year late—but Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (in whatever form he conceived it at this point) was something he too would never actually finish.
Despite his complaints, 1913 was clearly a very productive year for Weber; the shortcomings of Bücher’s contribution prompted him to draft what he described as a
comprehensive sociological theory and presentation that relates all large communal forms to the economy: from the family and household community right up to the “enterprise,” to the clan, to the ethnic community, to religion (covering all great religions of the world) … finally, a comprehensive sociological account of the state and Herrschaft. I might well claim that there is nothing like this, not even a “precursor.”65
But on the evidence of the essay on “Sociological Categories” that was published about the same time, even if Weber had actually arrived at this new perspective, he had not yet worked out how to present it.
Much of the correspondence in early 1914 was occupied with the technical business of setting and proofing; book one sections I and II were published in the summer, and the foreword to section I, dated 2 June 1914, states that the entire work would be published by the end of 1915.66 The outbreak of war ended all hope of that; three parts were published before August, one part in 1915, and one in 1918. Weber became the administrator of a military hospital, writing at the end of the year that he could do no more work on GdS for the time being.67
While the war postponed all further activity on GdS, Weber remained very busy. From 1916 onwards, he was increasingly and publicly engaged in contemporary political debate, delivering lectures and speeches, writing for newspapers, and standing as a candidate in the postwar elections. This activity brought home to him the distance between academic teaching and public speaking. We know from stenographic reports of speeches made to the Protestant Social Congress in the 1890s, and to meetings of the Verein für Socialpolitik68 and the German Sociological Society in the period from 1908 to 1912, that he was an effective, lucid speaker, but he loathed lecturing. His course of lectures in Vienna during the summer semester of 1918 was intended as a trial run, since he had not given a lecture course for twenty years; however, he quickly found himself forced to admit that he was born to be a writer and a public speaker but not an academic lecturer.69 He abandoned the idea of returning to teaching and the idea was floated that he might move sideways into party politics. His candidacy for the new National Assembly in early 1919 came to nothing, however. The analysis of the impact of wartime inflation that can be found in the closing pages of Chapter 2 applied to his own personal circumstances as much as to any other German household, and he was eventually forced to return to teaching because he needed to earn a living. For many years they had lived on Marianne’s legacies, but these were now worth only a fraction of their former value, for the Webers had invested heavily in war bonds whose value was now questionable.70
Since late 1917, Weber had been under consideration as a possible successor to Lujo Brentano, the incumbent of the Munich chair of economics. He was also under consideration in Vienna as a successor to Philippovich, who had died in 1917.71 His teaching in Vienna during the summer semester of 1918 was provisional and experimental, to see if he could in fact complete a semester’s lecturing; something that he had last achieved twenty years previously, during the winter semester of 1897–1898 in Heidelberg. He did last the course, but his conclusion was negative: academic lecturing was not for him, for it drained him intellectually and physically. Nonetheless, in early 1919 he was weighing two proposals: as a professor of politics (Staatslehre und Politik) at Bonn, and as successor to Brentano—in this latter case, he wished to alter the title to Gesellschaftswissenschaft und Nationalökonomie.72 Evidently, the choice between Bonn and Munich that he now seriously entertained in early 1919 turned on the degree to which he could use the chair to teach what he thought sociology should become; this and other factors led to his decision to accept the offer from Munich in March 1919, from which point he once again assumed the responsibilities of a full professor. From 1 April 1919, he became Munich Professor for “Social Science, Economic History, and Economics.”73
In early June 1919, on the way to Munich after the Versailles negotiations, Weber wrote to Paul Siebeck to give him his new address and assured him that in about six weeks the beginning of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft “will be in your hands.”74 On 24 June 1919, Weber began a course of lectures on “The Most General Categories of Social Science,” which, as he wrote to Marianne the following day, was the “sociology, which of course (the introduction) = the lecture course.”75 On 25 September 1919, he sent the first chapter to Siebeck, retaining the second chapter to check through, and writing that he would then send the following part: “Wirtschaft und Herrschaft.”76 As the editors of the correspondence note here, this was not actually delivered until 31 March 1920, and Weber’s titling it this way suggests that at the time he was thinking of emphasising the relationship between economy and forms of rule, which he does develop in chapter 3. By the early spring of 1920, this had turned into a typology of rule. Besides a comment in October 1919 that he was condensing the book, and that the “thick old manuscript will have to be quite thoroughly reshaped, and that is what I am (or was) doing,”77 there are few hints in his own letters about the progress of his writing.78 Nonetheless, on 20 October 1919 Weber began lecturing four times a week on an “Outline of a Universal Social and Economic History” and the conceptual remarks with which he prefaced his lectures clearly mirror the first twenty-six paragraphs of chapter 2.79
The “Editorial Report” in MWG I / 23 (pp. 79–107) gives as thorough an account as is possible of the progress of the writing of WuG I during 1919–1920, using the publisher’s correspondence and evidence from the various galleys and page proofs produced. We can also consider evidence from the body of the text itself, however, something that is apparent to any reader of this translation since its rougher edges are preserved here. Nevertheless, before discussing composition we need to continue on to the posthumous history of the book: the construction of the version of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft as it appeared in the GdS, the translation of WuG I into English in the 1930s, the role of Johannes Winckelmann in the transmission of an increasingly mangled German text, and the eventual dismantling of this edifice by the MWG editors.
From WuG to MWG
The path from the manuscripts and proofs that Weber left at his death to the 1922 edition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft has been scrupulously reconstructed by Edith Hanke, and here I need do little more than summarise the sequence of events that she has described.80 Weber had died in a rented flat in Munich; his study was in Heidelberg, and it was there that most of the work on his manuscripts was done. Marianne’s assistant, Melchior Palyi, assumed responsibility for Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, checking the older manuscripts for duplication and establishing what, if any, relationship there was between the older material and the parts already in press (the text translated here). We can see from the reproductions of some surviving proof pages in MWG I / 23 that Weber heavily reworked sections after they had been set; we do not, however, know what the “older manuscripts” looked like, since all of them have since disappeared.81 It does seem to have been Weber’s practice throughout his life to discard notes, drafts, manuscripts, and typescripts once a piece had been published; the sole exception to this seems to have been his lecture notes from the 1890s, an unexpectedly large amount of which have survived.
Weber’s working methods are illuminated by the account we have of the path followed by his Munich lecture, “Politics as a Vocation.”82 Weber’s rough speaking notes have survived. The speech was recorded by a stenographer and then typed up, Weber corrected and revised the typescript, it was set, he corrected the proofs, and the lecture was published; most of the intermediate materials, however, then vanished. Analogously, we might presume that what is usually described as “the old [pre-1914] manuscript” consisted in fact of typescripts, since for one thing no especial complaint seems to have been made at the time regarding their legibility—Weber’s handwriting was notorious. Whether any handwritten manuscripts therefore did survive in 1920 is an open question; quite likely Palyi’s first task was to winnow out duplicate or superseded typescripts to establish a unitary “manuscript.”
Once Palyi had done this, the text was copyedited, introducing stylistic improvements and standardising orthography. Hanke emphasises that no work of textual criticism was done, however, nor was any physical record kept of the manuscripts; hence, we have no knowledge about their size, condition, pagination, dating, arrangement, and so forth.83 While the manuscripts were conveyed into print in a relatively direct way—cleaned up, but not subject to revision—their subsequent disappearance means that we have no information on them other than that provided by the printed pages of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft following WuG I. This seriously compromises any weight that might be attached to any one component of the earlier material included with that drafted in 1919–1920. We do not know in what sequence this material was written, nor do we have any information on the order in which they were found, and so whether any one element is complete is unclear. While Max Weber’s authorial hand is present in WuG I, insofar as these chapters were actually set up in type and so have been subjected to the processes of revision and reconciliation that are part of the production of any book, the later sections of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft each have a thematic unity only; they cannot be used to support any particular interpretive evaluation or be construed as contributions to any overarching developing argument. Perhaps this quality of four-fifths of the text of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft contributed to the older idea, now generally disavowed, that Weber was a “comparative sociologist,” because this material does lend itself to a comparative framework, but not to an analytical one. Here the contrast with WuG I is very marked, for WuG I is nothing if not analytical.
Marianne Weber did, however, see the materials as “one work” made up of different parts, supporting this view with the presumption that it could be divided between an “abstract” and a “concrete” sociology that, as Wolfgang Schluchter notes, was really a distinction of her own invention.84 She believed that the older manuscripts were structured by ideal-typical concepts, although she missed this property in the manuscript for “Die Stadt” and therefore excluded it initially from “the work,” and gave it to Emil Lederer to publish separately in the Archiv. This explains why that manuscript was published first in the Archiv, but then also in the third part-publication of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in the spring of 1922. A concordance in MWG I / 24 of the shifts during 1921 and 1922 in arranging the nineteen texts making up “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft,” together with a comparison of the 1914 plan with these nineteen surviving texts, makes very clear the difficulty that Marianne Weber had in deciding on a final ordering of “the text.”85 One paradoxical outcome was that the final version of 1922 included both WuG I, chapter 3, probably written at the turn of 1919 into 1920, and the draft materials for that chapter written in 1913 or before, but now appearing as part III of the same book.
But this dilemma—how to marry three and a bit new chapters, composed in 1919–1920 according to a new plan in Weber’s head but nowhere written down, with a mass of preparatory material dating back many years—did not end with the solution of 1921–1922. A corrected edition came out in 1925, now divided into two half volumes, with the text on the sociology of music added; this was then reprinted as a third edition in 1947. The text then passed out of the care of Marianne Weber, and Johannes Winckelmann became the editor for subsequent German editions of Weber’s writings, bringing out a revised and reordered fourth edition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in 1956. Winckelmann’s editorial involvement coincided with the diffusion and consolidation of Weber’s international reputation in the 1950s and 1960s, and so some attention has to be paid to how his interventions affected the shaping of this reputation. First, however, we need to consider the translation of WuG I into English in the 1930s. For if Weber’s international reputation was established in the 1950s and 1960s, the version of WuG I published as The Theory of Social and Economic Organization also played a significant part in establishing that reputation.
The Theory of Social and Economic Organization was published in 1947 in London and Edinburgh by William Hodge; the American version of the text was set from the British page proofs and published the same year by Oxford University Press in New York, then reissued as a Free Press paperback in 1964. Roth and Wittich used this latter version, introducing some changes of their own, in their 1968 Economy and Society. This American provenance tends to reinforce the linkage to the “Americanisation” of sociology during the course of the 1950s, but the real clue to the origins of this translation lies not with Parsons and the American social sciences, but with the British publisher.86
As Parsons describes, he was originally commissioned in the later 1930s by the Anglo-Scottish publisher William Hodge to revise and edit a translation of chapters 1 and 2 that Alexander Henderson had prepared for them.87 William Hodge had studied music in Leipzig, but, unable to pursue a career as a professional musician, he had become head of the family publishing firm.88 In the later 1930s, he became friendly with Ragnar Nurkse, who, with Friedrich Hayek’s support, persuaded Hodge to embark on a series of translations of texts by German and Austrian economists. Hodge duly published Gottfried von Haberler’s The Theory of International Trade (1936), translated by Alfred Stonier and Frederic Benham; Oskar Morgenstern, The Limits of Economics (1937), translated by Vera Smith; Fritz Machlup, The Stock Market, Credit and Capital Formation (1940), translated by Vera Smith; Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (1945), and Human Action (1949); and Walter Eucken, The Foundations of Economics (1950), translated by Terence Hutchison. Hayek’s fingerprints are all over this selection of authors and translators, and so Hayek’s suggestion that William Hodge & Co. include in its programme a translation of the first two chapters of Max Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft is very suggestive of where Weber stood in the German-language social science of the 1930s.89 It is important to note that this was not where Talcott Parsons would seek to place him: as a sociological theorist practising an interpretive methodology.90 That Weber appeared in this company casts a completely fresh light on how his work would have been received in Britain during the later 1940s and early 1950s, as opposed to the United States.
Parsons’s involvement was initially indirect. Fritz Machlup, then at the Department of Economics, University of Buffalo, wrote to Parsons in February 1938 to let him know that the translation of the first part of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft was almost complete and that its translator, Alexander Henderson, was grateful that Parsons had agreed to look at the manuscript.91 Since neither Henderson nor the publisher had Parsons’s precise address, the manuscript was sent to Machlup in the autumn of 1938; he then took it with him on a visit to Cambridge in November, leaving it there with a colleague who then took it to Parsons.92 By the time Parsons became involved, therefore, the proposal to publish the first two chapters of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in English had been made and accepted, Henderson had been commissioned as translator, and he had completed draft translations for the envisaged two-chapter book. This must push the original suggestion by Hayek back into mid-1937, or even earlier, since the draft translation was said to be almost finished in early February 1938.93 Most likely, therefore, Henderson met Hayek shortly after he had graduated from Cambridge in June 1936 with a double first in economics, the month of his twenty-second birthday.94
Parsons received Henderson’s draft translations from Fritz Machlup in November 1938, and his first letter to James Hodge comments at length, negatively, on their quality.95 Parsons explained that there were major technical problems in translating chapter 1 from German into English, using concepts and making arguments familiar to a German reader, but with no direct equivalents in the English language. He argued that if a translation were to be attempted, it would require careful editing and be provided with an
extensive introduction which would provide a setting and prepare the reader for the many difficulties of the work, and with quite full explanatory notes wherever misinterpretation seemed at all likely.96
Simply presenting Weber’s chapters in a bald translation done by a nonspecialist would be, Parsons argued, “entirely inadequate.” And his brief examination of Henderson’s draft translations showed that they required “thorough and extensive revision from start to finish.” After making some points about English style and the meaning of Weber’s key concepts, Parsons
strongly advise[d] against publication of the translation in anything like its present form. I would much rather see the work remain untranslated than have available only the present translation.97
Parsons had also heard directly from Henderson, who was under the impression that Parsons was prepared to revise the entire draft translation. This is, of course, what he eventually did, but at this stage Parsons maintained that he could not, in the absence of a “specific arrangement” with William Hodge & Co., take on such a task. He closed the letter by noting that he had seen the von Schelting and Shils translation of chapter 1, section 1, which seemed to be “a much better piece of work than Mr. Henderson’s.”98 He also suggested that the proposed volume should include chapter 3, “Typen der Herrschaft,” extending the original proposal by about one-third.
James Hodge forwarded these comments to Alexander Henderson and then replied to Parsons in mid-March, after he had received Henderson’s own observations. Hodge recognised the force of Parsons’s arguments, but his description of Henderson’s own response suggests that Henderson already understood the general points concerning the problems of translating Max Weber’s prose into English.99 Henderson’s drafts were perhaps not as randomly inaccurate and uninformed as Parsons implied. James Hodge was reluctant to abandon the existing translation, in part for purely commercial considerations but also perhaps because Henderson had been recommended as a translator of Max Weber by Friedrich Hayek. He therefore proposed that Parsons formally assume an editorial role, and asked him to name a fee.
