Max Weber (Sociology)

Introduction
A principal founder of modern sociology, Max Weber Jr. was born 21 April 1864, to a prominent Prussian lawyer/politician and a pious mother, in Erfurt, Prussia. He was the eldest of eight children (his brother, Alfred, also became a noted sociologist and cultural analyst). Max married his cousin, Marianne Schnitger, in 1893; the couple had no children. He died unexpectedly, a victim of the global influenza pandemic, on 14 June 1920, at age fifty-six. Raised in a wealthy suburb of Berlin, he suffered childhood illnesses that left him confined to bed, where he became bookish. His father’s large home saw gatherings of the local and national political and intellectual elite, and he overheard conversations that drew him into a realm of rarefied cultural awareness. Given his protean appetite for knowledge, he wrote essays on ponderous topics while still in middle school, yet he never took formal schooling very seriously, educating himself through reading and interaction with academic relatives and houseguests. Formally, he pursued law, economics, and philosophy at Heidelberg, Straßburg, Berlin, and Göttingen (1882–1886); served in the army reserve for two years during college; and then studied law at Berlin, graduating in 1889. He then precociously won academic appointments at Berlin and Freiburg, but was forced to retire from teaching after a massive nervous breakdown that immobilized him from 1897 until 1903. He recovered enough to take an extended trip to the United States in 1904. Freed from teaching duties by an inheritance, he spent the next sixteen years or so producing a body of sociocultural, economic, and sociological analysis that is second to none in the history of modern social science. Weber’s common fame rests on his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1930 and Weber 2002, cited under The Protestant Ethic Debate), in which he demonstrated why northern European Protestant behavior was more conducive to the formation of early capitalism than were southern European Catholic beliefs and practices, a hypothesis that has inspired thousands of commentaries and critiques. But he also contributed fundamental works to the sociology of law (which he virtually invented), the sociology of music (also a first), the sociology of the economy, the philosophy of social science method, the comparative sociology of religion (also his creation), social stratification, the sociology of bureaucracy and of power and “charisma” (his term), and so on.
The following is a chronology of Weber’s major works: On the History of Medieval Trading Companies, 1889, age 25 (120 pages); Roman Agrarian History, 1891, age 27 (280 pages); Conditions of Agricultural Workers in East Prussia, 1892, age 28 (900 pages); The Stock Market, 1894–1895, age 30 (329 pages); Agrarian Conditions in Antiquity, 1897, age 33 (400 pages); The Protestant Ethic, 1905, age 41 (250 pages); Roscher and Knies, 1903–1906 (300 pages); Bourgeois Democracy in Russia, 1906, age 42 (250 pages); Critique of Stammler, 1907, age 43 (200 pages); Psychophysics of Industrial Labor, 1908, age 44 (120 pages); Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, 1909, age 45 (400 pages); On the Categories of Interpretive Sociology, 1913, age 49 (200 pages); Religion of China, 1916, age 52 (450 pages); Religion of India (400 pages); Ancient Judaism, 1917, age 53 (500 pages); Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany, 1918, age 54 (130 pages). Other major works include the posthumously published Collected Political Writings (1921), Economy and Society (1921), Rational and Social Foundations of Music (1921), and General Economic History (1923).
Weber’s Works in German
Weber 2001 is an online version of Max Weber: Gesammelte Werke und Schriften, an electronic source for Weber’s works in German that allows for terminological searches. This collection, originally on CD-ROM and compiled by Karsten Worm, includes “all of Weber’s published writings, lectures, and articles published in journals,” according to its bibliographical description. Economy and Society (Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology), a massive study assembled posthumously (in 1922) from Weber’s papers by his wife (herself an important intellectual and feminist leader in Germany), and wholly translated into English in 1968 for the first time, is the most important single collection of Weber’s work. For complete details on the chronology of composition, see Riesebrodt 2002, an online bibliography of Weber’s works. Sica 2004 (cited under Biographies, Handbooks, Bibliographies, Journals), the standard bibliography of works in English concerning Weber, includes over 4,800 items. This list continues to grow, because as Marx and Freud become, for many scholars, less tenable as the major analysts of the modern world, Weber’s ideas become ever more pertinent and revealing.
Riesebrodt, Martin. 2002. Bibliographie zur Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck.
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Offered as part of the Mohr Gesamtausgabe, provides a comprehensive chronological bibliography and publication details of all of Weber’s writings. In German.
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Weber, Max. 2001. Max Weber: Gesammelte Werke und Schriften. Edited and compiled by Karsten Worm. Charlottesville, VA: InteLex.
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This was originally a CD-ROM but is now offered online through certain university libraries and by paid subscription. It includes “all of Weber’s published writings, lectures, and articles published in journals,” according to its bibliographical description. Also included is the first (1922) edition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, “Drei reinen Typen der legitimen Herrschaft” from the Preussische Jahrbücher (1922), plus all seven volumes of his Gesammelte Aufsätze on social science and policy, politics, comparative religion, and economic history. Six extra articles from the Frankfurter Zeitung are also included, along with his writings about Russia, as well as important review-essays on books by Adolf Weber and A. Lewenstein.
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Selected Works in English Translation
The publication date of an English translation of one of Weber’s works bears no relation to either the date of composition or the date of publication in German.
Early Work on History and Political-Economics
Weber was trained first as a lawyer, second as a political-economist, and third as a historian. He did superior work in the second and third categories, though he very seldom practiced law and was rejected from the first legal job to which he applied. His academic work was superior in that he combined economics, historical archival work, and the nascent field of sociology into a mixture that was heretofore absent from German intellectual life (with the exception of Ferdinand Toennies’s Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887). Weber learned the craft of rigorous analytic thinking from his legal training, and the requirements of archival interpretation from his work in ancient and medieval history. This proved to be an exquisite combination for what would become “Weberian” sociology.
Weber, Max. 1979. Developmental tendencies in the situation of East Elbian rural labourers. Translated by Keith Tribe. Economy and Society 8.2 (May): 177–205.
DOI: 10.1080/03085147900000007Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber analyzes the results of the third survey (1894; surveys were also administered in 1849 and 1873) of rural laborers, executed by means of a questionnaire given to landowners in a discussion of changes in the lives of laborers and the arrangement of labor, particularly as affected by the extent to which the large landowners chose to participate in global markets. Reprinted in Keith Tribe’s Reading Weber (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 158–187.
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Weber, Max. 1985. “Roman” and “Germanic” law. International Journal of the Sociology of Law 13.3 (August): 237–246.
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Weber details the relationship between law and capitalism, emphasizing the distinction between the two forms of legal development and how each affected commerce differently. First published in 1895.
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Weber, Max. 2000. “Commerce on the stock and commodity exchanges.” Translated by Steven Lestition. Theory and Society 29.3 (June): 339–371.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1007003313032Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber’s description of the inner workings of exchanges of the period, based in part on his knowledge of his extended family’s commercial dealings going back several generations.
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Weber, Max. 2002. The history of commercial partnerships in the Middle Ages. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lutz Kaelber. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
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This work, Weber’s first dissertation, is an examination of the formation of commercial law. This constitutes something of a bridge between Weber’s earlier works on law and ancient history and later works such as The Protestant Ethic. The editor also supplies translations of ancillary material that Weber used in writing the book.
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Weber, Max. 2008. Roman agrarian history. Translated by Richard I. Frank. Claremont, CA: Regina.
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This early work qualified Weber for university-level teaching. It addresses Roman property use and related law. Its technical nature required Weber to study sparse documents of the time and enter into a public debate with Theodor Mommsen, the leading historian of his period and an old family friend of the Webers.
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General Sociology
As sociology was being formed between about 1850 and 1900—in Britain (principally) by Herbert Spencer; in France by Emile Durkheim; in the United States by Lester Ward, Franklin Giddings, and Albion Small (at the “Chicago School”); and in Germany by Weber, Georg Simmel, and Ferdinand Toennies—Weber’s style of work provided a unique perspective that is now known as “macrosociology” or “comparative-historical sociology,” and sometimes as “action theory.” It was this macro perspective, featuring large-scale social structures, that complemented Simmel’s microsociological analysis of face-to-face interaction. Weber’s posthumous masterwork (assembled by his wife, Marianne, and her colleagues), Economy and Society (Weber 1968a), provided the most elaborate analytic framework for the macro dimension, a role that it continues to fill even today.
Weber, Max. 1906. The relations of the rural community to other branches of social science. Translated by Charles W. Seidenadel. In Congress of Arts and Science, Universal Exposition, St. Louis. Vol. 7, Economics, politics, jurisprudence, social science. Edited by Howard J. Rogers, 725–746. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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A lengthy speech delivered in part in St. Louis during the Webers’ transformative US trip, in which he discussed the particularities of social conditions of life in rural areas versus the city, comparing Europe with the United States. Unlike Weber’s other work.
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Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in sociology. Translated and edited, with an introduction, by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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This is a classic collection of newly translated selections from Weber’s major works, organized into sections on Weber’s biography, science and politics, power, religion, and social structures. The most widely read collection of Weber in print, not likely to be superseded, especially due to the canonical introduction, with information provided by Gerth, and prose by Mills. Reissued with a new preface by Bryan S. Turner (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2009).