Parsons did so, also arguing that the planned volume should also include both chapters 3 and 4, the first four chapters forming, he wrote, “a natural unit,” being “the outline of the conceptual framework into which the more extended empirical material of the work was to be fitted.”100 If this proposal were acceptable, Parsons went on, Henderson could be asked to make the initial translation—and so Henderson’s translations were not so poor that any editor would do better to simply start afresh. Henderson, according to Hodge, immediately started work on chapters 3 and 4,101 and by mid-May Parsons accepted the financial terms William Hodge offered.102 In mid-June 1939, Parsons sent Henderson a sample translation of chapter 3, section 1, at the same time noting that Henderson had given his drafts the working title “Economy and Society.” Parsons’s belief that the first four chapters of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft formed a theoretical introduction to the later chapters led him to suggest a different title: “The Theory of Social and Economic Organization.”103
Parsons would hear nothing more from Henderson after sending him the sample translation from chapter 3. Henderson joined up in the autumn, and so Parsons went ahead on his own, reporting in late September 1939 that the translated text was now complete.104 He had tried to use Henderson’s existing drafts where possible, but noted:
I think the translation is really more mine than his.… A number of qualified persons have sampled both texts and assure me that, apart from the technical matter of accuracy as such, I have succeeded in making it quite reasonably readable.105
Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in early September would delay the book further, however. William Hodge moved his office back to Edinburgh, and in January 1940 Parsons wrote assuring his publisher that he would resume work soon—so the book was not, after all, entirely complete.106 By the end of 1940, Parsons had heard nothing more, writing that the editorial notes were now complete and he was about to start on the introduction.107 At the beginning of 1941, Parsons was reassured that Hodge would proceed with the book, and Parsons sent the complete manuscript in August.108 In October, Hodge confirmed receipt, and then in January 1942 Parsons wrote once more complaining that he had heard nothing.109 About half the book was set in the course of 1942, and in January 1943 Parsons acknowledged receipt of proofs and apologised for his delay in dealing with them.110 Throughout 1944, proofs and galleys went back and forth very slowly, the U.S. Post Office confirming in October that one partial set had been lost at sea, with Parsons apologising for delays on his part. Finally, in November 1944 James Hodge returned from service in the Royal Air Force and began reviewing progress, but, as he warned, labour and paper were very short, hindering any imminent publication.111 There matters remained until at the beginning of 1946 the New York office of Oxford University Press approached Parsons inquiring about U.S. rights to the translation. Parsons wrote in response that he had heard nothing more from the English publisher since James Hodge had written in November 1944. But at last, things now moved briskly ahead: Oxford University Press was already engaged in a Weber project with Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills,112 was interested in further translations from Weber, and wished to get this book out by April 1947, but Parsons’s own delays with the index postponed its publication until late September 1947.113
Hence, as a translation project, what became Talcott Parsons’s The Theory of Social and Economic Organization was originally proposed by Friedrich von Hayek for a series of translations from (mainly Austrian) economists who would today be seen as political conservatives. Likewise two of the translators of these works: Frederic Benham was subsequently a member of the Mont Pèlerin Society, and in 1937 Vera Smith married Friedrich Lutz, later President of that society.114 Furthermore, the draft translation was delivered to Parsons through the good offices of another Austrian of similar political complexion. This sheds an interesting light on what Max Weber’s name might have meant in the 1930s and on the fact that Parsons’s involvement did in fact bring about a reframing of Max Weber’s reputation: he entered the 1950s as a founder of modern (American) sociology and was distanced from the company of Ludwig von Mises, whose original landmark essay on the deficiencies of planned economies was published in the Archiv in 1920 at almost exactly the same time that Weber had been drafting his own critique of planned economies for chapter 2.115 Parsons’s introduction to Theory of Social and Economic Organization clearly delineates the manner in which Weber’s text was incorporated into his sociological narrative. The three principal sections of a substantial introduction correspond to Weber’s three main chapters: chapter 1 is covered in “Weber’s Methodology of Social Science”; chapter 2 in “Weber’s ‘Economic Sociology,’ ” and chapter 3 in “The Institutionalization of Authority.”
Max Weber not only returned to postwar Germany in the guise of a founding father of American sociology, as such his reputation could now be linked with a new liberal German political order—something against which Wolfgang Mommsen chafed, and which led to his efforts in Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (1959) to connect Weber more firmly to German conservative traditions.116 Johannes Winckelmann’s involvement in new editions of Max Weber’s writings was not therefore context-free and tended to reinforce this reputational revision, whereby Max Weber was moved out of a conservative German political tradition and into the emergent international “modern social sciences.” So how did Winckelmann’s involvement in the history of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft come about?117
Born in 1900, Johannes Winckelmann had been a law student in Hamburg from 1923 to 1926 and had, as a member of Ernst Cassirer’s seminar, studied the methodology of the cultural sciences, taking an especial interest in Max Weber. Before 1939, he worked as a civil judge in Hamburg, and then moved to the Economics Ministry as Ministerialrat and Referatsleiter in the Department of Money and Credit. Ending the war in Frankfurt, this financial experience led to his involvement in the creation of the Hessian Landeszentralbank, eventually as a member of its board. This was to be very significant for the later foundation of the MWG, for when the Allies relinquished control of the Bank deutscher Länder in 1951 (forerunner of the Bundesbank, created in 1957), Winckelmann received a substantial pension, which he used to retire to a life of scholarship devoted to Max Weber.118
But Winckelmann’s scholarship was an enthusiasm uninformed by any ongoing scholarly engagement since the 1920s. The revisions that he made to Weber editions were the work more of a tinkerer than a scholar, and this was most evident in his approach to Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, which he reordered and supplemented, also assembling a volume of supplementary notes. Roth and Wittich’s Economy and Society was based on Winckelmann’s fourth edition and therefore excluded the appended “Sociology of Music” and put in its place “Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany.” Part II in 1956 now opened with part II, chapter 6, of 1922; “Die Stadt,” part II, chapter 8, in 1922, became part II, chapter 16; and the eleven chapters of 1922, part III, became part II, chapters 10 to 15. Then the fifth edition of 1972 was different again: part III in 1972 was no longer chapters 10 to 16, but a unitary part II, chapter 9. None of this tinkering had much of an obvious impact on part I, but Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft as a whole was reorganised according to Winckelmann’s personal conviction that the manuscripts left by Weber at his death were not a pile of unsorted papers, but a late draft for a manuscript that had in 1913 been almost ready for the printer; that there was a “compositional idea” underlying this draft that related to the textbook character of the work; and that the edition as published in 1922 lacked this inherent internal structure (Gliederung) since its editors had imposed their own ideas about sequencing on the existing material, believing that Weber had more or less abandoned the 1914 GdS Plan (as they stated in the preface).119 The MWG editors’ work has demonstrated that he was, in one way or another, wrong on every count. Nonetheless, Winckelmann’s ideas had shaped the source on which Roth and Wittich based their translation, so that the existing English translation of Economy and Society reflects compositional ideas about Weber’s text that more recent scholarly work has shown to be without foundation.
All the same, it was due to Winckelmann that Munich and not Heidelberg became the base for the MWG edition. In the later 1950s, Winckelmann had made contact with the University of Munich and became an occasional teacher in sociology; he founded a Max Weber Archive, of which he then became the director. In 1963, he was made an honorary professor, and then in June 1966 the Max Weber Institut was founded in the faculty of social sciences (Staatswirtschaftliche Fakultät).120 At the age of sixty-six, Winckelmann was now the director of a university body with its own budget, an assistant, and a secretary. In 1975, the Max Weber Institut was transferred to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, shortly before which the new editorial board for the Gesamtausgabe was created, made up of Winckelmann, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Horst Baier, M. Rainer Lepsius, and Wolfgang Schluchter. This board created the academic platform on which work has since developed, Winckelmann ceasing to play any real further role in this.121 The MWG editors later simply jettisoned Winckelmann’s efforts at a reconstruction of “Weber’s idea” of the text and went back to the 1921 / 1922 version of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, the closest reflection of the then surviving papers that now exists.122
In so doing, however, they also broke up that text into its several constituent parts. MWG I / 22 published the earlier draft material in five separate sections, respectively: “Gemeinschaften,” “Religiöse Gemeinschaften,” “Recht,” “Herrschaft,” and “Die Stadt,” each section being given a detailed editorial introduction and apparatus that locates its material with respect to sources and Weber’s own previous work. MWG I / 23 prints “part I,” which is necessarily simply an emended version of the first 1921 instalment, since the surviving proofs and their corrections had naturally already been incorporated in that edition. In addition to that, an additional volume, MWG I / 24, provides the textual background, a substantial account of the course of development of the 1921 / 1922 text combined with associated plans and circulars. Instead of the one unitary volume that we had in 1922, we have seven separate volumes of text and editorial material.
Nonetheless, the way that the editors have approached the republication of the first instalment is not without its problems. As already noted, in February 1921 Marianne Weber had given this instalment the subtitle The Economy and Social Orders and Powers, but this has now been replaced in MWG I / 23 with Sociology. Unfinished, 1919–1920. It is not entirely clear whether this implies an incomplete sociology or an incomplete book. This problem is highlighted by the fact that WuG I is, in fact, here treated editorially in a manner different from the remainder of the 1922 text. The materials published as MWG I / 22 contain editorial reports on the various sections, as well as a detailed general introduction to each part-volume. In MWG I / 23, however, there is no sustained discussion of the sources for individual chapters; editorial comment on sources and allusions is scattered through footnotes to the text. There is a general introduction by Wolfgang Schluchter, but this fails to address the issue of what Weber might, in 1919–1920, have been intending in the context of the GdS, and how what he was writing related to the material on which he drew. We have seen that Weber could be quite scathing about contemporary sociological writing; what he intended to do about this remains unexplained. Schluchter also assumed responsibility for the annotations to chapter 1; Knut Borchardt annotated chapter 2; and Edith Hanke annotated chapters 3 and 4. Hanke had, of course, also edited MWG I / 22-4, “Herrschaft,” part III of the 1922 edition, on which WuG I, chapter 3 is based, and so her work on MWG I / 22-4 can be read against the later version in MWG I / 23. By contrast, Borchardt’s extensive knowledge of chapter 2 finds expression only in his numerous editorial footnotes to that chapter, without the opportunity to marshall his command of the material in an account of sources and structure discussing exactly where all this material comes from, or to what parts of Weber’s work it relates. This is an especially severe problem, for this chapter is based on historical and economic literature that is today largely forgotten, while since 1921 very little interest has ever been shown in the structure and argument of chapter 2.
The same is not true of chapter 1, which is the section of Economy and Society to which readers most often turn, but neither Schluchter’s general introduction nor his editorial footnotes address the origins and development of chapter 1 at all. Quite obviously, the essay on “Categories” published in Logos in late 1913 is the source for a great deal of chapter 1, although any comparison of the two texts quickly shows the very large distance that Weber had travelled beyond that essay by 1919. There is some important commentary that addresses this issue, but none of it is cited by Schluchter—for example, Klaus Lichtblau’s discussion of Weber’s changing use of Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung,123 which is never mentioned anywhere in MWG I / 23. In short, whereas Edith Hanke presents in MWG I / 22-4 a detailed account of where the concept of Herrschaft comes from and how it develops over the years in Weber’s writings, in MWG I / 23 we are given no idea of what Weber’s “sociology” might be, in what way it is exposed in chapter 1, and where it might have originated—despite MWG I / 23 being given the subtitle Sociology. We therefore need to consider here, albeit briefly, where the material in chapters 1 and 2 originates, and how it is organised.
The Text of the First Instalment
The provenance of the three complete chapters of WuG I can be quickly summarised. Chapter 1 develops the 1913 “Categories” essay, heavily revised and given its didactic structure through the experience of presenting the material in two lecture courses: in Vienna during the summer semester of 1918 as “Wirtschaft u. Gesellschaft (Positive Kritik der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung),”124 and in Munich during the summer semester of 1919 as “Die Allgemeinsten Kategorien der Gesellschaftswissenschaft” [The Most General Categories of Social Science]. No notes for these lectures, from either Weber or his auditors, have survived, but we do know that he completed work on chapter 1 shortly after giving the Munich lectures, sending it to Paul Siebeck on 25 September 1919.125
Chapter 2 is almost three times as long as chapter 1,126 but has no such readily identifiable source. The chapter clearly relates in part to Weber’s lectures from the 1890s, and there is a great deal of material added from his reading and writing on economic history, for when he wrote this chapter he was also giving his lecture course on an “Outline for a Universal Social and Economic History” during the winter semester of 1919 / 1920.127 The chapter is also heavily marked by the influence of Robert Liefmann and Friedrich von Gottl; hence, by material that Weber had read in the early 1900s, but where the exact impact of this earlier reading on the text is not as obvious as it might at first appear.
By contrast, chapter 3 is based on manuscripts dating back to 1908 that have now been published as MWG I / 22-4, where the line of development from early drafts to the finished chapter has been reconstructed in great detail. Weber sent the chapter to be set on 31 March 1920, and so probably worked on it during the early part of that year.128 Edith Hanke’s editorial work on the earlier draft provides an account both of its genesis and of its eventual revision into “part I,” chapter 3, using earlier publications, drafts, and correspondence to highlight their connection to the latter parts of chapter 1. However, while chapter 1 and the early paragraphs of chapter 2 are based on the principles of social and economic action, the third chapter breaks this pattern: it presents the genesis of political structures, and not an account of political action. How, then, chapter 3 relates to the two preceding chapters would require discussion separate from the question of how the material and arguments presented there relate to the earlier draft. Little can be said about the fragment of chapter 4 since it presents only the beginnings of a longer argument.
Important evidence concerning Weber’s work on “part I” is also available from some galleys that have survived from 1920. While we do not know exactly when Weber sent chapter 2 to be set, the first galleys for §§1–16 were dated 21 February 1920, and the MWG editors have constructed from surviving sets a concordance of the flow of revisions and corrected proofs from then until 27 May 1920, very shortly before Weber became fatally ill.129 For chapter 2, there are three discontinuous sets (for §§1–16, 24–27, 36–41), and for chapter 3, one set for §§15–18.130 The editors also reproduce a sample page from each sequence, and these demonstrate another significant aspect of Weber’s working methods: unlike modern practice, where proofs are usually presented to an author for correction only once, and for the clearly stated purpose of correcting typos and formatting errors, Weber used his galleys to heavily revise the text. A sample page from the beginning of chapter 2, §24,131 shows how Weber struck out whole sections, inserted new passages, rephrased lines, and corrected misspellings—and this page is dated 17 April 1920, barely two months before his death.
The implication clearly is that had Weber not died in June 1920, this process might well have continued, given the signs of haste in the later parts of chapters 2 and 3. Just because these chapters were set up in type did not mean that Weber was finished writing. I have already noted that the later parts of chapters 2 and 3 contain many asides in which Weber refers forwards to (nonexistent) passages where he will elaborate points, or to later chapters that were obviously never written because he died in the midst of writing. But when combined with the amount of revision that he plainly did in proof during the spring of 1920—that he used early galleys as a clean copy of a manuscript on which he could set to work once more—it seems more likely that, had he lived, chapters 2 and 3 would have undergone further revision. The existence of proofs for WuG I is presumed to imply that Weber had signed off this work, but he used proofs in the process of revising his writing and there is ample evidence that chapters 2 and 3 are not entirely finished.132
For example, while the structure of chapter 2 is derailed at the point that discussion of Knapp’s ideas on money begins, in the later passages of chapter 3 there is an even greater sense of incompleteness, of a need to pull an argument together rather than constantly defer clarification to (now nonexistent) later sections and chapters. Furthermore, there is also a sense here that the scope of the text as Weber imagines it in 1920 has run out of control, that it has escaped the limits of the GdS and is becoming a total sociology with no perceptible limits. These two features—the heavy revision made to galleys and the increasing number of references to unwritten parts of the text—can also be joined to a third, the irregularities in numbering of paragraphs and sections. The §24 in the sample proof page from 17 April 1920 ended up in the printed edition as §24a, presumably because it was easier to do that than renumber all subsequent paragraphs. The section numbering in chapter 3 likewise goes astray in the printed version.133
WuG I, chapter 4 is obviously a fragment, but it has been usual to treat the first three chapters as complete since, after all, they had been set up in type and Weber had made revisions to the proofs. But defects of order and argument persisted in the versions left at Weber’s death, and it seems plausible that further work on these chapters would have pulled them into a tighter shape—quite probably never as tight as chapter 1, but the structural contrast between that chapter and the two succeeding chapters is suggestive.
This also reinforces the sense that Weber was not in 1919–1920 simply running through a plan he had finalised in 1914. The practice of using the successive plans for the GdS as a means of construing how Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft might have turned out is shown by examination of the text of chapters 2 and 3 to be a mistake. The only real clues that we now have about what Weber had in mind in 1920 are there in the text published in 1921 and 1922, not in his correspondence, nor in the various plans he drew up years before. Moreover, in the later sections of chapter 3 Weber seems to be contemplating a text that threatened to become unrealisable, entirely bursting the bounds of the GdS. Under these circumstances, might Weber have come to acknowledge that the four chapters making up WuG I was all that the GdS needed? That we here already have a workable outline of a sociology that provides a means of organising our understanding of social, economic, and political life? A brief outline of the origins of the first three chapters can help us in considering this.
As already noted, in 1913 Weber published “Ueber einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie,”134 an essay addressed to the issue that, while human conduct was both contextual and regular, what made such conduct human was its susceptibility to being “interpretively construed.”135 Furthermore, any such “understanding” gained through construal possessed a degree of transparency, that is, Evidenz, although this was not in itself sufficient proof of its empirical validity. Causal imputation was required to establish this, and “Purposively rational construal has the greatest degree of ‘transparency’ [Evidenz].”136
The implications of these statements for Weber’s “sociology” will be discussed later; the point to be made here is that in 1913 Weber does present central ideas that will recur in chapter 1, but that are in 1919 developed much more systematically. For instance, in 1913 the important conception of Evidenz arrives in a rush already in the third sentence of the essay; as drafted in 1919, it is introduced in the third paragraph, elucidating the definition of sociology as a science that construes social action interpretively. Comparison of the early passages of the 1913 essay and of chapter 1 demonstrates that the latter reorganises the somewhat jumbled ideas expressed in 1913 into a clear didactic progression. There are also differences of emphasis between 1913 and 1919, as Klaus Lichtblau has detailed; there are continuities and discontinuities that help us understand how Weber refined his ideas. Letters from 1913 indicate that, at the time, he thought he had his sociology as good as finished; but comparison of the “Categories” essay with chapter 1 shows that in fact he still had a very long way to go in detailed conception, and especially in mode of presentation. However much he hated lecturing, we can presume that it was the presentation of this material in Vienna and Munich that helped bring about the orderly way in which he presents his ideas in chapter 1. And the subtitle of his Vienna lecture course—“Wirtschaft u. Gesellschaft (Positive Kritik der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung)”137 suggests a link back to his earlier critique of Stammler from 1907, “R. Stammlers ‘Ueberwindung’ der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung.”138 For a reader steeped in Weber’s methodological writings, chapter 1 reads like an extension and development of ideas that had preoccupied Weber since the early 1900s. While the basic lineaments of those ideas remained the same, over time they became more refined, until they are presented in chapter 1 as the relentlessly systematic “casuistry” that Weber considered appropriate to the GdS.
By contrast, that same reader would baulk at chapter 2, since it contains material and arguments that are quite plainly discontinuous with much of what Weber had published since the early 1900s. There are, of course, continuities with his writings on economic history, and in this regard this chapter is connected to a line of development that goes right back to his doctoral dissertation.139 But the framework to which this historical material is fitted in chapter 2 is not one that can be directly connected to any of Weber’s earlier published writing. When Frank Knight translated into English the student notes from the lecture course that Weber was giving while writing chapter 2—published in 1923 as Wirtschaftsgeschichte, edited by Hellmann and Palyi—he excluded the “Conceptual Preface” from his translation on the grounds that Melchior Palyi must have simply added to the student notes material that he had taken from Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. He was wrong: as the student notes show, Weber did open his lecture course on economic history in the autumn of 1919 with an exposition of the basic economic concepts found in chapter 2.140
The source for these principles can be found in the lectures that Weber had given in Freiburg and Heidelberg more than twenty years previously, and which were not published until 2009.141 These place Weber squarely in the mainstream of the “modern economics” associated with Carl Menger, but Weber was also heavily influenced by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, who in the 1890s was the chief proselytiser for “Austrian economics,” publishing in both European and American journals.142 The contribution that Böhm-Bawerk’s brother-in-law, Friedrich von Wieser, made to the first part of the GdS was the first general elaboration of the approach they had sketched out in their writings of the 1880s, and it was the writings of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk that would have the most significant impact on the way in which Weber, during the second half of the 1890s, absorbed contemporary economic writing. In the autumn of 1894, he started lecturing on theoretical economics for four hours a week in Freiburg, having spent the previous summer reading up on the subject. By the time his lectures were refined into the form they took in Heidelberg, they bore the clear marks of Austrian thinking about economic action, rationality, and choice.143
Weber’s approach to contemporary economic theory can also be illuminated by comparing the structure of his own reading list with the textbook of his predecessor in Freiburg: Eugen von Philippovich, whose death in 1917 would also provide the possible opening for Weber in Vienna. The editors of the 1894–1898 lectures present a useful side-by-side comparison of the structure of Weber’s reading list with that of the second revised (1897) edition of Philippovich’s own textbook, suggesting that there are clear similarities between Philippovich’s textbook and Weber’s ground plan. But the side-by-side comparison reveals more that Weber, by 1898, deviated significantly from his Freiburg predecessor.144
Rather than take the second edition of Philippovich’s textbook, I refer here to his first, the one that Weber might have looked at in the summer of 1894 when he made his first systematic foray into this material.145 Philippovich begins conventionally enough for a German economics text, defining the concept of “economy” as “all those processes and arrangements that are directed to the constant supply of human beings with material goods.”146 He moves from “the nature of economy” to “the elementary facts of economy,” the needs of man being the point of departure for economic activity, the purpose of such activity being their satisfaction. These needs do not, however, all have the same significance, and do not have the same impact on our action; the stimuli can vary—an opening to Menger’s arguments. At the end of the paragraph, he cites a number of sources: Hermann, Roscher, Wagner, Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, Sax, Gossen, and Alfred Marshall. While the argument is constructed in a conventional manner, Philippovich no longer neglects Austrian (Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, Sax) work, and also cites Marshall’s Principles (1890), which would for the next thirty years be recognised internationally as representing the most accessible general account of contemporary economic theory available.
Philippovich’s text is typical of contemporary German works in presenting a synthesis of new and old; the new subjectivist, Austrian approach, which itself was a development of a much older German political economy, is absorbed into a framework that remains centred in book II on the older organising idea of land, labour, and capital as factors of production; book III then deals with exchange, and book IV with income and consumption, concluding with an account of the historical development of theory and policy. This is a broad division of the subject that runs right back to the second edition of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Traité d’économie politique (1814). Weber’s 1898 outline, on the other hand, begins not with “The Nature of the Economy”147 but with “The Conceptual Foundations of Economics”; where Philippovich entitles chapter 2 in the introductory section “The Elementary Facts of the Economy,” Weber is already referring in §2 to “The Economy and Its Elementary Phenomena.” What for Philippovich are uncomplicated “elements” are already for Weber “phenomena” whose provenance is contingent and variable. He reinforces this sense of contingency by moving on to “The so-called ‘economic’ principle and the theoretical construction of the economy,” followed by economic needs and “goods,” enclosed within the quotation marks of which he made such liberal use. Here in the introductory sections, Weber treats economic science as a set of concepts and definitions with which “the economy” is constructed, not simply as a set of definitions of a preexisting economic reality. Furthermore, book III in Weber outlines the “Historical Foundations of the Economy” from ancient to modern society, an approach then unusual in German economics textbooks and an indication of quite why he planned for the GdS to begin with a historical account of economic development, and why he was so disappointed when Bücher delivered such a scrappy contribution. Instead, he would reprise these “Historical Foundations” in Economy and Society, chapter 2.
By 1898, Weber had already moved on from Philippovich in two important respects. First, he treated economics as a set of concepts and definitions with which “the economy” is constructed, not simply as a set of definitions derived from a preexisting economic reality. Weber starts out with robust conceptualisations of “economic activity” and then moves on this basis to a substantive appreciation of the economy, covering the conventional economic categories only in passing. This means that there is no clear division between “theory” and “applied economics”; this enables us to make greater sense of what he later sought to do on the basis of these notes in Economy and Society, chapter 2. Second, Weber opens the draft outline that he prepared for the summer semester of 1898 with “1. Begriff der Wirtschaft”—the “concept of economy”:
By “economic activity” we understand a specific form of external purposeful activity [Zweckstrebens]—that is, a conscious, planful relation to nature and people—which is prompted by those needs that require external means for their satisfaction—whether these needs be themselves “material” or “ideal”—and which serve the purpose of provision for the future.
“Economy” is the complex of measures brought into being by the economic activity of an individual or of a human community.148
This is in conformity with “what is generally accepted” among Austrian economists, as Emil Sax wrote in 1884.149 The work of Liefmann and Gottl would also have a major influence on the structuring of chapter 2, and this will be discussed in the following section.
Edith Hanke deals with the genesis of chapter 3 in detail in her editorial work for MWG I / 22-4 and I / 23. Here it is worth emphasising again that the “older draft” was included as part III of the 1922 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: this edition therefore includes as chapter 3 the final revision of a draft that is also printed later in the same book as part III. This rather bizarre circumstance seems to have gone generally unremarked in the Weber commentary, and it only became more obvious with the editorial decision to publish Economy and Society in its constituent parts. Furthermore, whereas chapters 1 and 2 are linked by an account of social action—the work of sociability in general, and then in chapter 2, how this work of sociability creates economic institutions—chapter 3 presents a typology of structures of rule.
For chapter 3, we do not need to construct relationships among diverse texts in an effort to identify a central thread or a guiding theme, nor do we need to take a position on the various arguments surrounding these efforts. In MWG I / 22-4, Edith Hanke presents chapter 3 as the culmination of a Herrschaftssoziologie, a “sociology of rule” developed since 1909, when Weber referred to his idea as an “Analyse der Herrschaft,” a “Kasuistik der Herrschaftsformen,” or a “soziologische Staats- und Herrschaftslehre.”150 At the time, the only systematic concept of Herrschaft was to be found in law, in the definition of the state by Laband, drawing on Gerber—rule as the power of command and coercion, a legalistic conception first challenged in 1900 by Jellinek’s Allgemeine Staatslehre. Quite properly, Hanke seeks to identify the sources of Weber’s conceptual apparatus, the materials with which he could work, where he takes this material up and simply repeats it, and where he takes it in a different direction. Unless we know the evolving conceptual field within which Weber was placed, we cannot really know where Weber himself begins and ends.
From the existing discussion of Herrschaft, Hanke then turns to bureaucracy—here again, around 1910 this was already associated (by Karl Kautsky and Alfred Weber) with rationalisation and capitalism; then Hanke turns to patrimonialism and feudalism, where Weber’s reading would have taken him into a debate among German historians about the origins of occidental feudalism—was it Germanic, or military, or perhaps related to tithes? “Charisma,” another key component here, was at this time applied to the early Christian church, and so a part of theological controversy, subsequently applied to the way many of Stefan George’s followers characterised themselves as “disciples.” Then Hanke turns to “legitimacy,” discussing the work of Bryce, Michels, Gumplowicz, and Oppenheimer, the upshot being that while a number of writers related systems of power to a need for legitimation, the idea of legitimacy itself was not systematically used to characterise rule. From the argument in the older draft that the claim of legitimacy can rest on rational rules or personal authority, which in turn can be either traditional or charismatic, there then later evolved the three types of rule that are the subject matter of chapter 3: bureaucratic, patriarchal, and charismatic.
This, then, outlines the leading features of the genesis of each chapter and the path that each line of thought follows, providing some insight into the shaping of Weber’s “sociology.” But there is one more approach to “his sociology” that can be explored before turning directly to it: the individuals that Weber names in chapters 1 and 2 as his “influences.”
Tönnies, Gottl, and Liefmann as Weber’s “Sources”
In the preamble to chapter 1, Weber names Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Rickert, Georg Simmel, Friedrich von Gottl, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Rudolf Stammler as notable influences on his thinking in writing the chapter. Weber here reviews some of his intellectual debts, positive and negative, making the point that his treatment of “meaning” involves distinctions that Simmel does not systematically make, and that his conception of Verstehen151 can be related to the work of Jaspers, Rickert, and Simmel. His earlier critique of Stammler is acknowledged as a foundation for the arguments of chapter 1, thus making a direct linkage back to his writing before involvement with the GdS project. He also here positively endorses Tönnies and Gottl, and here one can be easily misled, for in these two cases Weber quite clearly adopts terminology and ideas, but then provides them with a radically new twist.