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Weber, Max. 1947. The theory of social and economic organization. Translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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The longest and earliest translation from Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, accompanied by a lengthy Parsons introduction that locates Weber in Parsons’s developing scheme of “grand theory.” This work was subsumed in the Roth edition of Economy and Society (Weber 1968a), which first appeared twenty years later. The Parsons volume was canonical until Roth’s appeared, yet Parsons’s remained important because it was much cheaper and less unwieldy than the complete version published by Bedminster Press.
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Weber, Max. 1954. Max Weber on law in economy and society. Edited by Max Rheinstein. Translated by Max Rheinstein and Edward Shils. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954.
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Contains selections from Economy and Society that are focused on law, along with a masterful, essential introduction by Rheinstein. Basic work in comparative legal studies with emphases on the differences between common law and Roman, Islamic, Confucian, and ancient Jewish traditions, and comparisons between these and modern German law as known to Weber as a trained lawyer.
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Weber, Max. 1956. “Max Weber on bureaucratization in 1909.” In German politics: A study in political sociology. 2d. rev. and enlarged ed. Edited by J. P. Mayer, 125–131. London: Faber and Faber.
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Stenographic record of a speech on bureaucracy given to the Verein fuer Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy) in Vienna in 1909.
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Weber, Max. 1968a. Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology. 3 vols. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. New York: Bedminster.
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Reprinted in two volumes (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978). This is Weber’s defining work, assembled posthumously by his wife and students, and it is one of the most important works in social science. Many passages in this exploration of the interactions of culture and structure are classics themselves. Weber covers topics such as religion, law, action, the economy, and the organization of society, with an eye to the dynamics of power differentials.
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Weber, Max. 1968b. Max Weber on charisma and institution building: Selected papers. Edited by S. N. Eisenstadt. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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This collection of previously translated material brings together relevant selections on the relationship between charisma and various aspects of institution building. Reflecting the editor’s interests, Weber’s work from various periods is somewhat artificially joined under headings that emphasize how charismatic power interacts with a variety of social structures. Usefully connects Weber’s writing with contemporary research interests of the 1960s.
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Weber, Max. 1971. Max Weber: The interpretation of social reality. Edited by J. E. T. Eldridge. New York: Scribner.
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Selections drawn from a broad range of Weber’s work. Includes the first English translation of his plan for the study of occupational mobility, and reissues his important article on the reasons for Rome’s decline.
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Weber, Max. 1978. Max Weber: Selections in translation. Edited by W. G. Runciman. Translated by Eric Matthews. Cambidge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511810831Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A broad selection of Weber’s writings, organized into sections on methods, ideology, politics, and history, among others, including several otherwise unavailable translations, most notably his pungent 1907 polemic against Freudianism as practiced by the libertine Otto Gross.
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Weber, Max. 1994. Sociological writings. Edited by Wolf Heydebrand. New York: Continuum.
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Retranslations from Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft by Martin Black and Lance Garmer (pp. 28–122). This collection consists of a wide variety of selections from Weber’s work, including some then-new translations: “The Concept of Social Action,” “Power, Authority, and Imperative Control,” “Bureaucratic Authority,” “The Distribution of Power within the Political Community,” “The Chinese Literati,” “The Origins of Modern Capitalism,” “Judaism, Christianity, and the Socioeconomic Order,” “Definition of Sociology,” “Ideal-Type Constructs,” “Science as a Vocation,” and other essays.
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Weber, Max. 2004. The essential Weber: A reader. Edited by Sam Whimster. London: Routledge.
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Central themes highlighted in the collection include the developmental logic of world religions, the rise of modern capitalism, the multidimensionality of power in societies, the dilemmas of modernity, the theory of social action, ideal types, and the objectivity of knowledge. Most of the selections are newly translated to improve accuracy and allow Weber to speak in a more contemporary idiom.
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Weber, Max. 2005. Max Weber: Readings and commentary on modernity. Edited by Stephen Kalberg. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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Gathers Weber’s writings on a broad array of themes, including the nature of work, the political culture of democracy, the uniqueness of the West, the character of the family and race relations, the role of science, and the fate of ethical action in the modern world. Organizational topics guided by a pivotal theme of Weberian thought: “How do we live?” and “How can we live in the industrial society?”
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Methodology
These works are some of Weber’s most difficult to translate and to comprehend in English. His fierce and highly technical debates with Rudolf Stammler, Benedetto Croce, Wilhelm Roscher, Wilhelm Dilthey, and dozens of other “epistemologists” active during his lifetime illustrate Weber’s unending pursuit of a methodological platform from which sociology could launch its studies without appearing to ape either the natural sciences or the arts.
Lassman, Peter, Irving Velody, and Herminio Martins, eds. 1989. Max Weber’s “Science as a vocation.” London: Unwin Hyman.
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This collection includes some original translations and includes selections from Weber’s followers and opponents in the 1920s, which provide context for Weber’s thought on the subject. Little of this material has been available in English.
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Weber, Max. 1975a. R. Stammler’s “surmounting” of the materialist conception of history, part I. Translated by Martin Albrow. Journal of Law and Society 2.2: 129–152.
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Weber critically reviews the second edition of philosopher of law Rudolph Stammler’s work, which was itself a critique of and response to Marx. This piece explains in part Weber’s stance on methodology. Part 2 in British Journal of Law and Society 3.1 (1976): 17–43.
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Weber, Max. 1975b. Roscher and Knies: The logical problems of historical economics. Translated by Guy Oakes. New York: Free Press.
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Here, Weber is concerned less with those named in the title than he is with a general critique of the logical and methodological bases of the discipline of historical economics. They were both more established and recognized experts on historical methods, and the “logic” that they believed should direct historical analysis. Weber’s critique of their work is unforgiving.
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Weber, Max. 1977. Critique of Stammler. Translated by Guy Oakes. New York: Free Press.
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Weber’s extended critique of Rudolf Stammler’s Refutation of the Materialist Conception of History (1906; also known as The Historical Materialist Conception of Economy and Law: A Sociophilosophical Investigation). Shows Weber to have been a careful student of epistemological debates of the time, arguing not only with Stammler, but with many other scholars who at the time were deciding how to contend with Marxist interpretations of history.
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Weber, Max. 1981. Some categories of interpretive sociology. Translated by Edith Graber. Sociological Quarterly 22.1 (Winter): 151–180.
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See also Graber’s “Translator’s Introduction to Max Weber’s Essay on Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology,” Sociological Quarterly 22.1 (Winter): 145–150. Weber’s detailed sketch of his method of interpretive sociology, including sections on action and institutions, and the relationship of interpretive sociology to psychology and legal dogmatics.
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Weber, Max. 1995. On the method of social-psychological inquiry and its treatment. Translated by Thomas W. Segady. Sociological Theory 13.1 (March): 100–106.
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Weber’s review of works by Adolf Levenstein, including a critique of survey research methods. First published 1909.
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Weber, Max. 2011. Methodology of social sciences. Translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, with a new introduction by Robert J. Antonio and Alan Sica. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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A collection of Weber’s most widely read writings on methodology, which proved influential upon their initial appearance in English. Here, Weber introduces “ideal-types,” “value-freedom,” and other concepts concerning the success with which social science might approach an ideal of “objectivity.” This volume is a reset and corrected edition of Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949).
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Weber, Max. 2012. Max Weber: Collected methodological writings. Edited by Hans Henrik Bruun and Sam Whimster. Translated by Hans Henrik Bruun. London: Routledge.
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The most complete selection in English of Weber’s essays on methodology, broadly defined. Bruun’s 1972 monograph on Weber’s methodology set a high standard for such works, and his translation is likely the most accurate currently available. An essential source for serious students of Weber’s epistemology.
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The Protestant Ethic Debate
Weber became instantly famous in 1904–1905 when two articles in a fairly obscure academic journal were suddenly being read very widely, even beyond Germany’s borders. Weber argued that capitalism’s roots lay in beliefs and social action more attuned to Protestant sects of northern Europe and England (and, later, in the United States) than in the Catholic countries of the Mediterranean, or elsewhere in the world. Naturally, Catholic scholars, among others, took immediate offense, and the debate has raged ever since. One bibliography many years ago already listed 1,600 scholarly items that dealt with “the Weber thesis.”
Chalcraft, David, and Austin Harrington, eds. 2001. The Protestant ethic debate: Max Weber’s replies to his critics, 1907–1910. Translated by Mary Shields. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2001.
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A collection of Weber’s exchanges with his critics Karl Fischer and Felix Rachfahl. Includes an introduction detailing the history of this ongoing debate.
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Weber, Max. 1930. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. Preface by R. H. Tawney. London: Allen and Unwin.
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Reprinted in paperback in 1958 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons). Reprinted with a new introduction by Anthony Giddens in 1976 (London: Allen and Unwin); same edition reprinted in 1992 (New York: Routledge). Reprinted and reset with a new introduction by Randall Collins in 1995 (Los Angeles: Roxbury); second edition published in 1998, with the addition of “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” as translated in From Max Weber; third edition, translated and introduced by Stephen Kalberg, published in 2001, with addition of “‘Prefatory Notes’ to the Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion,” and reissued by Oxford University Press, with supplementary materials, in 2011. Parsons’s translation was the initial English translation of this classic work. One of the most widely debated works in international social science, here Weber posits the idea that certain normatively powerful religious ideas unintentionally supported particular types of economic development in the early modern period in northern Europe, particularly those represented in Lutheranism, Calvinism, and other Protestant sects. Using Ben Franklin as a later, secularized exemplar of “the Protestant Ethic” in the United States, Weber argues that Marx’s “superstructure” could indeed motivate economic action rather than simply follow it. The debate rages on.