Discussion of “influence” usually treats this as a positive trace from the work of one writer, thinker, or text to another. Here I want to point out that, with Weber, this linkage sometimes becomes seriously disrupted. As I suggested earlier, rather than assume a positive continuity, a more roundabout form of “influence” is often at work—where Weber seemingly takes up someone else’s idea, even acknowledges his debt more or less effusively, but then changes it out of all recognition. Just as much as with his own evolving ideas, Weber continually synthesised familiar material to produce new insights and arguments. These arguments have to be understood on their own terms. Identifying their origin helps us gauge his novelty; it does not reduce this novelty to something that had previously been understood. I will briefly demonstrate that the explicit traces of “existing ideas” in his writings can signify points at which he has inverted material he is ostensibly using. The novelty of what Weber is doing is not simply the shape he gives his arguments, but the radical changes he makes to that which he apparently “borrows.” Indeed, for the earlier methodological writings, Weber is mostly writing against, not with, the sources that have been identified and more or less extensively discussed in the commentary—Roscher, Knies, Rickert, Windelband, Stammler, and Sombart. These writers are all important influences on Weber because of the way he responded to their work, not because he simply adopted what they had written. This proposition can only be supported in outline here, and is most conveniently done in the case of three writers: Tönnies, Gottl, and Liefmann. In chapter 1, Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft is an obvious key reference, and when acknowledging Gottl, he is referring to Die Herrschaft des Wortes. In chapter 2, Gottl figures again in Weber’s discussion of Technik, drawing on Gottl’s GdS contribution on this topic, and the role this plays in chapter 2 is also related to a more general influence of Robert Liefmann’s work. I will begin by discussing chapter 1.
Ferdinand Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft is a philosophical history of social organisation, and so distanced from the analytical histories that Weber constructed, the better to understand the “history of our present.” Tönnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is built on a series of conceptual polarities,152 all of which turn on a fundamental distinction of Wesenswille—the real or natural unity of desires, feelings, inclinations—from Kürwille—an ideal or constructed version of the same. He suggests that in the former, the will dominates, in the latter, thought; he deems the first the psychological equivalent of the human body, whereas he views the second as a creation of thought itself.153 The text is not constructed on a series of related concepts that provide the progressive building blocks for social analysis, as in Weber; instead, there is a simple repetition of equivalent binary relationships, all of which are reducible to this original polarity of Wesenswille and Kürwille. So, for example, he suggests the feminine nature of Gemeinschaft, centred on the house and not the market. Householding is strong and independent in the village, sustained in the town in the bourgeois household, but in the city becomes steril, eng, nichtig, subsumed into a mere place to live.154 The thought is continued into trade, which is said to be inimical to the domestic, settled life. A trader is a constructed person who is rootless—a traveller, familiar with alien customs and mores, without love for any one country, speaking in many tongues and duplicitous, zungenfertig und doppelzüngig, that is, the opposite of a Bauer who is solidly rooted in the Scholle, and of the Bürger practising a craft.155 This simple duality is presented in tabular form:156
|
Gemeinschaft |
Gesellschaft |
|
Wesenswille |
Kürwille |
|
Selbst (self) |
Person |
|
Besitz (property) |
Vermögen (wealth) |
|
Grund und Boden (land) |
Geld (money) |
|
Familienrecht (family law) |
Obligationsrecht (contract law) |
Henry Maine’s original argument concerning a movement from status to contract underpins this approach,157 interpreted by Tönnies as a movement involving the progressive dissolution of family relations and the growth in their place of individual obligations. The individual becomes a construction of civil law instead of being defined as a member of a family, a “community of blood” where “Grund und Boden has its own will.”158 Borrowing from Hobbes, with whose work Tönnies had begun, the state is described as an artificial social connection created to protect its subjects—as he writes echoing Hobbes, an “artificial person.”159
Emile Durkheim reviewed Tönnies’s book in 1889 and recognised that it drew on Maine’s conception of an evolutionary movement from status to contract.160 He described Tönnies’s book as a treatise regarding the shift from an “organic” past to a “mechanical” future, using terms he would later employ when his doctoral thesis was published in 1893 as “De la division du travail social: Études sur l’organisation sociales des sociétés.” Durkheim reversed the terminology in his book, however: here the evolutionary movement from community to society was described as involving a shift from mechanical to organic solidarity. In her introduction to a new translation of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Jose Harris suggests that, for Tönnies, “community” and “society” are two coextant and distinct modes of social order, not part of an evolutionary progression in the way that Durkheim in 1889 supposed. The problem of modernity, she suggests, is therefore not conceived by Tönnies as the “waning” of a past order, but rather as the deliberate replacement of affectively based relationships with rationally formed ties, which once effected, eliminate the prospect of recreating equivalent affective relationships. Community gives way to society not because of any evolutionary superiority of the latter, but because once formed, the rule-governed rational conduct of society undermines any other mode of existence.161
Seen from the perspective of what Weber does in chapter 1, however, we can question this judgement. As is made clear from the above summary, the way Tönnies’s entire book is built on sets of binary relationships reducible to the contrast of Wesenswille to Kürwille implies that, in time, community is irrevocably lost and replaced by a constructed, artificial society. Tönnies associates all positive social features with the former; he has absolutely nothing positive to say about the latter. Tönnies is, in fact, just another cultural critic of modernity who writes about the present while thinking of the past—rather like Sombart, in fact.162 The duality that Weber does adapt from Tönnies, in the form of Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung, neither assumes the naturalness of Gemeinschaft, since it is a social order that can be created and is not pregiven, nor entails a general polarity of social development, a relentless movement from the first to the second. Weber employs Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung as alternative social strategies. In his emphasis on historical contingency, he certainly emphasised that certain developments could form turning points that, once passed, could not be undone, but this is not how the processes of Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung are elaborated in WuG I. Where Tönnies’s book is a lament for the loss of an old order, Weber was a sober critic both of the old and the new order. While one might regret it, there was no going back to the older order, however much the new order was the preserve of the “specialists without spirit” whom Weber excoriates in the closing pages of the Protestant Ethic. If we examine what influence we might attribute to Tönnies in the construction of chapter 1, we can conclude that it extends just as far as the idea of distinguishing Gemeinschaft from Gesellschaft, and no further.
The case of Gottl is rather different; here it is the idea of “basic concepts” as the building blocks of scientific argument that is perhaps the most prominent association, although it had long been usual to begin German economic treatises with a listing of basic economic concepts, and Friedrich Julius Neumann had in 1889 published a review of European political economy in just these terms.163 In 1900, Gottl had completed his Habilitation in Heidelberg’s Faculty of Philosophy with a dissertation on “basic concepts” in economics;164 Die Herrschaft des Wortes was a reprint of his Habilitation dissertation, coupled with a lecture given in Heidelberg in December 1900.165 As the subtitle to his book suggested, Gottl proposed a “critique of economic thinking” through an interrogation of its basic concepts, but this was a critique founded in philosophy, not economics. Consequently, while he raises the important point that central concepts are used casually and unreflectively in economics, he nowhere seeks to exemplify this and demonstrate consequences. Nor, indeed, does Gottl go so far as to examine the idea of a concept, a Begriff, and quite why it might play such a central role in the development of scientific argument. The lecture that Gottl coupled with his dissertation repeated the same ideas at very great length: claiming that clear definitions were needed, but not offering any; introducing terms but failing to elaborate their meaning; seeking to make distinctions, but not making clear why this was important. In 1906, Max Weber wrote to Gottl that he had had to read Herrschaft des Wortes four times before he got to the end without forgetting where he had started,166 which indicates more Weber’s perseverance than the complexity of Gottl’s text. Likewise, when Gottl gave a lecture on “The Limits of History” at the 1903 Historians’ Congress (Historikertag) in Heidelberg, contemporary reports suggest that not only did very few understand what he was saying but that very many struggled to make any sense at all of what he was saying—it was just Unsinn (nonsense): they heard the words he uttered, recognised it was in German and grammatical, but it made no sense to them. Weber, however, maintained that it made perfect sense, that it had, for him, a meaning that he could transform into some kind of sense.167 What Weber took from Gottl was the idea that the analysis of human action could be developed as a set of basic concepts; while Gottl never got beyond stating the idea, Weber showed in chapter 1 how this idea might be realised.
This work of transformation is also evident in chapter 2 with his use of Gottl’s contribution, “Wirtschaft und Technik,” for the GdS. Weber wrote of the piece, “Gottl’s work is quite excellent. There is nothing similar in any work,” which was not necessarily an unambiguous endorsement.168 Gottl contended in his piece that Technik is the means through which our actions become successful, defining Wirtschaft and Technik as, respectively, “ordered action directed to the satisfaction of needs,” and “the orderly execution of this action.”169 He then relates technical and economic rationality, and general and specific utility, to productivity and efficiency (Wirtschaftlichkeit), proceeding from one distinction to another as if logically, but without actually developing his argument in any clear direction. Nonetheless, in chapter 2 Weber takes up Gottl’s distinction between Wirtschaft and Technik, the distinction turning on the relationship between means and ends, and the degree of rationality of an action. Following on from chapter 1, the “meaning” of an action is the subjectively intended meaning; hence, at the beginning of chapter 2 an “economically oriented” action is intentionally oriented to satisfying a desire for utilities. The rationality of this action arises from the degree to which the action takes account of the purpose for which means are employed; it is a measure of the planful orientation of the actor. Whether an action is rational or not then relates to the social, or if you like, institutional, context of the action; there are no inherently rational means, simply activity seeking to meet certain ends whose rationality derives from the manner in which means are selected to achieve desired ends.
Where Gottl limited himself to philosophical phraseology, Weber used this idea to develop an idea of social technology: the organisation and management of social action. Hence, here again, Weber picks up a distinction that Gottl had opened up but had not developed logically—and then embeds it in his account of rational economic action. Weber states in chapter 2, §1.4, “not every action which is rational in its means should be called ‘rational economic action.’ ” He seeks here to limit the conception of Technik to the medium through which an action is executed and separate it from “economy,” which constantly implies a relationship between means and end—ambiguously so, in normal usage, since it means both action aimed at satisfying a need and the form in which that action is executed, “the well-known principle of ‘least force.’ ” It is this latter form of action that Weber calls “the measure of rationality of a technique.”
As for Robert Liefmann, Weber more than once extravagantly praised the work of his former student, and in closing chapter 2 he specifically endorsed Robert Liefmann’s work on income. Liefmann had been a doctoral student in Freiburg with Max Weber, and from 1914 held the chair of economics there. He later claimed to have long held the view that Weber had a descriptive and historical approach to economics, whereas Liefmann considered himself more a theoretician, a statement since used in support of a claim that Weber was not, or no longer, really an economist.170 But as with Gottl, we need to be more sceptical in accepting the self-assessments of Weber’s contemporaries, even if Weber himself endorsed them. Weber certainly was influenced by Liefmann’s work in chapter 2, but not by what Liefmann himself regarded as his unique achievement.
Liefmann believed that he had resolved a central problem in modern economic theory by properly identifying the subjective basis of need, but to make this claim he (falsely) attributed to all other preceding writers a confusion of factors of production with subjective need. This was first stated in 1907,171 then developed at very great length in 1917, when he enlarged again on the way that all previous writers had a faulty conception of economic phenomena. Liefmann believed that the correct approach was his own conception of “marginal return,” whereby an economic action involved a calculation by the agent of a marginal cost, and hence of the yield as the surplus of utility that one gains from the dedication of the final unit of cost applied to every need. Hence, what the consumer equalises are marginal returns.172 So far as it is possible to follow Liefmann’s reasoning, he appears to get everything backwards, working from yield to cost and not the other way around. As a contemporary reviewer suggested, Liefmann was a bad writer who consequently became a bad theoretician, or possibly the other way around, added to which he belligerently rejected all other views or opinions, insisting on the novelty of his own ideas.173
While Liefmann’s overbearing insistence on his own originality is a constant feature of his writing, his own estimation of what was central to his writing had little or no impact on Weber’s own thinking. Knut Borchardt points out that the central role that Kapitalrechnung (capital accounting) plays in chapter 2,174 a key element in Weber’s treatment of the rationality of economic activity used fifty-four times in the chapter, was not a common contemporary technical term. It did, however, recur in Liefmann’s essay “Kapital und Kapitalismus,” where it functioned to characterise the capitalist enterprise.175 And so while Weber does draw on Liefmann for a central idea in the chapter, his direct acknowledgement of Liefmann relates to something else. Nor does Weber share Liefmann’s perspective on recent economic theory; as Weber makes quite clear at the beginning of chapter 2, his main points of orientation are the works of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk. In chapter 2, Weber picks up where he had left off in his 1898 plan for an economics textbook, but twenty-two years later he is still absorbing contemporary German economic work. To what end, however?
Weber’s “Sociology”
From 1913 onwards, Weber referred to the one contribution that he was now going to make to the GdS as “his sociology.” Making the same criticism of Liefmann as Eßlen had in his 1918 review, and having read about half of Liefmann’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, Bd. I, he wrote to him in March 1920, saying:
If you would only concisely and simply outline your own formulations, instead of complaining of the stupidity of others who have not arrived at the same conclusions, I do believe that a great deal of sterile annoyance could be avoided. First of all, your campaign against “sociology”: I well understand this, but wish to note that if I have now become a sociologist (according to my official title!), then to a great extent in order to finish off the last resilient remnants of an enterprise working in terms of collective concepts. In other words: sociology too can only be based on the action of one, several, or many individuals; it can only be pursued with a strictly “individualistic” method.… In sociological terms, the state is no more than the chance that particular kinds of specific action occur. And that is all. I have taught and written about this for years. What is “subjective” about this is that such action is oriented to particular ideas. And what is “objective”: that we, the observers, conclude that there is a chance that action oriented to these ideas will follow.176
Action, its orientation, Chance, subjective and objective appraisal—these are the basic elements of Weber’s sociology, and they support the proposition advanced here that we already do have most of Weber’s “sociology” in WuG I. When he bowed to student demands in the autumn of 1919 and lectured on economic history, we might note that he had no such hesitation during the previous summer in lecturing on “his sociology.” During the autumn of 1919, he had moved on to draft chapter 2 of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, “basic sociological categories of economic action”; this drew on his studies of economic history, but having to lecture on economic history was a diversion from his contemporary interest in developing a sociological account of economic action—whence the distance between the lectures on “outlines of a universal social and economic history” and the substance of chapter 2, notwithstanding their clear affinity.
We can push this idea further and consider what the relation is between the draft material that Marianne Weber added on to WuG I and this newly emergent “sociology.” When Weber refers in chapters 2 and 3 to elaborations that were eventually never drafted, he is for the most part referring to elements of his “special sociologies.” “Economy” and “society” are indeed the central elements—to this extent perhaps Hayek was right in seeing chapters 1 and 2 as the core exposition, and Parsons wrong in arguing for the addition of chapter 3 and the fragment of chapter 4. In his last lecture course, Weber described the sociological concept of law as follows:
[Regarding the law], for the sociologist the question is: How great is the chance that it will count for something, that one will orient oneself to it? Contradictory norms are something that the sociologist can understand, but not the lawyer! The sociological concept of law is that there are in people’s heads (judges, legal staff, the public) conceptions of orders to which people orient themselves because they regard these orders as legitimate.177
And so this “sociological concept of law” derives from the conceptual apparatus that he had drafted for WuG I, chapter 1 during the summer of 1919: it is a “special sociology,” the application of “his sociology.”
In this light, it could be said that the earlier drafts added to WuG I are so much material out of which Weber distilled his “sociology,” and that we can see in the increasingly fragmentary narrative of chapter 3 Weber’s struggle to determine the boundaries of “his sociology.” The problem was that there was potentially no limit to these “special sociologies,” studies that Weber had been conducting from the early 1890s on such topics as Roman agrarian relations, the sociology of labour migration, the relation of commodity markets to the institutions that determine the prices prevailing in these markets, the increasing interest in religions as belief systems shaping human conduct, the psychophysics of labour, the sociology of the press, and so forth—this was all material out of which he could distil “his sociology,” but they are not that sociology itself. And in this respect, the subtitle title given to Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Teil I by the MWG editors—Soziologie. Unvollendet 1919–1920—is both right and wrong. This is Weber’s sociology, but it is not that incomplete. Rather, Weber had not yet come to that conclusion when he died; WuG I is incomplete only in the sense that Weber had not fully worked through the implications of what he had achieved; hence, the references to elaborations that were never written and the degeneration of later sections of the text into lists.
Max Weber had completed his academic training in law and would have formally qualified as a lawyer if he had gone on, as once planned, to serve out his practice as legal counsel to the Bremen Chamber of Commerce, a post for which he applied in 1890. In Berlin, he had already acted as an unpaid court official, but this path shifted first into the teaching of law (in Berlin), and then on to the teaching of political economy (in Freiburg). During the first half of the 1890s, he was deeply engaged with two central aspects of contemporary economic policy: the social and political aspects of rural labour migration, and then from around 1894 with the role of stock and commodity exchanges in domestic markets. Building on this, in 1894 he accepted a position teaching economics and finance at the University of Freiburg, where he also gave courses on agrarian policy.
Set against this bald outline, the formation of those who in the early 1900s represented German sociology was entirely different, if indeed we can talk of anything like a coherent “German sociology” at this time.178 Georg Simmel was six years older than Weber; from 1876, he studied history, psychology, and philosophy in Berlin, and in 1880 submitted a dissertation composed of “psychological and ethnographic studies” on the origins of music. This was rejected, and he then submitted another in 1881, on Kant’s monadology, which was successful and he was awarded a faculty prize. His Habilitation followed in 1884, dealing with Kant’s conceptions of space and time; he passed the oral examination on the second attempt in 1885. From 1885, he lectured as a Privatdozent, and as an unpaid adjunct professor from 1900, his teaching ranging over topics such as aesthetics, philosophy, and sociology. He also played an active part in the cultural life of the capital, becoming a popular public lecturer. In 1908, he published a book entitled Sociology,179 which was a collection of previously published essays that formed, as the subtitle indicated, “studies of forms of sociation” rather than any systematic treatise. He described sociology’s relationship to existing disciplines as an auxiliary one, that is, a “new method” and new approach to the phenomena dealt with in these other domains.180 But these phenomena were the very “collective concepts” that Weber strenuously rejected, and Simmel’s vision was of a sociology that comprehended the totality of these phenomena, as a doctrine focussed on the “social being of humanity.”181 Simmel’s entire intellectual formation differed from that of Weber, while Weber explicitly rejected the conception of sociology that Simmel advanced.
Although he did not publish a book like Simmel’s, we could also consider here Franz Oppenheimer, who was appointed in 1919 to the chair of Theoretical Economics and Sociology at Frankfurt am Main. Originally studying medicine in Freiburg from 1881 to 1885, it was while practising as a doctor in Berlin that Oppenheimer became interested in social problems and began the study of economics. He was awarded a doctorate in economics from Kiel in 1908, and in 1909 completed his Habilitation in Berlin with the support of Gustav Schmoller and Adolph Wagner, then working during the World War I in the War Ministry. Here again, not only was his training and experience quite different from that of Weber, his conception of sociology as a social philosophy of humankind was one that Weber explicitly rejected, but his Theorie der reinen und politischen Ökonomie (1910) contained discussion of economic sociology and social economics to which I will return below.
Lastly, Ferdinand Tönnies pursued a broad range of studies at four universities and eventually received his doctorate from Tübingen in 1877 for a dissertation on Hellenic philology. The following year, he travelled to England and began studying some neglected manuscripts by Thomas Hobbes, eventually publishing in 1889 editions of The Elements of Law Natural and Politic and Behemoth.182 This was after the first edition of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft had appeared in 1887 with the subtitle Treatise on Communism and Socialism as Empirical Cultural Forms.183 In 1912, a second edition was published that changed the subtitle to Basic Concepts of Pure Sociology, but in which the text itself remained unaltered, and so this version is perhaps better described as a second printing rather than as a second edition. The preface to this edition stated that when originally published, the book had been intended for philosophers’ eyes, but that philosophers had generally neglected it. Now writing in 1912, Tönnies noted that despite a growing interest in issues of social development, sociology still lacked any place within the German university.184
This exclusion is caused not by any aversion to the name, for this name is increasingly used by philosophers. Rather, it is a diffidence with regard to the subject matter—philosophy, especially the dominant academic philosophy, senses that it is unprepared for a fundamental and radical treatment of these problems.185
In this new preface, Tönnies reviewed the limited way scholarly endeavours had, in the course of the nineteenth century, responded to the social and political challenges that had developed; naturally enough, he neglected the extensive empirical response to the “social question” with which Weber himself had been involved in the 1890s. It is also worth noting in this context that Weber joined the newly formed German Sociological Society in 1909 because he saw it as a vehicle for empirical research, but he promptly left it once he realised that there was little commitment to this among its membership.186 Both Weber and Tönnies rejected the rather loose and undefined label “sociology” in contemporary writing, but Weber’s response was very different from that of Tönnies: the GdS offered the opportunity of reviewing the contemporary phenomena of capitalist development, and his own contribution to this was a sociological framework that would advance empirically based social, economic, and political analysis, rather than social philosophy and cultural criticism.
And so, although Weber did refer to “his sociology” from 1913 onwards, and in opening chapter 1 he did refer to contemporaries who wrote sociological works, what “his” sociology might be is only captured in any systematic way by what he wrote down from the summer of 1919 to the late spring of 1920. This can be confirmed by even cursory comparison with the various key texts of his “methodological” writings. For example, the 1904 “Objectivity” essay outlined the tasks and limits of the social sciences in confronting contemporary issues, but it does not seek to provide any guidance on exactly how those social sciences should proceed. The 1913 essay on value freedom discusses the relation of value-laden knowledge to scientific knowledge, but lays down no fixed procedure for the conduct of the latter. The three chapters written in 1919–1920 do, on the other hand, offer a basic template, and so represent a new departure for Weber.
Rather than seek clues to the nature of his “sociology” in what Weber had written earlier, before he started referring to “his” sociology, we might also consider the term that Weber selected for the Grundriss—“social economics.” Why did he think in 1909 that this might be the most fitting title for the handbook that he had agreed to put together? At that time, this was not a term that was widely in circulation; even today, if the internet is searched on the specific term Sozialoekonomik, the only contemporary usage you find is related to the GdS. Heinrich Dietzel had in 1895 published Theoretische Socialökonomik as part of Adolph Wagner’s reference work Lehr- und Handbuch der politischen Oekonomie, and it was Dietzel whom Weber had considered in 1909 as a possible alternative to Wieser for the principal GdS contribution on economic theory. Although Dietzel insisted throughout his book that Socialökonomik was the most appropriate designation for modern economic theory, he never actually explained why, and the usage never caught on.187 Heino Heinrich Nau suggests that Dietzel first adopted the term as a way of avoiding any suggestion that there were “national” varieties of what should be a rational, abstract science, hence as a way of avoiding employing the term Nationalökonomie.188 Nau’s discussion of Dietzel’s usage emphasises this abstract character of the term, an emphasis that rather stands against Weber’s adoption of Sozialökonomik for the GdS, since this was anything but an abstract exposition of economic principles as a whole.
Another instance of the term postdates Weber’s initial interest but is of some significance in confirming Dietzel’s usage. Franz Oppenheimer’s 1910 treatise, Theorie der reinen und politischen Ökonomie, was organised into four books: “Grundlegung der Ökonomik”; “Ökonomische Soziologie. Die Wirtschaftsgesellschaft”; “Sozialökonomik. Die Gesellschaftswirtschaft”; and “Kritik der klassischen Distributionstheorie.”189 Besides this movement from an “economic society” to a “social economy,” Oppenheimer here employs Sozialökonomik in a manner similar to that of Dietzel: to denote an abstract, deductive science that contrasts with the inductive approach of an economic sociology and is independent of time and space.190 From this, we might draw the conclusion that here, yet again, Weber picked up a contemporary term and used it in a different sense—not as an abstract term, but as an all-embracing name for modern economic organisation that was lexically distinct from the current German terminology—“the economy of peoples,” “national economics,” and “political economy.” The meaning of Sozialökonomik for Weber therefore lies in the use he made of it, and if he could detach the term from its contemporary moorings in this way, then why not “sociology,” too?
If we accept that the meaning of a term lies in the use made of it, we should therefore direct our attention to what Weber does in the text of WuG I. Typically, commentators’ attention has focussed on the early parts of chapter 1 that address methodological and epistemological issues: What is social action and how might we understand what the meaning of action is? As noted above, it was this section 1 of chapter 1 that Alexander von Schelting and Edward Shils chose to translate in the mid-1930s, indicating their belief that this represented the key statement of Weber’s sociology. Although their translation was never published,191 academic sociologists in the latter half of the twentieth century treated as uncontroversial this general idea that sociological theory was grounded on a specific methodology, and that therefore methodological discussion was a legitimate way of understanding and advancing social theory. Even though Weber loathed “methodology” and strenuously denounced this position, the creation of a sociological canon around the work of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim led to Weber’s specific approach being regarded as “interpretive” as opposed to Marx’s historical and materialist analysis, or Durkheim’s emphasis on collective representations. When Johannes Winckelmann published his fourth edition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in 1956 he gave it a new subtitle, Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie, and in 1968 Roth and Wittich simply adopted this invention for their English edition. More recently, Wolfgang Schluchter has created an overview of Weber’s “late sociology,” treating this as an interpretive sociology that contrasts with an “earlier” sociology, foremost of course the two essays on the Protestant Ethic from 1904 / 1905.192 Correspondingly, this “late sociology” is treated as issuing from Weber’s “mature work,” as contrasted with the less systematic “early work.”
Weber’s route to “his sociology” took a different path, however. Central to the Protestant Ethic essays is the idea of Lebensführung, or “life conduct”—a centrality to which Wilhelm Hennis drew attention in his first major essay on Weber,193 and which was linked by Weber to the “orders and powers” within which men and women led their lives. The point was to understand how this interaction played out in different historical constellations, and for the sake of consistency, it was also necessary to articulate how the motivation and meaning of action for individuals could be accessible to investigation and understood as social processes. The first chapter of WuG I presents a systematic argument that the motivation of individual action can inform an understanding of social processes and social orders that transcends the intentions of those who are engaged in them. This is the purpose of the first “methodical” section of chapter 1, and no more than that. As the first sentence of the definition of “sociology” in chapter 1, §1, states, this seeks causal explanation of the course and effects of social action by means of the understanding of (individual) social action. Construing the meaning of social action is not the sociology itself; it is the starting point, the means for the development of a sociology that requires other principles and concepts to construct causal explanations. Once this possibility is established, Weber is able to lay out his “basic sociological concepts,” and, importantly, move on this basis into an analysis in chapter 2 of the “sociological categories of economic action.”
By comparison with the routine association of Weber with an interpretive sociology, relatively little attention has been paid to the “basic sociological concepts” that follow on from the methodological preamble to chapter 1. We should also note that much of Weber’s language is processual, emphasising the flow of events, and the formation of orders from actions. Contingency plays a major role, visible in his relentless use of Chance to denote opportunities, probabilities, and risks, doubled by the figure of “orientation”—agents are always (more or less) “oriented” to particular actions, so that any judgement of actual outcomes is relatively indeterminate and context dependent. Agents assess and estimate their prospects, and are engaged in processes that place them in constellations of forces that shape the opportunities open to them. While Weber insisted that social action was always individual action, as he wrote to Liefmann, there was besides the issue of understanding subjective meaning also the “objective” aspect: the organisational structures that framed action and that created the “chance that action oriented to these ideas will follow.”194
For Weber, the modern world is fragmented and “disenchanted” in the sense that no unitary order can explain everything. Faith in the rational organisation of the world means that individuals rely on the knowledge of others to make the most mundane things happen. As he states in “Science as a Vocation,” we travel on trams without the faintest idea of how they work, nor do we need to know.
Thus, increasing intellectualisation and rationalisation does not mean an increasing general knowledge of the conditions in which we live. It means instead something else: the knowledge, or the belief, that if one only wanted, one could establish what these conditions are—that there are, in principle, no enigmatic and unpredictable forces that are here at work, but rather that all things—in principle—can be controlled through calculation.195
Religious belief had once provided a way of making sense of one’s position in the world, of opportunities presented and lost. The modern world lacked such coherence; it was fragmented beyond the grasp of any one unitary vision capable of providing guidance across diverse domains. To find their way in this disordered and fragmented world, individuals had to internalise and adhere to particular sets of procedures applicable to specific social, economic, and political constellations. Weber’s analysis of bureaucratic orders reflects this, but much of the commentary, in associating this with his conception of rationality, has overlooked this purely regional, procedural perspective in favour of a more generalising and universalistic understanding. Weber’s point about modern organisations was not, however, that the inescapable outcome of rationalisation was bureaucratization; rather, that organisations all developed (diverse) technologies of conduct that had to be inculcated in their “staff” and enforced among their constituencies. This reads at times like a managerial perspective on social processes, so that later passages of chapter 3 carry strong echoes of “social administration,” or what we might call “social management.” And “administration” is indeed a central concept for Weber—for social, economic, and political orders.
As I point out in the Translation Appendix, the idea of a social group beyond the individual is first described in chapter 1 as a Kreis, or Gruppe(n). 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. Once the term has been formally defined in chapter 1, §12, it is then used exclusively as the basic designation of social organisation, being compounded in different ways to reflect the varied contexts of social organisation. Once the idea of a Verband has been introduced, it quickly becomes apparent that every Verband has two properties: it is directed by someone, and usually there is a “staff” that manages the execution of the instructions given. To make this work, the director needs the adherence of the staff, and the staff need the acquiescence or active cooperation of those whose activities they administer. Social organisation becomes a work of social administration. And so, chapter 1 lines these key concepts up: Verband, Stab, Verwaltung, and Legitimität,196 with Herrschaft serving as the glue that keeps social, economic, and political organisation together. Once Herrschaft is defined in chapter 1, §16, it becomes the defining feature of all organisation.