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Weber, Max. 1978. Anti-critical last word on The Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Wallace M. Davis. American Journal of Sociology 83.5 (March): 1105–1131.
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Felix Rachfahl was the most significant of Weber’s critics during his own lifetime, and this is the last of Weber’s responses in the published exchanges between the two.
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Weber, Max. 2002. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, and other writings. Edited and translated by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. New York: Penguin.
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A new translation of the classic. Parsons’s translation contained consequential inaccuracies that these translators seek to correct. Also includes a new translation of Weber’s writings on sects.
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Sociology of Comparative Religion
One of Weber’s many scholarly gifts was facility with foreign languages, which is a principal requirement for solid comparative analysis. As a young man he learned Hebrew for Bible study, and later in school he acquired Latin, Greek, English, and French. For his dissertation work he learned medieval Spanish and Italian, and in a six-week period of being tutored by émigrés, he gleaned enough Russian to read newspaper accounts of the 1905 Revolution as it unfolded. He did not learn Asian languages, but instead relied on some world-class “Orientalists” he knew well for help with translations and transliterations. It was on these bases that he wrote his incomparable studies of the relationship between religious beliefs and socioeconomic action in India, China, and Israel. He planned to write studies of Islam and medieval Catholicism as well, but ran out of time.
Weber, Max. 1951. The religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
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One of Weber’s four important studies of the various roles and effects of religion in society. In this volume, he focuses mostly on Confucianism and Taoism, and compares the economic development of this region to that in the West, insofar as it relates to religion. Sinologists have long regarded this as a fundamental work, despite arguments with Weber’s portrayal of Chinese society under the influence of Confucian ethics and their effect on commerce.
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Weber, Max. 1952. Ancient Judaism. Edited and translated by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
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The most substantial of Weber’s four major works on religion focuses on Judaism’s influence on and differences from Islam and Christianity, with many sidelong glances into other topics of sociological importance (e.g., the “pariah” condition of Jews). Probably the most lastingly important of his three books on comparative religion, largely due to Weber’s knowledge of Hebrew.
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Weber, Max. 1958. The religion of India: The sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
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Despite problems with the translation and transliteration of technical terms, this book remains essential for understanding Weber’s interpretation of religious beliefs, religiously motivated action, and the development of economic systems. Carefully relying on the best available scholarship (e.g., that of Paul Deussen), and despite lacking Sanskrit or Hindi, Weber persuasively analyzes the pivotal role of dharma throughout Indian history, showing how it constrained economic development among castes. He also comments on Ceylon, Korea, China, and Japan in terms of their religious and economic development.
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Weber, Max. 1963. The sociology of religion. Translated by Ephraim Fischoff. Introduction by Talcott Parsons. Boston: Beacon, 1963.
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This is the most complete and concise description of Weber’s sociology of religion, a lengthy excerpt from Economy and Society (and therefore subsumed in Roth’s complete edition; see Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology). It covers the emergence of modern religion, its association with various aspects of social strata, and its implications for the development of various types of societies. Reissued in 1993 with a new foreword by Ann Swidler.
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Weber, Max. 1973. Max Weber on church, sect, and mysticism. Translated by Jerome Gittleman. Sociological Analysis 34.2 (Summer): 140–149.
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Comments delivered by Weber at a colloquium held during the first meeting of the German Sociological Society. Other participants to whom Weber refers included Ferdinand Toennies, Ernst Troeltsch, and Georg Simmel.
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Weber, Max. 1985. “Churches” and “sects” in North America: An ecclesiastical socio-political sketch. Translated by Colin Loader. Sociological Theory 3.1 (Spring): 7–13.
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A precursor to later works such as The Protestant Ethic, written following Weber’s travels in the United States.
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Politics
Weber was born into politics, as his father was an associate of Bismarck and other prominent political actors in the Prussian state, as well as holding office himself. There was considerable speculation that Weber would run for office immediately following the removal of the German Kaiser in 1918 (against whom Weber wrote publicly), but his sudden death removed that possibility. Weber was intensely alert to the relationships among political power, economic power, legitimacy, tradition, and other components of political life and analysis, and in this he was a much better analyst than were Marx, Durkheim, or Simmel, each of whom understood parts of political life but lacked the comparative-historical breadth of Weber’s vision.
Weber, Max. 1967. A letter from Max Weber. Translated and introduced by Bruce B. Frye. Journal of Modern History 39.2 (June): 119–125.
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Weber’s letter of resignation from a committee of the German Democratic Party, and an explanation for his action.
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Weber, Max. 1972. Max Weber’s proposal for the sociological study of voluntary associations. Translated by Everett C. Hughes. Journal of Voluntary Action Research 1.1 (January): 20–23.
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Translation of Geschäftsbericht (Market report), published in 1911. Describes Weber’s view of the significance of such associations and suggests a path for their study. Translated by an important American sociologist not usually associated with Weber studies.
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Weber, Max. 1980. The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address). Translated by Keith Tribe. Economy and Society 9.4 (November): 428–449.
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Speech given by Weber upon his appointment to the University of Freiburg. An example of Weber’s simultaneous involvement in academia and politics. Reprinted in Keith Tribe’s Reading Weber (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 188–209.
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Weber, Max. 1986. The Reich president. Translated by Gordon C. Wells. Social Research 53.1: 125–132.
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Weber’s proposal for the governing of Germany as World War I came to an end. He was considered for, but was not appointed to, a high-ranking position. It was, in fact, his wife who was elected to political office around this time.
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Weber, Max. 1994. Weber: Political writings. Edited by Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This compilation of Weber’s writings on politics covers his thoughts on politics in the modern West as well as German politics specifically, including his important essay on socialism, another analyzing Russia’s prospects for democratic rule, and another on the spread of voting rights in Germany.
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Weber, Max. 1995. The Russian revolutions. Translated and edited by Gordon C. Wells and Peter Baehr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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Weber reflects on the 1905 Russian Revolution and possible paths forward for the nation. Weber was tutored by Russian émigrés in Heidelberg, learned the language in several months, read contemporary newspaper accounts from Russia about the 1905 Revolution, and wrote two extended treatments of those events which have, according to experts, held up remarkably well given the proximity of his analysis to the actual events as they occurred.
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Weber, Max. 2002. Voluntary associational life (Vereinswesen). Translated by Sung Ho Kim. Max Weber Studies 2.2 (May): 199–209.
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Weber’s thoughts on civil life, including voluntary associations, which were an ongoing focus in his work, both regarding politics as well as his fundamental theory of social action.
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Historical Economics
Weber’s first professorship was in a chair of political-economics, and because he was quite young by German standards to hold this job, he must have been very highly regarded as an economist. (At the time there were no professorships of “sociology” proper.) Weber’s second dissertation probed intricacies of Roman political-economy and land ownership practices, and his first dissertation had used archival materials from Italy and Spain to comprehend economic law and custom as applied to merchant shipping practices in the Middle Ages. Thus, it can be said that Weber came to sociology by way of law and economics—which is why he always held Marx, whose fascination with economics was equally profound, in high regard.
Weber, Max. 1950. The social causes of the decay of ancient civilization. Translated by Christian Mackauer. Journal of General Education 5.1: 75–88.
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From a lecture at Freiburg. Describes the internal characteristics of ancient, classical civilization that contributed to its deterioration.
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Weber, Max. 1976. The agrarian sociology of ancient civilizations. Translated by Richard I. Frank. London: NLB.
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This monograph is a comparative economic, political, and social history of ancient civilizations, including Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Rome. Of particular interest are the differences between Western and Eastern civilizations, insofar as they are the roots of modern differences; also includes “The Social Causes of the Decline of Ancient Civilization.” Reissued in 1988 by Verso Press, and in a “second edition” by Verso Classics in 1998.
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Weber, Max. 1981. General economic history. Translated by Frank H. Knight. New introduction by Ira J. Cohen. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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First published 1927 (London: Allen and Unwin). US edition published in 1927 (Greenberg Publishers); reissued 1950 (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 401 pages); reissued 1961 (New York: Collier Books, pages reset; 288 pages). This 1981 edition is also a reissue. After his death, this compilation was assembled from Weber’s lecture notes by his students. It is broad ranging and discusses the role of institutions and law in the economy, and although drier and less authoritative than Weber’s polished works, it has remained a vital resource in understanding economic development from a sociological point of view. The first third analyzes feudal social relations in Europe.
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Political-Economics
Weber’s book widely known in English as The City is in fact an excerpt from Economy and Society (Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology), and is more a history of cities as loci of economic and political development than a study of “urban sociology” of the type we would recognize as such today. Throughout Weber’s work, the connection between economics and all other aspects of social life was an intimate, even necessary one, and his ability to write technically sophisticated treatments of economics per se comes as a surprise to sociologists who know him for his more conventionally sociological research.
Tritsch, Walter. 1985. A conversation between Joseph Schumpeter and Max Weber. History of Sociology 6.1 (Fall): 167–172.
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Unusual document showing the friendly tension that existed between the two giants of 20th-century economics, intellectually similar but personally distant, with Schumpeter very much the junior scholar. Recorded from memory by Tritsch.