Coupled with this, Weber’s central categories—Chance, Verband, Evidenz, Herrschaft, Legitimität, Appropriation—are substantially neutral. His sociology is built around empty categories that can then be developed systematically in combinations as “his casuistry.” The great virtue of this basic approach is that it allows him to define the state simply as a Verband whose special function is to monopolise the means of violence / force / compulsion, but which can only exist through the force of legitimation. So here three categories are placed together—Verband—Staat—Legitimität. Consistent application of this approach is very demanding, and only chapter 1 demonstrates entirely successfully how it might work. Chapter 2 demonstrates this feature in the negative: beginning with the same kind of consistency as chapter 1, there is a consistent adherence to the basic terminology, but the exposition gradually runs out of control and the definitional paragraphs become longer and longer, with relatively perfunctory elaboration.
Ironically, in chapter 2 the structure of the text begins to run away with Weber when he introduces the concept of the “division of labour”—what he himself, unhelpfully, refers to as the “distribution of activity” (Leistungsverteilung).197 His account begins clearly enough with §15, where the move is made from generic economic activity to the way this is combined and separated. §16 deals with the consequences of this distinction, but §17 simply continues on from §16 without presenting any new stage in the argument; it elaborates §16.B, the impact of means of production (i.e., Beschaffungsmittel—another unhelpful idiosyncrasy) on the division of labour, complementing §16.A, which involves the combination and separation of activity / work.198 So why is this not one paragraph, including A and B? Then §18 introduces the “social” form of division of labour, with §19 then simply continuing on from §18. Coupled with this, the casuistry now really begins to become intrusive. §20 is Appropriation (i.e., allocation) of the means of production complementary to labour, §21 Appropriation der disponierenden Leistung, that is, the allocation of management functions, a very brief definition (half a page) with no elaboration; indeed, Weber remarks that none is necessary. Then the definition for §22 runs over three pages without any elaboration; §24 turns to Beruf, and significantly Weber then runs on with §24a—as noted above, this should have been §25 but was misnumbered, and so instead of renumbering up to §41 the decision was taken in 1921 to add an “a” to the repeated numbering of “24.”
It also becomes evident in the course of chapter 2 how much emphasis Weber places on “management” (Leitung). Indeed, it could be suggested that Weber’s sociology presents an analysis of society and modernity directed to the management of social situations and processes, that is, the elements of a managerial theory of society that has been obscured by its association with the (certainly related) Weberian “theory” of bureaucracy. Here again, the focus has always been on the structure and not the process—the ongoing dynamics of managing social orders, that all social action is oriented to social organisations that provide them with opportunities that shape the way individuals lead their lives.
This is how Max Weber conceived “his sociology” in the very last years of his life. Nonetheless, this was itself continuous with what he had written many years before. The essay on “objectivity,” written in 1904 for the first issue of the Archiv, concludes with an early statement of the essentially unfinished nature of work in the “cultural sciences”:
All work in the cultural sciences in an age of specialisation, once oriented towards particular material by a particular way of posing a problem and having created its methodological principles, will treat the analysis of this material as an end in itself. It will no longer consciously assess the value of individual facts in terms of their ultimate evaluative ideas, and will lose its consciousness of being ultimately rooted in these evaluative ideas altogether. And that is a good thing. But at some point, things change: the meaning of perspectives simply accepted without further reflection becomes uncertain, the path becomes lost in the twilight. The torch of cultural problems has moved onwards. Then even science and scholarship prepare to shift their ground and conceptual apparatus, so that they might gain renewed perspective on the current of everyday events in the detachment of reflection. They follow those stars that are alone able to give meaning and direction to their labour:
A new impulse awakes,
I hurry forth to drink its eternal light,
Before me the day, behind me the night,
Heaven above, beneath me the waves.
—Goethe, Faust, part I, scene 2199
What marks out “Weber’s sociology” is his attempt to build basic concepts that could endure as analytical tools, that would escape this inevitable process of renewal. These tools are presented to us in the first three chapters of WuG I; we have here enough material to understand what the nature of “his sociology” is.
Introduction to the Publication History
The Max Weber Gesamtausgabe200 first began publication in 1984, and when it is finally completed the task will have taken almost forty years.201 The publisher, Mohr-Siebeck, was Max Weber’s principal publisher, initially of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, the journal that Weber, along with Werner Sombart and Edgar Jaffé, began to edit in 1904, and then through this connection, of the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik for which Weber was editor in all but name from 1908. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft was initially published in 1922 as a book that was part of the Grundriss, but then took on a life of its own. The listing below provides the reader with a way of identifying the different versions of the text discussed in the commentary on Weber’s writings.
The Gesamtausgabe is divided into three sections: section I being published writings (24 volumes); section II, correspondence (10 volumes); and section III, academic lecture notes (7 volumes). The first instalment of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft published in February 1921 is included in MWG, section I, as MWG I / 23 since it was part of the volume published as a large book in 1922; but as outlined in the introduction above, this single book was in fact a composite text based on galleys dating from 1919 to 1920 that Weber had corrected and older manuscripts on which he had not directly worked since 1913. None of Weber’s own manuscript material for any of this work has survived, only some portions of the corrected galleys for the first instalment. Besides the opportunity for editorial review that these surviving galleys provide, all versions of Economy and Society, in whatever language, derive from the German printed editions: the instalments of 1921 / 1922 and the complete book of 1922.
Using Max and Marianne’s correspondence with the publisher, it has been possible for the editors to at least estimate dates for the various materials assembled in the 1922 text, and on this basis the MWG editors made a radical, and justifiable, decision: they broke the text of the 1922 book in two, publishing the printed version of the older draft manuscripts as MWG I / 22 (in five separate parts), and publishing the section that Weber had drafted and corrected in the months before his death as MWG I / 23.202 A clear distinction was thereby made between what Weber had written in the months before his death and manuscripts found in his study after his death, on which he had not worked for many years. A further editorial volume, MWG I / 24, was added, detailing the genesis of the text.
As I have emphasised above, the differing provenance of these two components of the 1922 book—the draft manuscripts dating from the period up to and including 1913, and the new chapters developed from some of this material in 1919–1920, implies that they support different kinds of interpretation. What became the first instalment was written up in just under a year by Max Weber as a continuous argument that ends with the fragment of chapter 4 because he then became ill and died. This continuous argument can be read out of the structure, sequence, lexical usage, material employed, emphasis, and repetition in the three complete chapters. But the remainder of the book is based on diffuse material that follows no particular plan and is substantively interesting in its own right, but is probably no longer part of the book as Weber envisaged it in 1920. And this is not an argument based on authorial intention and the notion that we cannot impute any clear unifying “intention” to these draft manuscripts; even a partly finished “book,” as the first instalment actually is, has to be read differently from earlier notes and drafts associated with it. Those materials are evidence for, and support, different kinds of interpretation and argument.
Editions and Translations
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. I Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Erster Teil (Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. III Abteilung). Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), February 1921. Pp. 1–180. [Erste Lieferung]
Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. III Abteilung. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Bearbeitet von Max Weber. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1922.
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. 2nd ed., corrected, in two half volumes and including as an appendix the “Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik.” Tübingen: C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1925.
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. 3rd ed., reprint of 2nd ed. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1947.
The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated by A. R. [sic] Henderson and Talcott Parsons. London: William Hodge, 1947.
The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.
Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society. Edited and translated by Edward Shils and Max Rheinstein. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954.
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie. 4th ed., in two half volumes. Edited by Johannes Winckelmann. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1956.
The City. Translated by G. Neuwirth and Don Martindale. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958.
“The Household Community.” In Theories of Society. Foundations of Modern Sociology, translated by F. Kolegar, edited by Talcott Parsons, pp. 296–305. New York: Free Press, 1961.
“Ethnic Groups.” In Theories of Society, translated by F. Kolegar, edited by Talcott Parsons, pp. 305–309.
“Religion and Social Status.” In Theories of Society, translated by Christine Kayser, edited by Talcott Parsons, pp. 1138–1161.
Basic Concepts in Sociology. Translated and introduced by H. Secher. New York: Philosophical Library, 1962.
The Sociology of Religion. Translated by Ephraim Fischoff. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.
The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. New York: Free Press, 1964.
Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. 3 vols. Edited by Gunther Roth and Claus Wittich. Translated from the 4th German ed. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968.
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie. 5th ed., in two half volumes. Edited by Johannes Winckelmann. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1972.
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie. 5th ed. (Studienausgabe). Edited by Johannes Winckelmann. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1976.
Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Edited by Gunther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Stadt. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, I / 22-5. Edited by Wilfried Nippel. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2000.
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Religiöse Gemeinschaften. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, I / 22-2. Edited by Hans J. Kippenberg, with Petra Schilm and Jutta Miemeier. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2005.
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Herrschaft. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, I / 22-4. Edited by Edith Hanke, with Thomas Kroll. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2005.
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaften. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, I / 22-1. Edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen, with Michael Mayer. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2009.
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Entstehungsgeschichte und Dokumente. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, I / 24. Edited by Wolfgang Schluchter. Tübingen: C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2009.
Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. 3rd ed. 2 vols. Edited by Gunther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Soziologie. Unvollendet 1919–1920. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, I / 23. Edited by Knut Borchardt, Edith Hanke, and Wolfgang Schluchter. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2013.
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Recht. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, I / 22-3. Edited by Werner Gephart and Siegfried Hermes. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2014.
1. In February 1921, October 1921, April to May 1922, and September 1922. See Max Weber Gesamtausgabe [Complete Works] (henceforth MWG), I / 24, p. 102.
2. “Part I” was added by Marianne Weber to the title page for the first instalment published in February 1921 (see MWG I / 24, pp. 43, 98), but since this instalment was made up of three apparently complete chapters plus the fragment of a fourth, it would have been obvious to readers that this “part” was incomplete. Marianne Weber does not appear to have conducted her editorial work during the summer and autumn of 1920 according to any notes Weber might have made concerning the structure of what he was working on, nor did Max Weber at any time refer to the chapters he drafted in 1919–1920 as “part I.” For obvious reasons, I refer to this section repeatedly here, but need to remind the reader of these reservations; in the following, I will therefore refer to the first four chapters of Economy and Society as WuG I.
3. This translation is based on Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1922). Marianne Weber added the subtitle, using a subheading from a printed summary outline of June 1914 (see MWG I / 24, pp. 168–69). To explain exactly why this was a mistaken idea cannot be attempted here. The text of the first instalment was published as Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Soziologie. Unvollendet 1919–1920, ed. Knut Borchardt, Edith Hanke, Wolfgang Schluchter, Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, Bd. I / 23 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 2013).
4. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Being Part I of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, trans. A. R. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (London: William Hodge, 1947), p. 404; Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 436; Free Press paperback edition 1964 (this edition hereafter referred to as TSEO). Henderson’s first names were Alexander Morell; the initials as given in the Hodge edition are incorrect.
5. Max Weber, Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968) (hereafter cited as E & S). This was republished in 1978 by the University of California Press in two volumes, and this version was reissued in 2013 together with a new foreword by Gunther Roth (pp. xxviii–xxxvii), which provides an overview of the text’s history and its reception in more recent years. The composition of this edition is listed in the draft bibliography appended to my “Translating Weber,” in Why Concepts Matter. Translating Social and Political Thought, ed. Martin J. Burke and Melvin Richter (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 228–29. A separate translation of chapter 1 by H. P. Secher was also published in 1962 as Basic Concepts in Sociology (New York: Philosophical Library). See the complete publication history of the German and English versions of the text below.
6. Hence, where the structure begins to fall apart in chapters 2 and 3 only adds to the sense that Weber is seeking to develop a very particular structure, but in this case falls short.
7. Where emphasis is laid on the continuous, ongoing nature of economic activity in Betrieb (for the complex connotations of this term see the explanation in Appendix A), and also in his argument that economic activity should not be understood in terms of “supply and demand,” but instead in the ramifying desire for utilities and the activity that this desire prompts in seeking their satisfaction.
8. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers (New York: McGraw Hill, 1937); see my discussion of this in my essay “Talcott Parsons as Translator of Max Weber’s Basic Sociological Categories,” History of European Ideas 33 (2007): 212–33.
9. Parsons expounds Weber’s “Methodology of Social Science” not by reference to Weber’s own sources, but rather according to the approach he adopted in The Structure of Social Action. See the introduction to TSEO, pp. 12–20.
10. In a letter to Paul Siebeck, 3 November 1913 Weber wrote: “For myself, I have worked up my contribution into a sociology, so as to provide a substitute for Bücher’s poor contribution, I still have some work to do on that.” Briefe 1913–1914, MWG II / 8, p. 344. See his letter to Paul Siebeck, 21 February 1915, Heidelberg, Briefe 1915–1917, MWG II / 9, p. 21, and to Paul Siebeck before 10 May 1916, Charlottenburg, MWG II / 9, p. 411: “Meine ‘Soziologie’? Dear God! … There is more in the way of references and the like to be added, but the text itself has to be shortened. I hope to be able to do that. More than that is at present impossible. The sociology will have to be completed after the war.” For a general discussion of Weber’s “sociology,” see Klaus Lichtblau, “Max Weber’s ‘Sociology’ as Seen Against the History of the Work,” Max Weber Studies 15, no. 2 (2015): 232–47.
11. See Lawrence A. Scaff, Max Weber in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 244ff.
12. Wolfgang Schluchter, Max Webers späte Soziologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017).
13. See especially “ ‘A Science of Man’. Max Weber and the Political Economy of the German Historical School,” chapter 3 of his Max Weber’s Central Question, 2nd ed. (Newbury, U.K.: Threshold Press, 2000), pp. 105–47.
14. Hereafter cited as GdS.
15. TSEO, p. v.
16. Guenther Roth does, by contrast, include in his 1968 introduction a brief summary of the provenance of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft and the structure of the GdS. E & S, pp. 56–61.
17. These references were eliminated from the translation in TSEO and E & S but are preserved and footnoted here.
18. On 8 November 1919, Weber wrote to Paul Siebeck that the book would need careful proofing “exactly because I lend the material a ‘pedagogic’ form that I think fitting, so that ‘sociology’ can finally be treated in a rigorous and scholarly manner, and not as the dilettantist outpouring of inspired philosophers.” MWG II / 10.2, p. 833.
19. The 180 pages in 1921 / 1922 become 340 pages in TSEO.
20. See Appendix A for discussion of the meaning of these terms.
21. TSEO, p. 89n4.
22. This is yet another level of complexity in the history of the text: for the first instalment of February 1921, Marianne Weber drafted an analytical summary of contents in which each paragraph was listed with a short title. These do not, however, appear in the chapters themselves as subheadings, and so one reads the chapters as they were written by Max Weber independently of these signposts. Parsons, however, took Marianne Weber’s summary descriptions of content and used versions of them as subheadings in the chapters. Since the distinction between definition and exposition had been removed, these subheadings now signpost the whole section rather than the definition paragraph as is implied by Marianne Weber’s analytical contents. This practice on the part of Parsons also reinforced any misdirection resulting from his translation practice.
23. For the reverse story, where Parsons’s replication of Weber’s layout and terminology were suppressed by the publisher of his 1930 translation of Weber’s Protestant Ethic, see Scaff, Max Weber in America, pp. 222–26.