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Weber, Max. 1958. The city. Translated and edited by Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
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Weber’s comparative theory of urbanization through history, to be compared with Fustel de Coulanges’s work. The first English translation of this work, which is part of his Economy and Society. Remains fundamental for urban and comparative-historical sociology. Critics have disparaged the quality of the translation, which was repaired in the Roth/Wittich complete edition of Economy and Society (Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology).
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Weber, Max. 1975. Marginal utility theory and the so-called fundamental law of psychophysics. Translated by Louis Schneider. Social Science Quarterly 56:1 (June): 21–36.
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First published 1908. Weber reviews Lujo Brentano’s The Development of Value Theory, and as part of this effort also addresses the relationship between certain theories of psychology and economics. Specifically, Weber evaluates the utility of the Weber-Fechner Law—a notion named for two German psychologists, Ernst Weber (no relation to Max) and Gustav Fechner—as it might pertain to marginal utility theory. It posits that any change in sense perception is closely and proportionally related to any change in the intensity of the stimuli that were originally acting on the senses. Weber’s response to the application of this “law” to economic analysis was not warm.
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Weber, Max. 1999. Essays in economic sociology. Edited by Richard Swedberg. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Long introduction by the editor, along with a useful glossary of Weber’s economic terms, plus selections from previously published Weber translations. This collection of Weber’s writings on the economy is usefully organized into sections on the development of the economy, politics and law, religion and culture, and theoretical aspects.
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Weber, Max. 2000. Stock and commodity exchanges. Translated by Steven Lestition. Theory and Society 29.3 (June): 305–338.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1007042728962Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber describes the organization and purposes of, as well as differences between, various exchanges of the 19th century, informed not only by his research, but also by the long record of his extended family’s participation in these markets.
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Weber, Max. 2006a. Germany—Agriculture and forestry. Max Weber Studies 6.2: 207–230.
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Recently rediscovered, Weber outlines industry practices and economic structure, with some comparison to the United States. Introduction by Guenther Roth. First published in Encyclopedia Americana, 1907–1908.
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Weber, Max. 2006b. Germany—Industries. Max Weber Studies 6.2: 219–230.
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As with Weber 2006a, recently rediscovered. Weber outlines industry practices and economic structure, with some comparison to the United States.
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Sociology of Culture
It is fair to say that Weber invented the sociology of the press and the sociology of music, was the only classical theorist to interact personally with important African American intellectuals, and had planned on writing a large-scale study of Tolstoy’s novels and philosophy had he lived longer. He was a trained pianist and music theorist, read widely in literature, and was an art collector. His interest in what we now call the sociology of culture was lifelong and innovative, so much so that his small monograph on music (Weber 1958) has not been surpassed in the century since it was written. All this points to an aspect of Weber’s achievement that is underappreciated.
Shils, Edward, ed. and trans. 1974. Max Weber on universities: The power of the state and the dignity of the academic calling in Imperial Germany. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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A collection of Weber’s occasional comments on academic life, concerned mostly with what he saw as troubling developments in German universities, but also including comparisons with American universities. First published in Minerva 11.4 (October 1973): 571–632.
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Weber, Max. 1904. Letters to Booker T. Washington, September 25 and November 6, 1904. In Bryn Mawr College Archives. Bryn Mawr, PA: Bryn Mawr College.
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Letters from Weber to Washington about a potential meeting and the exchange of materials. Recovered by Lawrence Scaff, June 1994.
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Weber, Max. 1958. The rational and social foundations of music. Edited by Don Martindale and Johannes Riedel. Translated by Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrude Neuwirth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1958.
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A musicologically technical text in which Weber applies to music his idea that all aspects of Western society are becoming rationalized, which he does by comparing Western theories of harmony with those of the Middle East and Asia. He had been trained as a pianist. The quality of the translation has been disparaged by Weber specialists, but it has not been retranslated. Reprinted in 2009 (Mansfield Center, CT: Martino).
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Weber, Max. 1971. Max Weber on race and society. Introduction by Benjamin Nelson. Translated by Jerome Gittleman. Social Research 38.1 (Spring): 30–41.
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Weber’s speech to the German Sociological Association on the subject of race. The speech is largely a response to the application of crude Darwinism to the subject of race.
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Weber, Max. 1972. Georg Simmel as sociologist. Translated by Donald N. Levine. Social Research 39.1 (Spring): 155–163.
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Weber was both influenced by and critical of his close friend Simmel, and this is the only critique of his work of any length that Weber penned. It was not published during Weber’s lifetime, but was discovered later at the University of Munich.
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Weber, Max. 1973. Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois, March 30, 1905. In The correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois. Vol. 1, Selections, 1877–1934. Edited by Herbert Aptheker, 106–107. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press.
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Having met with Du Bois during his trip to the United States in 1904, and Du Bois having attended some of Weber’s early lectures at Berlin in the 1890s, Weber writes to Du Bois of his interest in having some of Du Bois’s work and other scholarship on the question of race in the United States translated into German.
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Weber, Max. 1976. Towards a sociology of the press. Journal of Communication 26.3 (Summer): 96–101.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.1976.tb01910.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
From a speech to the Congress of Sociologists in Frankfurt, 1910. Presents Weber’s ideas on how to proceed with, and the important questions to be addressed in, such a line of study, with emphases upon questions of method and reflections on the importance of mass communication.
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Weber, Max. 1979. Speech to German Sociological Association. Translated by Hanno Hardt. In Social theories of the press: Early German and American perspectives. By Hanno Hardt, 174–182. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE.
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In this translation of the first half of the 1910 speech on Zeitungwesen, Weber outlines his plan for a study of Germany’s newspapers, as well as the bases for a sociology of the press.
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Weber, Max. 1984. “Energetic” theories of culture. Translated by John Mark Mikkelson. Mid-American Review of Sociology 9.2: 33–58.
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This is a vigorous critique of the work of Wilhelm Ostwald, who sought to apply principles of the physical sciences to sociology, in Darwinist fashion. See accompanying “Note” by J. Mikkelson and Charles Schwartz (pp. 27–31). First published in 1909.
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Weber, Max. 1988. A letter from Indian Territory. Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology 16.2 (November): 133–136.
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Written during Weber’s trip through the United States, where he met a rich Cherokee Indian land agent in Muskogee and took a canoe trip through the swamps of eastern Oklahoma, meanwhile doing a quick ethnographic study of the local inhabitants, and reporting to his mother. Originally published in 1904.
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Weber, Max. 1998. Preliminary report on a proposed survey for a sociology of the press. Translated by Keith Tribe. History of the Human Sciences 11.2 (May): 111–120.
DOI: 10.1177/095269519801100207Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber’s proposed plan for a study of the press, designed to address such topics as the inner workings of the industry as well as the role of the press in the production of public opinion.
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Weber, Max. 1999. Letters from Ascona. In Max Weber and the culture of anarchy. Edited by Sam Whimster, 41–71. London: Macmillan.
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Letters written by Weber to his wife, Marianne, during his stays in Ascona, Switzerland. A group of liberated quasi-Freudians met there, many of whom were known to Weber—who served as their legal counsel when they were arrested in Italy—and he analyzed their beliefs and their behavior.
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Weber, Max, Alfred Ploetz, and W. E. B. Du Bois. 1973. Max Weber, Dr. Alfred Ploetz, and W. E. B. Du Bois (Max Weber on race and society II). Translated by Benjamin Nelson and Jerome Gittleman. Sociological Analysis 34.4: 308–312.
DOI: 10.2307/3709734Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Excerpts from proceedings of the German Sociological Society involving dialogue between Ploetz and Weber, in which Weber refers to Du Bois.
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Biographies, Handbooks, Bibliographies, Journals
Over the past seventy years or so, Weber’s ideas have inspired thousands of monographs, chapters, and articles in all the major world languages (see Sica 2004), and such works are now featured in a journal exclusively dedicated to his work, Max Weber Studies. In addition, there are a handful of nonredundant, seminal works without which an understanding of Weber’s remarkable background and its formative impact on his work cannot be understood. Most are in English and are listed here.
Baumgarten, Eduard, ed. 1964. Max Weber: Werk und person. Tübingen, West Germany: J. C. B. Mohr.
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A lengthy, essential collection of documentary materials and commentary, assembled by one of Weber’s relatives, which has played an important role in all subsequent Weber studies. Sadly, never translated into English.
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Diehl, Carl. 1923. The life and work of Max Weber. Quarterly Journal of Economics 38.1 (November): 87–107.
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One of the earliest accounts of Weber just postmortem in English, illustrating his importance to historical economists and other social scientists even before any of his major works were translated into English. Includes sections on Weber’s life, his position on methods, the “ideal-type” and its relevance for economics, and Weber’s sociology and its relationship to other social sciences.
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Green, Martin. 1988. The von Richthofen sisters: The triumphant and the tragic modes of love; Else and Frieda von Richthofen, Otto Gross, Max Weber, and D. H. Lawrence, in the years 1870–1970. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press.
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Controversial but illuminating study by a literary critic of the two women who captivated a number of important intellectuals in Weber’s circle, including Weber himself, his brother Alfred, Otto Gross, Edgar Jaffé, and the British novelist D. H. Lawrence. First book to document Weber’s romantic relationship with Else von Richthofen, the eventual lifelong companion to his brother, though via speculative evidence. Originally published in 1974 (New York: Basic Books).
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Kivisto, Peter, and William H. Swatos Jr. 1988. Max Weber: A bio-bibliography. New York: Greenwood.
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A valuable, trustworthy annotated bibliography of 902 items, in English and divided by topic; remains useful for material published until the mid-1980s. Includes a concise biographical study, an essay about Weber’s reception in the United States, plus lists of works under topics of biography and intellectual history, methodology, religion, politics and social classes, and modernity, rationalization, and bureaucracy. Indexed by author and topic.
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Max Weber Studies. 2000–.
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A semiannual, begun in 2000; editor’s office is at London Metropolitan University.
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Meurer, Bärbel. 2010. Marianne Weber: Leben und werk. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck.
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The only detailed biography of Weber’s wife, the first half of which deals with her life as Weber’s companion, nurse, and intellectual partner, as well as her own writings as an early German feminist. Also treats her lifelong effort to protect and expand Weber’s scholarly reputation following his premature death, including her relations with American scholars who developed the Weberian tradition after World War II. Shows that her work as feminist theorist was achieved without much overt aid from her husband.
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Mitzman, Arthur. 1984. The iron cage: An historical interpretation of Max Weber. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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Originally published 1969 (New York: Alfred Knopf). An essential biography written by an accomplished intellectual historian who also wrote about Tönnies, Sombart, and Michels. Attacked by some as psychologistic and reductionistic, the book was the first to give Weber a human dimension as he worked his way through the difficulties of maturing in an authoritarian family and state, and as he came to terms with the irrationality central to interpersonal as well as societal life during his adulthood. Well counterposed to Bendix’s biographical study (Bendix 1960, cited under Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1960 and 1970).
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Mommsen, Wolfgang J., and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds. 1987. Max Weber and his contemporaries. London and Boston: Allen & Unwin.
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A unique, lengthy volume published by the German Historical Institute in which top Weber experts and other scholars assess the personal, professional, or intellectual relationship Weber had with (and his influence upon) many authors, including his brother Alfred, Sombart, Schumpeter, Michels, Mosca and Pareto, Sorel, Durkheim, Lutherans, Troeltsch, Karl Lamprecht, Otto Hintze, Friedrich Naumann, Walther Rathenau, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, and many others, including Nietzsche.
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Palyi, Melchior, ed. 1923. Hauptprobleme der soziologie: Erinnerungsgabe für Max Weber. 2 vols. Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.
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Palyi (b. 1892–d. 1970), eventually a conservative economist and US newspaper columnist, worked with Marianne Weber after Max’s death in assembling his General Economic History from lecture notes. He also gathered this volume of reminiscences from scholars and friends who knew Weber personally, including Sombart, Kantorowicz, Tönnies, Carl Schmitt, Gustav Landauer, Emil Lederer, Paul Honigsheim, and others. There is no comparable volume.
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Radkau, Joachim. 2009. Max Weber: A biography. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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Only detailed biography (by a nonspecialist) that competes with Marianne Weber’s account of eighty years before. Well received generally, though too psychologistic for some readers, and too speculative in terms of Weber’s psychopathology, sexual and otherwise. Likely too “presentist” in part, yet likely to become the standard until more revealing letters are slowly published and another attempt is made some years hence. Useful supplement but hardly a substitute for Marianne’s version (see Weber 1975).
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Schroeter, Gerd. 1980. Max Weber as outsider: His nominal influence on German sociology in the twenties. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16.4: 317–332.
DOI: 10.1002/1520-6696(198010)16:4%3C317::AID-JHBS2300160404%3E3.0.CO;2-ASave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Schroeter was an unusually careful native German scholar who immigrated to Canada when young and wrote penetrating essays in English on intellectual history, including this unusual analysis of Weber’s rapid loss of intellectual influence in the decade following his death. This topic has seldom been examined elsewhere. Important themes during the Weimar Republic are presented, including social integration, the shattered faith in reason, and the attempt to create a uniquely “German” sociology. Neither Weber’s conception of sociology nor his methodological formulations had much impact during this period, because he died too early, German sociology lacked the necessary institutionalization, and there was a reorientation in scholarship following World War I, which Weber’s ideas could not bridge. Reprinted in Peter Hamilton’s Max Weber: Critical Assessments, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 33–51.
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Seyfarth, Constans, and Gert Schmidt, comps. 1977. Max Weber bibliographie: Eine dokumentation der sekundärliteratur. Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag.
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The only extensive bibliography of works pertaining to Weber up to the point of its publication, listing 2,348 items without annotation, mostly in German and English, arranged chronologically from 1919 forward. Some introductory material in both languages. Divided into (1) Weber’s works; (2) books and dissertations on Weber; and (3) articles and chapters on Weber. Printed in typescript and poorly bound; detailed separate indices by name and by subject. Second, unchanged edition published in 1982.
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Sica, Alan. 2004. Max Weber: A comprehensive bibliography. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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As comprehensive in scope as possible up to its point of publication, this work lists all of Weber’s works in English translation, selected reviews of his works in English, most theses and dissertations pertaining to Weber, and a sub-bibliography of works concerning Weber’s concept of “rationalization,” concluding with a long list of works, organized alphabetically by author, that bear on Weber and his work, totaling nearly 5,000 items.
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Swedberg, Richard, comp., with Olga Agevall. 2005. The Max Weber dictionary: Key words and central concepts. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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Uniquely useful reference tool by a leading authority on Weber (as well as on Schumpeter and Tocqueville). Not only are all the major and minor conceptual distinctions in Weber defined in English, but the German originals are usually stated at the same time for ease of cross-reference. German and English texts where Weber uses a particular term are specified precisely. There is also an excellent bibliography of Weberian works.
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Turner, Stephen P., ed. 2000. The Cambridge companion to Weber. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Turner, an acute Weberian, invited first-rate specialists to write about most aspects of Weber’s ideas and life that still inspire scholarship. Chapters include “Rationality, Economy, and Society” by Jon Elster; “Rationalization and Culture” by Alan Sica; “Psychophysics and Culture” by Wolfgang Schluchter; “The Rule of Man over Man: Politics, Power, and Legitimation” by Peter Lassman; “Weber on the Cultural Situation of the Modern Age” by Lawrence A. Scaff; “Global Capitalism and Multi-Ethnicity: Max Weber Then and Now” by Guenther Roth; “Constitutional Caesarism: Weber’s Politics in Their German Context” by Sven Eliaeson; “Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” by Alastair Hamilton; “Max Weber’s Orient” by John Love; “Max Weber’s Ancient Judaism” by John Love; “Max Weber as Legal Historian” by Harold J. Berman and Charles J. Reid Jr.; “From Agrarian History to Cross-Cultural Comparisons: Weber on Greco-Roman Antiquity” by Wilfried Nippel; and “Max Weber as Economist and Economic Historian” by Stanley L. Engerman.
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Weber, Marianne. 1975. Max Weber: A biography. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Wiley.
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Reissued with a new introduction by Guenther Roth in 1988 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction). Marianne Weber defined Weber for all interested parties as soon as she published her biography in 1926. Even though no English translation was available for fifty years thereafter, serious students of Weber read her book in the original, so it was widely known. Some critics refer to the book dismissively as hagiography, but aside from her undeniable yet canny celebration of Weber, the book includes analysis of his heritage and work that is unavailable elsewhere. First German edition: Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild (Tübingen: Mohr, 1926).
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Broadscale Studies and Monographs
Many leading Anglophone sociologists have “had a go” at interpreting Weber for their less theoretically inclined colleagues, beginning with Talcott Parsons’s effort in 1937 (Parsons 1937, cited under Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1930 and 1960). Over time, it has become obvious that not all informed readers can agree on “the one best way” of interpreting his work, which means that a half-dozen arguable positions exist—Weber as functionalist, neo-functionalist, quasi-Marxist, anti-Marxist, cultural theorist, religionist, lawyer, obsessive rationalist, and so on—and each carries the day for a while, then subsides. If serving as the launching pad for heated argument is the measure of true importance in the history of social science theorizing, then Weber is at least as important as anybody else, including Marx, Durkheim, or Freud. The difficulty facing novices is not knowing where to jump into the long-standing fray. The books, articles, and chapters listed in this section would very likely fall into any serious Weberian’s syllabus of essential works, realizing all the while that studying them would require many years. Put another way, any of these works would offer a view of Weber that is not fundamentally distorting, and many of them have the added virtue of offering a reading of the works that is far clearer than the originals.
Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1930 and 1960
Karl Löwith was twenty-three when Weber died, and even though he became Heidegger’s student, eventually he would become professor of philosophy at Heidelberg University, Weber’s home for many years. The influence of Weber’s ideas on Löwith’s generation was deep and broad, and his major books reveal this sensitivity to Weber’s philosophical dimension (see Löwith 1982). Similarly, Talcott Parsons, though American by birth, received his doctorate at Heidelberg very soon after Weber’s death, and he, too, relied on Weber’s ideas throughout his career, not only translating Weber for English speakers but also interpreting his work for decades (see Parsons 1937). There were many other articles and books about Weber published during this period, but the work of these two men was unusually influential.
Löwith, Karl. 1982. Max Weber and Karl Marx. Edited by Tom Bottomore and William Outhwaite. Translated by Hans Fantel. London: Allen & Unwin.