24. Compare, for example, the final sections of Chapter 3, §12, below with TSEO, pp. 367–69.
25. We see this with the concept of “ideal type.” Georg Jellinek had distinguished an “ideal type” from an “empirical type,” the latter listing phenomena but not representing any essentialism. Weber adopted the “empirical” type, but then called it an “ideal” type, thus reversing Jellinek’s usage. See Andreas Anter, Max Weber’s Theory of the Modern State. Origins, Structure and Significance (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 13–14.
26. He worked for six semesters in Freiburg from winter semester 1894–1895 to summer semester 1897; in Heidelberg, winter semester 1897–1898; in Vienna, summer semester 1918; in Munich, a late-starting summer semester in 1919; in Munich, winter semester 1919–1920.
27. See Friedrich Lenger, “Anfang und Ende einer spezifisch deutschsprachigen Sozialwissenschaft: Umrisse einer Geschichte des Archivs für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik,” in his Globalen Kapitalismus denken. Historiographie,- theorie- und wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Studien (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), pp. 108ff.
28. The GdS has a rather complex overlapping organisation of five Bücher distributed among nine Abteilungen (Abt.), with parts distinguished both alphabetically and numerically.
29. For details on this proposition, see my essay “Capitalism and Its Critics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Thought, ed. Greg Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
30. Adolph Weber wrote in Ignaz Jastrow, ed., Die Reform der staatswissenschaftlichen Studien, Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, Bd. 160 (Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1920), p. 58, that in 1900–1901 there had been 25 doctorates in economics awarded in Prussian universities. This rose to 78 in 1913, and during the coming two years he estimated that 2,000 students proposed to complete study related to economic topics in Prussian universities. During the winter semester of 1919–1920, there were 1,660 students in Berlin, 1,600 in Frankfurt, and 1,250 Cologne who had “economics”—Wirtschaftswissenschaften—as their main topic of study. The new qualification came into force across Germany in 1923. See A. Weber, “Das Diplomexamen für Volkswirte,” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 3, Folge Bd. 65 (1923): 289–318, and more generally, “The Handelshochschulen and the Formation of Betriebswirtschaftslehre, 1898–1925,” chapter 5 in my Strategies of Economic Order. German Economic Discourse, 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
31. This was because in the United States, for example, most courses in business and commerce during the 1920s were simply created by drawing on existing arts and social science courses; it was only in Germany at this time that a fully functional syllabus for business education existed at a national level, together with teachers, journals, textbooks, and institutions. See chapter 5 of my Strategies of Economic Order.
32. For a fuller account of the development of the GdS project, see my “What Is Social Economics?,” History of European Ideas 40 (2014): 734–40.
33. The publication of his 1894 Freiburg Inaugural Address with Siebeck in 1895 initiated their correspondence, but it was the editorial management of the Archiv that provided the platform for the GdS.
34. See the account of the acquisition and relaunch in MWG II / 4, pp. 68–70. Sombart had originally been in discussion with Braun about a transfer of ownership; Braun met Weber in Heidelberg on 31 May 1903, who brought Braun together with Jaffé, and in the summer it was Weber’s suggestion to Jaffé that brought about Siebeck’s involvement.
35. MWG I / 24, p. 3.
36. The terms of the contract are given in MWG II / 4, pp. 603–4n2.
37. See the summary in MWG II / 4, pp. 461–62, and in MWG I / 24, pp. 3–4.
38. Bernhard Harms (1876–1939) attained his doctorate in Tübingen in 1901 with Schönberg as his doctoral supervisor and by 1903 had attained his Habilitation, moving to Jena in 1906 and then Kiel in 1908, where in 1914 he founded the Königliches Institut für Seeverkehr und Weltwirtschaft [Royal Institute for Marine Transport and World Economy] later known as the Institute for the World Economy. Siebeck did not explain why it was that he wished to preclude Harms from becoming involved in the project, but we shall see below that he was not wrong in his wish to do so.
39. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 15 April 1905, MWG II / 4, pp. 462–63. Siebeck would have been aware of the problem with deadlines, since Weber’s “Objectivity” essay had been intended to be the first piece in the new Archiv, establishing the purposes of the new journal, but Weber was late in delivering the manuscript and it was consequently set as the second item of the first issue: “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Bd. 19 H. 1 (1904): 22–87. Although the name of the journal changed, the volume numbers continued on from the Braun Archiv.
40. Weber to Siebeck, 15 April 1905, MWG II / 4, p. 465.
41. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 26 November 1905, MWG II / 4, p. 605.
42. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 19 May 1906, MWG II / 5, p. 93.
43. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 5 October 1908, MWG II / 5, pp. 667–68, and then again 26 December 1908, MWG II / 5, p. 705, and 3 January 1909, MWG II / 6, pp. 17–18.
44. “Economy and Economic Stages”—that Weber wished the GdS to begin with a substantial account of the evolution of the modern economy is in itself significant, as was his bitter disappointment with what Bücher eventually submitted.
45. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 20 April 1909, MWG II / 6, pp. 103–4.
46. MWG I / 24, p. 15. Nonetheless, Weber would later complain that the “deficiencies” of Wieser’s contribution would have to be remedied in his own work, that is, in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. See MWG I / 24, pp. 76–77.
47. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 20 April 1909, MWG II / 6, pp. 105–6.
48. MWG I / 24, p. 17.
49. Plan printed in MWG I / 24, pp. 141–54.
50. See MWG I / 24, pp. 155–62, for this typeset proof.
51. The 1922 version ran out at pp. xii+ 840.
52. Plan printed in MWG I / 24, pp. 168–73.
53. In the GdS plan printed at the front of another instalment published earlier in 1922, “C. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft” was in three parts: “I. The Economy and Social Orders and Powers”; “II. Types of Communalisation and Sociation”; “III. Types of Rule.” As noted above, trying to bring order to these various divisions and orderings cannot be attempted here, and would bring us no closer to understanding how Weber actually did compose WuG I.
54. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 22 March 1912, MWG II / 7.1, p. 486.
55. There is a detailed editorial summary of the controversy drawing on Harms’s correspondence in MWG II / 6.2, pp. 522–25.
56. MWG II / 7.2, pp. 563–64.
57. Max Weber to Otto Baumgarten, 12 December 1912, relating to a letter Harms had written to Baumgarten on 22 November 1912, MWG II / 7.2, p. 789.
58. Max Weber to Fritz Keller, 30 December 1912, MWG II / 7.2, p. 813.
59. Max Weber to Soziologisches Kränzchen [Sociological Circle], Kiel, 4 January 1913, MWG II / 8, p. 41.
60. Max Weber to Johann Plenge, 21 January 1913, MWG II / 8, p. 50.
61. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 23 January 1913, MWG II / 8, pp. 52–53.
62. Max Weber to Johann Plenge, 26 January 1913, p. 57n1.
63. Eventually, pp. 1–18 of the first volume.
64. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 28 January 1913, MWG II / 8, p. 60. He was still smarting from “Bücher’s poor effort” in November. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 3 November 1913, MWG II / 8, p. 344.
65. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 30 December 1913, MWG II / 8, p. 449. Hence, Weber planned to write an account of “economy and society” organised in terms of social institutions of different scope and scale, thus replacing Bücher’s evolutionary history of stages of economic organisation.
66. Vorwort to Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. Abt. I: Wirtschaft und Wirtschaftswissenschaft (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1914), p. ix.
67. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 3 December 1914, MWG II / 8, p. 801.
68. Association for Social Policy: founded in 1874, it commissioned surveys and reports for discussion at an annual conference, printed the proceedings, and was the principal hub for German academic lawyers, political scientists, and political economists.
69. “Nein—ich bin für die Feder geboren, und für die Rednertribune, nicht für die Katheder.” Max Weber to Marianne Weber, 7 May 1918, MWG II / 10.1, p. 166.
70. See Hinnerk Bruhns, Max Weber und der Erste Weltkrieg (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), p. 95.
71. Philippovich’s appointment to Vienna had created the opening for Weber in Freiburg.
72. “Social Science and Economics.” For details, see Gangolf Hübinger’s introduction to the 1920 lecture course on the sociology of the state (Staatssoziologie), MWG III / 7, pp. 28–29.
73. “Gesellschaftswissenschaft, Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Nationalökonomie,” in conformity with a wish Weber had expressed in a letter to the ministry on 19 February 1919 (MWG II / 10.1, p. 466).
74. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 10 June 1919, MWG II / 10.2, p. 636.
75. Max Weber to Marianne Weber, 16 June 1919, 25 June 1919, MWG II / 10.2, pp. 647, 667.
76. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 25 September 1919, MWG II / 10.2, p. 789. In a letter to Paul Siebeck on 27 October 1919, Weber also proposed that Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft be published in instalments, so that it would begin to appear before the work as a whole was finished. MWG II / 10.2, p. 826. This arrangement was agreed on by early November. MWG II / 10.2, p. 833.
77. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 27 October 1919, MWG II / 10.2, p. 826.
78. The progress of setting and proofing can be established from correspondence with the publisher, summarised in MWG I / 23, pp. 81–88. The first sections of chapter 2 were probably delivered to the typesetters in the first half of January 1920 (p. 85).
79. See the translation of this in my “Max Weber’s ‘Conceptual Preface’ to General Economic History. Introduction and Translation,” Max Weber Studies, special issue (2006): 11–38.
80. Edith Hanke, “ ‘Max Weber’s Desk Is Now My Altar’: Marianne Weber and the Intellectual Heritage of Her Husband,” History of European Ideas 35 (2009): 349–59.
81. Marianne Weber gave away manuscripts and proofs to various of her helpers and collaborators; besides some proofs retained in the Mohr Siebeck archives, only the proofs that Marianne presented to Else Jaffé seem to have survived from all this material. Else had passed them on to Wolfgang Mommsen in the early 1950s. See MWG I / 23, p. 602.
82. See the “Editorisches Bericht,” MWG I / 17, pp. 131–55.
83. Hanke, “ ‘Max Weber’s Desk,’ ” p. 354.
84. MWG I / 24, p. 98.
85. MWG I / 24, pp. 129–31.
86. I draw in the following on material presented in my “Talcott Parsons as Translator of Max Weber’s Basic Sociological Categories,” History of European Ideas 33 (2007): 212–33. For the reconstruction of the progress of translation and production of Theory of Social and Economic Organization, I am indebted to material given to me by Lawrence Scaff and Álvaro Morcillo Laiz.
87. Talcott Parsons, preface to TSEO, p. v. Parsons also acknowledges that he was given sight of a draft translation of chapter 1, section 1, by Alexander von Schelting and Edward Shils. Reconstruction of the history of the Parsons translation has to rely largely on his own account of events, since the papers and correspondence of William Hodge & Co. were destroyed during the war. Information obtained from Sir Alan Peacock, telephone conversation, 19 April 2005.
88. See my interview with Sir Alan Peacock in Keith Tribe, ed., Economic Careers. Economics and Economists in Britain, 1930–1970 (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 199.
89. The same letter in which this initial intention is clarified also clearly states that Alexander Henderson had entered the project on the direct recommendation of Hayek. Letter from James H. Hodge to Talcott Parsons, 14 March 1939, Parsons Papers, Pusey Library, Harvard University HUG(FP) 15.2, Box 13. I wish to thank Robin Carlaw and the Harvard University Archives for this information, as well as Lawrence Scaff for his great generosity in giving me a full set of this correspondence.
90. The partial translation of the opening pages of WuG, chapter 1, by Edward Shils and Alexander von Schelting in the mid-1930s (a copy of which Parsons had) would have reinforced this feature of Parsons’s perspective on Weber.
91. Machlup signs off with greetings to Parsons’s family, suggesting that Parsons’s offer was a verbal one. Machlup and Parsons had been corresponding since 1936, but there is no mention of the translation project until this point. Fritz Machlup to Talcott Parsons, 16 February 1938, Machlup Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Box 44, Folder 13. My thanks to Ronald M. Bulatoff and the Hoover Institution for making this material available to me.
92. Parsons to Machlup, 27 November 1938. Machlup Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Box 44, Folder 13.
93. Alexander Henderson’s draft translation cannot be traced in the Parsons Papers and must be presumed lost.
94. Following his graduation from Cambridge, Alexander Morell (“Sandy”) Henderson (1914–1954) spent some time in Vienna, and then in 1937 succeeded Kenneth Boulding as an assistant lecturer in Edinburgh. When war broke out, he joined the Royal Tank Regiment, and following demobilisation moved to a lectureship in Manchester. By 1949, he was professor of economic theory at Manchester University, moving to the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1950, where he jointly authored the first textbook on linear programming. A. Charnes, W. W. Cooper, and A. Henderson, An Introduction to Linear Programming (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1953). My thanks to Patricia McGuire, archivist at King’s College, Cambridge, for confirming personal details on Alexander Henderson.
95. Letter from Parsons to James Hodge, 26 January 1939, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 13.
96. Parsons to Hodge, 26 January 1939, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 13.
97. Parsons to Hodge, 26 January 1939, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 13.
98. Shils had prepared this translation some time in the mid-1930s; he had intended to publish a collection of Weber’s writings, but was outmanoeuvred by C. Wright Mills. See G. Oakes and A. J. Vidich, Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 20–25.
99. Hodge to Parsons, 14 March 1939, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 13.
100. Letter from Parsons to James Hodge, 13 April 1939, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 13.
101. Letter from Hodge to Parsons, 4 May 1939, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 13.
102. Letter from Parsons to James Hodge, 17 May 1939, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 13.
103. Letter from Parsons to James Hodge, 28 June 1939, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 13. In the same letter, he notes that no arrangements had been made for publication in the United States and suggested that it would be worthwhile arranging for an American edition bound from sheets supplied by Hodge.
104. Letter from Parsons to James Hodge, 25 September 1939, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 13.
105. Parsons to James Hodge, 25 September 1939, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 13.
106. Parsons to James Hodge, 10 January 1940, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 27.
107. Parsons to James Hood, 14 November 1940, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 27.
108. Violet Manhood to Parsons, 14 January 1941; Parsons to Manhood, 12 August 1941, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 27.
109. Telegram from Hodge to Parsons, 6 October 1941; Parsons to Manhood, 28 January 1942, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 27.
110. Parsons to Manhood, 28 January 1943, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 27.
111. James Hodge to Parsons, 7 November 1944, Parsons Papers, HUGFP 15.2, Box 27.
112. Their edited collection From Max Weber was published in New York in 1946.
113. Margaret Nicholson (Oxford University Press) to Parsons, 26 August 1947.
114. Dieter Plehwe, Table I.1 in his introduction to Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin. The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 18.
115. Ludwig von Mises, “Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Bd. 47 (1920): 86–121.
116. It should be noted how early this important and authoritative study of Max Weber appeared, later translated as Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
117. The following summarises my account of this episode in “Max Weber: The Works,” Economy and Society 41 (2012): 282–98, which here draws on M. Rainer Lepsius, “Münchens Beziehungen zu Max Weber und zur Pflege seines Werkes,” in Karl-Ludwig Ay and Knut Borchardt, eds., Das Faszinosum Max Weber. Die Geschichte seiner Geltung (Konstanz: UVK Verlag, 2006), pp. 17–27.
118. Winckelmann’s credentials as a banker-scholar were established with his review of Weber’s works in “Max Webers Opus Posthumum,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, Bd. 105 (1949): 368–87.
119. Johannes Winckelmann, Max Webers hinterlassenes Hauptwerk: Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Enstehung und gedenklicher Aufbau (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1986), p. 122.
120. The principal chairs in this faculty were those of forestry, economics, and management (Betriebswirtschaftslehre, or BWL).
121. Edith Hanke, Gangolf Hübinger, and Wolfgang Schwentker, “Die Entstehung der Max-Weber-Gesamtausgabe und der Beitrag von Wolfgang J. Mommsen,” in Geschichtswissenschaft im Geist der Demokratie. Wolfgang J. Mommsen und seine Generation, ed. Christoph Cornelißon (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), pp. 207–38.
122. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Max Weber’s ‘Grand Sociology’: The Origins and Composition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Soziologie,” History and Theory 39 (2000): 367. See the carefully phrased comments about the editors’ use of Winckelmann’s corrections to “part I” for his fourth and fifth editions, MWG I / 23, p. 105, and the description of the changes made, pp. 105–6.
123. See the Translation Appendix for the problems in translating these terms, and more generally, Klaus Lichtblau, “Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung in Max Weber: A Reconstruction of His Linguistic Usage,” History of European Ideas 37 (2011): 454–65, originally published in Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 29 Heft 6 (2000): 423–43.
124. “Economy and Society (Positive Critique of the Materialist Conception of History).” See Kiichiro Yagi and Yukihiro Ikeda, eds., “Economics Courses at Vienna University 1849–1944—Compiled from Its Course Lists” (Working Paper No. 1, Faculty of Economics, Kyoto University, February 1988), 1:104.
125. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 25 September 1919, MWG II / 10.2, p. 789.
126. In this translation, Chapter 1 is just over 24,000 words, compared with the 60,000 words of Chapter 2 and the 34,000 words of Chapter 3.
127. See note 79 above. There is no record of when this chapter was finally sent to be set, but the first galleys were dated 21 February 1920.
128. See MWG II / 10.2, p. 789n3.
129. See MWG I / 23, p. 603.
130. Respectively MWG I / 23 pp. 606, 664–65, 691, and 710.
131. MWG I / 23, facing page 664. §24 here finally became §24a, cf. MWG I / 23 pp. 345–46.
132. Weber was under great pressure from Siebeck to deliver his manuscript; this was why he proposed publishing the work in instalments, forcing himself to finish sections and hand them over as he went rather than wait until the whole text was finished.
133. In the following translation, this printing error is corrected and the correction noted; the MWG editors preserve it.
134. Translated by Edith E. Graber as “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology,” Sociological Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1981): 151–80.
135. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 5th ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1982), p. 428.
136. Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehrei, p. 428.
137. “Economy and Society (A Positive Critique of the Materialist Conception of History)”.
138. Translated by Guy Oakes as Max Weber, Critique of Stammler (New York: Free Press, 1977).
139. See the collection Max Weber, Économie et société dans l’Antiquité, précédé de les causes du déclin de la civilisation antique, with an introduction by Hinnerk Bruhns (Paris: La Découverte, 2001), and Hinnerk Bruhns, Max Webers historische Sozialökonomie. L’économie de Max Weber entre histoire et sociologie (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014).
140. Max Weber, Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Abriss der universalen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, ed. Siegfried Hellmann and Melchior Palyi (Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1923) (now MWG III / 6), translated by Frank Knight as General Economic History (New York: Greenberg Publishers, 1927); see my discussion in “Max Weber’s ‘Conceptual Preface,’ ” pp. 11–38.
141. For his summer semester 1898 course on economic theory, a structured set of readings and a summary of “Book I: The Conceptual Foundations of Economics” were printed and circulated; these were published separately as Grundriss zu den Vorlesungen über Allgemeine (“theoretische”) Nationalökonomie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1990), and are now also printed in MWG III / 1, pp. 89–117, 122–54.
142. For an outline of this, see my “Lecture 11. From Political Economy to Economics,” in The History of Economics. A Course for Students and Teachers, ed. Roger E. Backhouse and Keith Tribe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda, 2017), pp. 183–91. There is remarkably little modern commentary that addresses the international impact of “Austrian” economics in the 1890s, something that is obvious from any review of contemporary periodicals.
143. For a discussion of the reading that Weber recommended and its relation to his teaching, see my “Max Weber and the ‘New Economics,’ ” in Austrian Economics in Transition. From Carl Menger to Friedrich Hayek, ed. Harald Hagemann, Tamotsu Nishizawa, and Yukihiro Ikeda (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 73–79.
144. MWG III / 1, pp. 69–79. Weber’s notes for his lectures on theoretical economics are undated. They have been edited in MWG III / 1 to reflect the coherence they acquired over the years. They represent his lecturing in 1898, and we can only surmise how he got there; it is not possible to judge from them exactly what Weber had delivered during winter semester 1894–1895 in Freiburg.
145. Weber had attended Carl Knies’s Heidelberg lectures in political economy in 1882 and 1883, but the 1883 edition of Knies’s Die politische Oekonomie vom geschichtlichen Standpuncte contains no reference to the work of Menger, nor to Böhm-Bawerk’s first publication, Rechte und Verhältnisse vom Standpunkte der volkswirthschaftlichen Güterlehre. Kritische Studie (Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagner’schen Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1881). For a discussion of Knies’s teaching, see my “Max Weber and the ‘New Economics,’ ” pp. 69–73, and for Weber’s reaction, see Wilhelm Hennis, “Max Weber’s Central Question,” in Max Weber’s Central Question, pp. 128–29.
146. Eugen von Philippovich, Allgemeine Volkswirthschaftslehre (Freiburg I. Br.: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]), 1893), p. 1.
147. Philippovich’s Book I is “Das Wesen der Volkswirthschaft,” the first chapter being “Das Wesen der Wirthschaft.”
148. MWG III / 1, p. 122.
149. Emil Sax, Das Wesen und die Aufgaben der Nationalökonomie. Ein Beitrag zu den Grundproblemen dieser Wissenschaft (Vienna: Hölder, 1884), p. 9.
150. “Analysis of rule,” “casuistry of forms of rule,” a “sociological theory of the state and of rulership: MWG I / 22-4, p. 3. The following outlines key points of Hanke’s editorial introduction to MWG I / 22-4.
151. See the discussion of this term in the Translation Appendix.
152. Klaus Lichtblau makes this point in his “Die Bedeutung der Kategorie des ‘Einverständnisses’ in Webers Wissenschaftslehre,” in Max Webers vergessene Zeitgenossen. Beiträge zur Genese der Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Gerhard Wagner and Claudius Härpfer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2016), p. 219.
153. Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie (1935; repr., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979), p. 73.
154. Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 135.
155. Tönnies, p. 141.
156. Tönnies, p. 158. A complete listing of the respective properties of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is given on pp. 216–17.
157. Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law. Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (London: John Murray, 1861).
158. Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 186.
159. “Eine fingierte oder künstliche Person.” Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 198.
160. Joan Aldous, “An Exchange between Durkheim and Tönnies on the Nature of Social Relations, with an Introduction by Joan Aldous,” American Journal of Sociology 77 (1972): 1196. Durkheim’s review was published in Revue philosophique, t. 27 (1889): 416–22.
161. Jose Harris, introduction to Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. xxix. Note that this edition does not carry the subtitle Basic Concepts of Pure Sociology that Tönnies gave to his book from the second edition of 1912 onwards.
162. See Friedrich Lenger, Werner Sombart 1863–1941. Eine Biographie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994), pp. 140, 162.
163. Friedrich Julius Neumann, Grundlagen der Volkswirtschaftslehre (Tübingen: Verlag der H. Laupp’schen Buchhandlung, 1889). The first chapter was “Wirtschaft und Wirtschaften,” followed by chapters on wealth and goods, value, and returns; revenue; and income. Neumann also wrote the entry “Wirtschaftliche Grundbegriffe” in Handbuch der politischen Ökonomie, Bd. 1, 3rd ed., ed. Gustav Schönberg (Tübingen: H. Laupp’schen Buchhandlung, 1890), pp. 133–74, which covers the same ground.
164. Gottl had previously completed a doctorate supervised by Knies in Heidelberg, and would have gone on to pursue his Habilitation with Weber if it had not been for Weber’s illness. He was instead supervised by Weber’s stand-in, Karl Rathgen. As Morikawa notes, there was nonetheless a student–teacher relationship between Gottl and Weber, even though Gottl was only four years younger. Takemitsu Morikawa, “Friedrich Gottl und Max Weber,” in Max Webers vergessene Zeitgenossen. Beiträge zur Genese der Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Gerhard Wagner and Claudius Härpfer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2016), p. 194.
165. Friedrich Gottl, “Ueber die ‘Grundbegriffe’ in der Nationalökonomie” (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1900), pp. 1–64 of Die Herrschaft des Wortes. Untersuchungen zur Kritik des nationalökonomischen Denkens: einleitende Aufsätze (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1901).
166. Weber to Friedrich Gottl, Heidelberg, 8 April 1906, MWG II / 5, p. 70.
167. Morikawa, “Friedrich Gottl und Max Weber,” pp. 194–96.
168. Max Weber to Paul Siebeck, 15 April 1914, MWG II / 8, p. 623.
169. 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. 208.
170. Robert Liefmann, “Robert Liefmann,” in Die Volkswirtschaftslehre der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, ed. Felix Meiner and Felix Meiner (Leipzig: Verlag, 1924), p. 158.
171. Robert Liefmann, Ertrag und Einkommen auf der Grundlage einer rein subjektiven Wertlehre. Ein wirtschaftstheoretischer Versuch (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1907), pp. 3, 17.
172. There is a measurement problem here, but all arguments about utilities and yields are subject to the same problem. See Robert Liefmann, Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, Bd. I: Grundlagen der Wirtschaft (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1917), part I, chapters 3 and 4, pp. 299, 407.
173. Joseph Bergfried Eßlen, “Nutzen und Kosten als Grundlage der reinen Wirtschaftstheorie,” Schmollers Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im deutschen Reich, Jg. 42 (1918): 1123.
174. MWG I / 23, p. 259n29.
175. Borchardt refers to “Kapital und Kapitalismus,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, Bd. 72 (1916): 328–66, and Bd. 73 (1917): 45–100.
176. Max Weber to Robert Liefmann, 9 March 1920, MWG II / 10.2, pp. 946–47.
177. MWG III / 7, p. 68.
178. In fact, the first dedicated chair for sociology in Germany was not founded until 1925, for Hans Freyer at Leipzig. For a discussion of interwar German sociology, see my introduction to Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1988), p. 3.
179. Georg Simmel, Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1908).
180. Simmel, Soziologie, quoting from the Simmel Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 11 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992), p. 15.
181. Of the “Gesellschaft-Sein der Menschheit,” p. 25; for the statement on totality, see p. 22.
182. It was this connection to Hobbes that lends us a clue to the sense of his usage of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: here he drew on Hobbes’s use of “concord” and “union.” See Istvan Hont, Politics in Commercial Society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 5.
183. Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen. See Harris, introduction to Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, pp. xiv–xv, for an account of the publishing history of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft and its relationship to Tönnies’s work on Hobbes.
184. Historically, of the four faculties Theology, Medicine, Law, and Philosophy, the first three were vocationally oriented, and the fourth provided for nonvocational “general studies.” While this casts an interesting light on “German philosophy,” it also strengthens Tönnies’s complaint that even in the least vocational part of the German university, there was no room for sociology.
185. Tönnies, “Vorrede zur zweiten Auflage,” in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, p. xxv.
186. “Weber did not participate in the foundation of the German Sociological Society with a view to the establishment of a new academic discipline, but rather to establish a forum which would permit the planning and execution of ‘sociological’ investigations consistent with his own interests.” Wilhelm Hennis, “The Media as a Cultural Problem: Max Weber’s Sociology of the Press,” History of the Human Sciences 11 (1998): 107.
187. See Heinrich Dietzel, Theoretische Socialökonomik (Lepizig: C. F. Winter’sche Buchhandlung, 1895), chapter 2.
188. Heino Heinrich Nau, Eine “Wissenschaft vom Menschen”. Max Weber und die Begründung der Sozialökonomik in der deutschsprachigen Ökonomie 1871 bis 1914 (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1997), p. 200.
189. “Foundations of Economics,” “Economic Sociology. The Economic Society,” “Social Economics. The Societal Economy,” and “Critique of the Classical Theory of Distribution”.
190. Franz Oppenheimer, Theorie der reinen und politischen Ökonomie. Ein Lehr- und Lesebuch für Studierende und Gebildete (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1910), pp. 61, 74.
191. A copy of the typescript from the Parsons Papers in Harvard University Archives was consulted while working on this translation.
192. Schluchter, Max Webers späte Soziologie, pp. 267ff.
193. See Wilhelm Hennis, “Max Weber’s ‘Central Question,’ ” in his Max Weber’s Central Question, 2nd ed. (Newbury, U.K.: Threshold Press, 2000), pp. 3–51.
194. Max Weber to Robert Liefmann, 9 March 1920, MWG II / 10.2, p. 947.
195. Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” MWG I / 17, pp. 86–87.
196. “Organisation,” “staff,” “administration,” and “legitimacy.”
197. See the discussion of Leistungsverteilung in the “Preliminary Remarks” to the Translation Appendix.
198. We can note here that Weber’s use of Verteilung here is also idiosyncratic. Normally, the word is translated as “distribution,” but Verteilung is a word formed around the root noun Teil—“part”—so by prefixing this with “Ver-,” the usage suggests not so much that “distribution” is a given outcome, where we are directed to the place where the parts end up, but instead to the process of separating something into parts. Stated in this way, his usage does make sense, but the cost here is very great, because the specialised nature of the vocabulary begins to overwhelm the exposition. When Weber turns to the work of Knapp, who in his analysis of money created a whole new vocabulary most of which failed to gain acceptance, the real limits of coining neologisms become apparent. What seems to happen here is that Weber sought to develop a specialised vocabulary, but unfortunately failed to properly explain what was implied by this usage—the kind of fault we more commonly find in Knapp or Liefmann or Gottl.
199. Max Weber, “Die Ojektivität sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 5th ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1982), p. 214.
200. Referred to throughout simply as “MWG”—a convenient shorthand in German since it is pronounced “em-vay-gay”.
201. For an account of the genesis of this project, see my “Max Weber: The Works,” Economy and Society 41 (2012): 282–98.
202. MWG I / 23 is based on the first 1921 instalment; this translation is based on the corresponding section of the 1922 book. In practice, this makes little or no difference, but the point needs to be made to prevent adding to an already confusing state of affairs.