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Originally published 1932; reissued with a new preface by Bryan Turner (London: Routledge, 1993). Löwith (or Loewith) was a student of Heidegger and the author of the notable From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). He wrote this short book in order to pose his own existentialist concerns alongside the alienation theory of Marx versus the rationalization theory of Weber. After eighty years it remains the best shorthand guide to the philosophical meaning of the two complementary yet distinct arguments, both of which were fired in the oven of capitalist development. It probes the question “What does capitalism do to individual consciousness?”.
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Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The structure of social action: A study in social theory with special reference to a group of recent European writers. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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Reprinted in paperback in two volumes (New York: Free Press, 1968). See pp. 500–694. Though at first little noticed, this book slowly changed the landscape of social theorizing in the United States and Britain as its author became progressively more famous. Parsons believed that Durkheim, Weber, Alfred Marshall, and Vilfredo Pareto (omitting Marx and Simmel) “converged” in their understanding of human action, getting away from the overly simple models of rational behavior popular among marginalist economists, and embracing normatively driven theories that became, in Parsons’s hands, the structural-functionalism he and Merton pushed to the sociological foreground during the 1950s and 1960s.
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Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1960 and 1970
This was a golden age in Weber interpretation, though each writer came at Weber from a distinctive angle. Raymond Aron was the doyen of French intellectuals in the social sciences, but his youth in Alsace gave him a familiarity with German language and culture, which fruitfully complemented his Gallic work setting (see Aron 1967). Reinhard Bendix, a German who spent his entire career in the United States, was instructed by his father, a scholarly judge, to study Weber and others of his era, and his biography of Weber (Bendix 1960) was for decades the principal source of information for readers in the Anglophone sphere. Julien Freund’s book (Freund 1968) is one of the most astute to have come out of this period; in it he probes Weber’s concern with irrationality and other matters given shorter shrift in Aron 1967 and Bendix 1960. Alfred Schutz tried to join the ideas of Husserl, his teacher, with those of Weber regarding social action, in a unique fusion that strongly influenced many scholars who did research informed by phenomenology or action theory (see Schutz 1967).
Aron, Raymond. 1967. Main currents in sociological thought. Vol. 2. Translated by Richard Howard and Helen Weaver. New York: Basic Books.
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Aron was for several decades the leading French interpreter of German social thought, and after his works were translated into English during the 1960s, his influence broadened. His analysis of Weber is “elegant” in true French fashion, in that, unlike so many German Weberians, he did not clog his books with burdensome scholarly apparatus. The Weber volume of his Main Currents was the primer of choice among college teachers during the 1960s and 1970s, so that many students knew Weber only through Aron’s interpretation, which emphasizes the philosophical underpinnings of macro concepts, especially political power, to which Aron committed other books, and of which he was an acknowledged expert. Also see Aron’s German Sociology, translated by Mary and Thomas Bottomore (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), pp. 67–106, 140–141; reprinted in 1964.
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Bendix, Reinhard. 1960. Max Weber: An intellectual portrait. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
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Reissued in 1977, with an introduction by Guenther Roth (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press). Bendix’s solid “portrait” of Weber was the standard work between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, and was as close as most students got to Weber himself. It remains in print. Roth, a student of Bendix at Berkeley, carried on in this distinctly German tradition of Weber analysis (unlike Aron’s), in which the comparative-historical thread is highlighted, especially regarding religion. Bendix’s Weber was opposed to Parsons’s, and was less concerned with social-psychological or philosophical ruminations than were later interpretations. His book remains sensibly valuable in a time of unsupported speculation. See also Bendix, Reinhard, and Guenther Roth’s Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971).
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Freund, Julien. 1968. The sociology of Max Weber. Translated by Mary Ilford. New York: Pantheon.
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Reprinted, with introduction by Bryan Turner, in 1998 (London: Routledge). Not unlike Franco Ferrarotti’s work (Ferrarotti 1982, cited under Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1970 and 1985), though far more influential in the United States, Freund’s approach to Weber is distinctly European in nature, emphasizing (in ways that Bendix’s fundamental work avoided) the “underside” of Weberianism. His analysis of the Irrationalitätsproblem (problem of irrationality) is particularly welcome and acute when compared with most other works. His understanding of Weber as a thinker who created a body of work in a very specific cultural milieu could only have been written by a scholar of Alsatian origins, looking to both sides of the Rhine with equal knowingness. A stimulating and reliable guide.
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Oberschall, Anthony. 1965. Empirical social research in Germany, 1848–1914. New York: Basic Books.
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A valuable monograph that offers reliable commentaries on Weber’s huge study of Prussian/Polish agricultural workers in 1890 for the Verein fuer Sozialpolitik that made his reputation as an empirical researcher, plus remarks on his time-and-motion analysis of a textile mill owned by relatives in 1908, which gave Weber a niche in the early history of industrial sociology. As there are few such works, this one remains useful.
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Schutz, Alfred. 1967. The phenomenology of the social world. Translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press.
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Originally published in 1932 as a dissertation. Schutz was a lawyer, economist, and successful businessman, as well as a part-time philosophy professor in New York City after leaving Europe in 1939. His early work, here translated thirty-five years after being written, was an attempt to blend Husserl’s phenomenology and Bergson’s dualistic philosophy with Weber’s action theory. Schutz wished to invest Weber’s theory with a more finely tuned appreciation of human consciousness by means of phenomenological technique, especially with regard to meaning and the concept of rationality in its various forms. He also probed Weber’s understanding of objectivity and subjectivity. See in particular pp. 1–44.
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Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1970 and 1985
By the time these commentaries were written, an “orthodoxy” in Weberian studies had emerged, composed mainly by Parsons, Bendix, and Aron, with serious challenges posed in Germany by Wolfgang Mommsen and Habermas. For younger scholars like Giddens, it became a rite of passage to say something important about Weber, on one’s way to “one’s own” theorizing (see Giddens 1972). Interestingly, there are many instances in which the study a given scholar gave to Weber’s work became some of the best work produced by that scholar.
Andreski, Stanislav. 1984. Max Weber’s insights and errors. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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Andreski is famously heterodox in his view of social theory, and bold enough to correct classical thinkers, including Comte, Spencer, and Weber, whose works he has edited. This brief work asks a fundamental question: Based on what we now know that Weber could not, and based on “advances” in analytic thinking, what of Weber’s work remains inviolably useful, and what of it should be discarded? Andreski goes briskly through Weber’s main ideas regarding law, religion, power, bureaucracy, charisma, and feudalism/patrimonialism. Given his own work in comparative sociology, his suggestions for correction are interesting, if not entirely convincing in all points.
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Ferrarotti, Franco. 1982. Max Weber and the destiny of reason. Translated by John Fraser. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
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Originally published in 1965. A style of presentation common to members of the European intellectual and political elite (Ferrarotti served in the Italian Parliament), this is a dense analysis of Weber’s work in toto, with special attention given to his relationship with Marx. Unlike many treatments, this one does not cater to an imagined audience of undergraduate students, but is written at a higher, more concise level that offers, without frills, the basic Weberian notions that continue to be useful in sociological work, such as ideal-types, objectivity, rationalization, and so on.
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Giddens, Anthony. 1972. Politics and sociology in the thought of Max Weber. London: Macmillan.
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A very brief study done when the author was quite young, yet already exhibiting the firm grasp Giddens had on Weber’s ideas, even if not so firm as his reading of Durkheim. His widely admired Capitalism and Social Theory (1971) is a companion volume. Reprinted in Giddens’s Politics, Sociology, and Social Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 15–56.
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Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. Max Weber’s theory of rationalization. In The theory of communicative action. Vol. 1. Translated by T. McCarthy, 143–271. Boston: Beacon.
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In the 1970s, Habermas’s main project of defining the nature of a nonoppressive societal setting for interaction and communication took him to Weber and other classical theorists. His detailed examination of their main texts often reveals more about his own theoretical goals than about the works being interrogated, yet because he is creatively theoretical, his treatment is worth studying, less for hermeneutic precision than for extension.
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Murvar, Vatro, ed. 1985. Theory of liberty, legitimacy, and power: New directions in the intellectual and scientific legacy of Max Weber. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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Based on papers delivered at the Max Weber Colloquia (Milwaukee), this set of ten studies probes unusual aspects of Weber’s work, including its applicability to ecological studies, sultanism, music and the arts, sociology of law, political freedom, patrimonialism in China and Islamic countries, and Maoism. A good indicator of the high-level Weber work of the period, prior to the Gallic transformation of contemporary social thought.
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Roth, Guenther, and Wolfgang Schluchter. 1979. Max Weber’s vision of history: Ethics and methods. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Roth and Schluchter have long been captains of the Weber industry, the former offering four essays here that touch on charisma in the counterculture, revolutionary ideas and religiosity, the relationship between Fernand Braudel’s historiography and Weber’s theory of rationalization, and Weber’s understanding of history. Schluchter’s two essays concern the paradoxical qualities of rationalization processes and the issue of value neutrality and ethics. The two are always worth reading, even when taking contentious positions regarding the “proper” Weberian legacy.
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Schweitzer, Arthur. 1984. The age of charisma. Chicago: Nelson-Hall.
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A thorough introduction and application of one of Weber’s most famous and useful terms (borrowed and elaborated from a historian of the early Christian church), in which Schweitzer analyzes an exhaustive grouping of 20th-century political leaders with claims to genuine charisma (including Gandhi, Nehru, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Clemenceau, Churchill, de Gaulle, Lenin, Mao, Mussolini, Hitler, and many others). He categorizes charismatic leaders as “giants, luminaries, failures, or aspirants,” thereby providing one of the best applications of a Weberian analytic term to date, especially in the political realm.
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Stammer, Otto, ed. 1971. Max Weber and sociology today. New York: Harper & Row.
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When the Weber centenary was celebrated in Heidelberg in 1964, the German government made it possible for luminaries of all political persuasion to attend and argue vigorously about Weber’s continuing role in German cultural and political life. This belated translation became famous for the disputes that were aired in response to papers of Talcott Parsons, Raymond Aron, and Herbert Marcuse—by Theodor Adorno, a young Jürgen Habermas, Wolfgang Mommsen, Reinhard Bendix, Benjamin Nelson, and others. Marcuse’s attack on Weber’s politics gave the volume instant notoriety and lasting importance.
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Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1986 and 1989
This set of commentaries evidenced a sophistication, and a critical distance as well, which was not as much evident in earlier studies, in which “laying out the basic ideas”—there being so many of them—had been the primary motivation for writing. Randall Collins’s interpretation of Weber (in Collins 1986), for instance, constituted a deviation from his own work in conflict theory and microanalysis, for which he became famous. Yet registering a viewpoint regarding Weber remained a valuable and laudable activity for social theorists, so long as one took a slightly critical stance that moved beyond the didactic treatments of the 1960s and 1970s. Harvey Goldman and Bryan Green took Weber studies into a new zone by connecting his work with high literacy, a hint of things to come after postmodernism rediscovered the classical tradition in social theory (see Goldman 1988 and Green 1988).
Campbell, Colin. 1989. The Romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell.
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By combining the insights of Weber on the Protestant ethic and Veblen (among others) on consumption as a pervasively modern behavior pattern, Campbell puts forth the novel notion that Romanticism and Sentimentalism were joined to create “the other Protestant Ethic” that led to modern consciousness. He tries to answer a puzzling question: If the early Protestants eschewed consumption and vanity, how did that mindset convert into one that continues to produce great output but is joined with an insatiable desire for consumer goods?
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Collins, Randall. 1986. Weberian sociological theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511557682Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is likely the least read of Collins’s many books of social theory and analysis, because the Weberian clique found it insufficiently precise and admiring with regard to “The Master’s” work, while the much larger audience discovered that its density of ideas and data were perhaps too Weberian for their comfort. Collins manages to discuss intelligently and lucidly themes that he finds in Weber, such as the high Middle Ages, technology, Weber and Schumpeter, imperialism, Russia, alienation, the family, and the status of women. All in all, a book Weber would have found interesting.
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Goldman, Harvey. 1988. Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the shaping of the self. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Goldman, a political theorist by training, wrote an extraordinary dissertation that he turned into two volumes: this one and Politics, Death, and the Devil: Self and Power in Max Weber and Thomas Mann (1992). Here, he deeply probes the German “soul” by juxtaposing the life and works of Weber and Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize novelist. Mann’s Buddenbrooks is highly instructive when compared with Marianne Weber’s biography of Weber, helping secure a more complete picture of his era and his family’s history back to 1800.
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Green, Bryan S. 1988. Literary methods and sociological theory: Case studies of Simmel and Weber. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Green is a sociologist but writes with the skill and analytic tools of a literary critic, which gives this book its special utility. By examining Weber’s work as texts produced within a literary context and with literary intentions, Green shows that Weber’s work was influenced by 17th-century theological casuistry as well as 18th-century English novels, and that concern about prose style affects theorizing in ways that are seldom discussed in this literature. See in particular pp. 179–266.
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Hinkle, Gisela. 1986. The Americanization of Max Weber. Current Perspectives in Social Theory 7:87–104.
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English translations of Weber have introduced shifts in meanings, a process termed “Americanization,” which is defined as an interpretive transformation not only of Weber’s words, but also of his ideas, styles of thinking, modes of expression, mental imagery, and assumptions. Three works are analyzed: (1) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (translated by Talcott Parsons; see Weber 1930, cited under The Protestant Ethic Debate); (2) Economy and Society, Vols. I–II (edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich; see Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology); and (3) “Objectivity in Social Science,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences (edited and translated by Edward A. Shils and Harry Finch; see Weber 2011, cited under Methodology). Accuracy in translation cannot be assumed, as demonstrated in misrepresentations of Weber’s scientific intentions in the examples analyzed. His intellectual and methodological context has been altered through word selection and syntactical changes, and his neo-Kantian commitments have been ignored, replaced with empiricist and positivistic tendencies absent in the originals.
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Jaspers, Karl. 1989. On Max Weber. Translated by Robert J. Whelan. Edited and introduced by John Dreijmanis. New York: Paragon House.
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Following World War II, Jaspers was the “good German,” explaining though not justifying to a large Anglophone audience his country’s shocking behavior during the war. He had known Weber since 1909, venerated him as a heroic figure, understood Weber’s psychopathology based on his psychiatric training, and wrote extremely sympathetic and insightful essays about the man and his ideas after his untimely death. He famously referred to Weber as “the greatest German of our era,” and he hypothesized that the Nazis would have had a more difficult time establishing hegemony had Weber and his followers been available to obstruct them.
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Käsler, Dirk. 1988. Max Weber: An introduction to his life and work. Translated by Philippa Hurd. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Widely regarded as the best concise overview of Weber’s work and life in English, this brisk study also includes an excellent chronology and bibliography of Weber’s works, limited in utility only because the German original was published in 1979. Does not penetrate much beyond the fundamentals within each of Weber’s many zones of research, but is an excellent port into the Weberian sea.
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Murphy, Raymond. 1988. Social closure: The theory of monopolization and exclusion. Oxford: Clarendon.
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The literature on “social closure,” derived from fleeting passages in Weber’s Economy and Society (Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology), is not large, and this book provides a good summary of the arguments as of some years ago. The idea has been extended into various studies concerning the mechanisms that professional groups and other “status groups,” as defined by Weber, use to secure their borders and control membership. The American Medical Association’s refusal to accredit more medical schools than they think is good for their professional prospects is an obvious example. See in particular pp. 1–37, 64–70, 113–126, 132–136, 169–178, 195–218.
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Scaff, Lawrence A. 1989. Fleeing the iron cage: Culture, politics, and modernity in the thought of Max Weber. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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A well-regarded set of connected essays (half previously published) that skillfully compares Weber’s and Simmel’s views of modernity, plus close scrutiny of the Weber archives in Germany with an eye toward embellishing our understanding of Weber that, by comparison, makes others seem colorless and inhuman. Scaff is among the best US interpreters of Weber’s work, and his Max Weber in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2011) continues his careful, archivally based labors, providing the fullest account of Weber’s transformative 1904 trip.
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Sica, Alan. 1988. Weber, irrationality, and social order. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Analyzes Weber’s work and legacy, emphasizing his confrontation with “das Irrationalitätsproblem” in its many forms—how to accommodate fundamentally irrational social action within a model built on the presupposition of rational calculation—and the theoretical and existential problems this posed for Weber himself, some of which he failed to resolve. Also briefly introduces Vilfredo Pareto as a useful corrective and foil to Weber’s emphasis on rational action in economic settings, plus an excursus on hermeneutic practice. Revised paperback edition published in 1990.
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Tribe, Keith, ed. 1989. Reading Weber. London: Routledge.
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“The work of reading Max Weber is a task that has barely begun,” writes Tribe, who has translated many texts either by or about Weber, and along the way produced a series of articles that are unusually sensitive to scholarly matters often ignored by other Weberians. This well-regarded collection not only includes important essays by Lawrence Scaff, Friedrich Tenbruck, and Martin Riesebrodt, but also boasts three otherwise unavailable translations of Weber’s work on political-economic and industrial topics, anchored by Tribe’s essay, which contextualizes the translations.
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Whimster, Sam, and Scott Lash, eds. 1987. Max Weber, rationality, and modernity. London: Allen & Unwin.
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Whimster is the editor and publisher of Max Weber Studies, has translated a new collection of Weber’s work into English, and has written a series of enlightening works pertaining to Weber over the last thirty years. This sturdy volume brings together a notable group of Weber specialists, and others, who direct their inquiries to the general question of how securely Weber’s ideas are locked within a “modernist” gaze, and to what extent his ideas can continue to inform social research. (Note: Editors’ names are printed in reversed order on the cover of the paperback edition vis-à-vis the title page.)
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Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1990 and 1995
With postmodern theory firmly in the saddle, the modernist stream from which Weber was alleged to have come fell under constant attack, so defending or explaining his viewpoint and that of his colleagues became itself a scholarly specialty. Roslyn Bologh’s study (Bologh 1990) was the first by a woman (nearly all Weberian monographs had been written by white males to that point), and it focused on Weber’s personal life, trying to connect his psychosexual identity with his formal sociology. Weber was also connected overtly to the sociology of culture for the first time, and his training as a lawyer was shown to have influenced his way of going about research and of understanding social action, a connection not previously made in the literature.
Albrow, Martin. 1990. Max Weber’s construction of social theory. New York: St. Martin’s.
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A distinguished British sociologist, Albrow wrote this general study thirty years after first trying to comprehend Weber’s achievement (via Marianne Weber’s biography; see Weber 1975, cited under Biographies, Handbooks, Bibliographies, Journals). He personally consulted a number of leading theorists while writing the work (e.g., Norbert Elias, Anthony Giddens, Johannes Winckelmann, Gert Schmidt), which gives the work more weightiness and thoroughness than is often the case with primers. He deals with the makeup of Weber’s Weltanschauung (Kant, Nietzsche, Goethe, Freud), then deals with the questions of rationality, power, interpretation, values, and the market, each in some detail.
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Bologh, Roslyn Wallach. 1990. Love or greatness: Max Weber and masculine thinking—A feminist inquiry. London: Unwin Hyman.
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Bologh proposes in her unique volume a somewhat “new” interpretation of Weber, building on the notions of Arthur Mitzman and Martin Green that gender identity and sexuality saturated Weber’s vision of the social world in ways he did not overtly acknowledge or perhaps even understand (see Mitzman 1984 and Green 1988, cited under Biographies, Handbooks, Bibliographies, Journals). Bologh proposes that Weber’s theorizing of power, bureaucracy, religion, and private life is uniformly “masculine” in nature, and she interprets his works in ways that prove her point. She concludes with an alternative through feminism and Marxism, which she views as compatible.
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Cahnman, Werner J. 1995. Weber and Toennies: Comparative sociology in historical perspective. Edited by Joseph Maier, Judith Marcus, and Zoltan Tarr. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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Tönnies, Weber, and Simmel cofounded the German Sociological Society in 1909. At the time, Tönnies was the best-known sociologist among them—his Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) had already reached classic status, and his championing of Marx was risky and courageous. That his posthumous fame would be so eclipsed by his two colleagues would have surprised all of them. Cahnman is one of few scholars who has probed their relationship as comparative researchers, which gives this book of essays its special value. See in particular pp. 23–69, 81–85, 109–123.
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Horowitz, Asher, and Terry Maley, eds. 1994. The barbarism of reason: Max Weber and the twilight of enlightenment. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press.
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The title is darker than the substance of this collection, the point of which is to assess once again Weber’s concept of “rationalization” and the processes of “purpose-rational” versus “value-rational” types of action in modern societies as their denizens try to avoid the “iron cage” of inhibitions, rules, authoritarian governments, and other unhappy results that come with bureaucratization. The contributors disagree as to how hopeless the modern situation might be, depending on their enthusiasm for Kant versus Nietzsche—and Weber’s place between them.
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Kalberg, Stephen E. 1994. Max Weber’s comparative-historical sociology. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Kalberg has devoted many years to demonstrating that hidden within Weber’s torrential output of historical studies, tangled with substantive details and organized around troubling “ideal-types,” there lies a coherent methodology of comparative analysis that not only served Weber well, but could also be adopted with profit by today’s scholars. This interpretation, strongly argued as it is, has not persuaded as many Weberians as Kalberg might wish, yet his serious, close reading of Weber’s works (in German) gives the book value.
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Sadri, Mahmoud. 1992. Max Weber’s sociology of intellectuals. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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A short treatment of a neglected subtopic within Weber studies, focusing on how intellectuals, broadly defined, are categorized, analyzed, and historically located in Weber’s sociology of comparative religion, as well as his political writings.
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Schroeder, Ralph. 1992. Max Weber and the sociology of culture. London and Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
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A concise argument that Weber’s work should be reviewed as a coherent contribution to cultural analysis rather than simply unrelated studies of religion, law, economics, historical change, or other possible avenues of analysis. Seeing a “thematic unity” within the entire corpus, and borrowing heavily from Schluchter’s studies of Weber’s comparative religion, Schroeder proposes reading Weber as offering a sustained worldview.
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Turner, Charles. 1992. Modernity and politics in the work of Max Weber. London: Routledge.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203414194Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The strength of this monograph lies in its illustrating how Weber’s difficult Zwischenbetrachtungen (summary study of comparative religions) can be fitted with a theory of personality, modernity, and the tragedy of culture that so intrigued Weber and his colleagues around the fin de siècle. Turner highlights Weber’s Kantian value system, its role in giving him tools with which to probe the meaning of modern culture for the ethical individual.
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Turner, Stephen P., and Regis A. Factor. 1994. Max Weber: The lawyer as social thinker. New York: Routledge.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203202043Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Stephen Turner’s various works on Weber are always worth study, since they combine an acute sense of what is important qua social theory with deeper philosophical meanings. This book is unique in that it explains how Weber’s early legal training and his accompanying study of the philosophy of law allowed him to visualize “social action” as would an attorney, or an economist with a legal background, giving it a twist that is absent in other classical theories.
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Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published since 1996
Full-scale treatments of Weber occupying entire books were beginning to become scarcer in the 1990s than they had been during the preceding forty years, since the sustained attack on “dead white European males” had taken its desired effect on publishers and readers. Yet still, a noted historian not known for Weber work turned his hand to Weber (Diggins 1996); one of Germany’s finest Weberian scholars published more essays, though with a small press (Hennis 2000); one of Weber’s last students was given a final platform for his uniquely informative memoir and commentaries (Honigsheim 2000); and the dean of Germany’s Weber studies also produced an important monograph (Schluchter 1996). Thus, “the Weber Industry” has lumbered along.
Diggins, John P. 1996. Max Weber: Politics and the spirit of tragedy. New York: Basic Books.
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A widely noted general study of Weber by an Americanist scholar best known for his biography of Veblen. Diggins wrote the book for a large audience, relying throughout on standard sources, mostly in English, and far removed from the hermeneutic subtleties that undergird much recent Weber scholarship. Given his long-standing scholarly interests, the book gives more attention to Weber’s politics than do other general studies. Because it was published by a trade house, it has probably introduced more readers to Weber than monographs more intimately connected to primary sources, yet it has not been accepted as authoritative by specialists.
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Hennis, Wilhelm. 2000. Max Weber’s science of man. Translated by Keith Tribe. Berkshire, UK: Threshold Press.
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See also Hennis’s Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, translated by Keith Tribe (London and Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1988). Hennis represents a heterodox wing of German Weber studies, setting him at odds with other notable specialists who cannot accept his portrayal of Weber’s achievement. Due in part to his training in law and political theory, but as much simply reflecting his virtuosic interpretations, he concludes that Weber’s “central question” is “nothing less than the requisite comprehension of the genesis of modern man—No! Menschentum—by way of a historical-differential investigation.” Via Nietzsche and others, Hennis also tends to Weber’s concern with irrationality.
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Honigsheim, Paul. 2000. The unknown Max Weber. Edited and with an introduction by Alan Sica. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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This is a reprint of Honigsheim’s On Max Weber (1968), plus four previously uncollected articles on Weber’s early work. A student and friend of Weber’s, Honigsheim wrote his dissertation on Jansenism under Weber’s direction, but also, and more importantly, composed in the 1940s and 1950s a series of uniquely concise and comprehensive essays on Weber as anthropologist, historian of agriculture, and rural sociologist, and on his personal sense of religiosity. In addition, he wrote a substantial memoir about Weber. None of these works has been supplanted in the literature.
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Schluchter, Wolfgang. 1996. Paradoxes of modernity: Culture and conduct in the theory of Max Weber. Translated by Neil Solomon. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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Long regarded as one of Germany’s leading Weber specialists and keeper of his archival materials, Schluchter regards Weber’s most important achievement as the documentation of Western historical development through the mode of civilizational “rationalization.” His Rationalism, Religion, and Domination (Schluchter 1989, cited under Rationalism and Religion) is an exhaustive account of Weber’s sociology of comparative religion. Paradoxes of Modernity considers Weber’s theory of values and how ethics affect political action, plus more analyses of the sociology of religion, with particular attention to Weber’s unfinished examination of Islam. See also The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History, translated by Guenther Roth (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981).
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Sica, Alan. 2004. Max Weber and the new century. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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Considers the continuing utility of Weber as a theorist and iconic presence in the literature, with special reference to his increasing availability to public discourse. Also offers a detailed rhetorical analysis of the opening passages from Economy and Society (Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology), where Weber explains his theory of social action.
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Swedberg, Richard. 1998. Max Weber and the idea of economic sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Over the past decade or two, Princeton University Press and the university’s sociology department have become sponsors and disseminators of “economic sociology,” and in this book, Swedberg, one of its major participants, anoints Weber as a founder of the perspective. Working his way through the major writings, Swedberg shows how Weber’s sociological economics dealt with politics, laws, religion, and the history of capitalism in the West in a way that is superior to conventional economic reasoning, as well as ordinary sociology.
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Turner, Bryan, ed. 1999. Max Weber: Critical responses. 3 vols. London: Routledge.
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Bryan Turner’s contribution to Weberian studies is long and deep, going back nearly forty years. His Weber and Islam was the first to deal with that vexed topic, and his later writings, like For Max Weber, have added to a solid interpretation of Weber’s ideas and continuing relevance based on a close reading of the German texts as well as English translations. This multivolume collection serves as a handy introduction to the secondary literature. See, in particular, “An Introduction to Max Weber’s Sociology” (pp. 1–20), by the editor. Turner’s 1992 volume of essays, Max Weber, from History to Modernity (London and New York: Routledge), brings Weber into contiguity with postmodernism, body studies, Simmel and Nietzsche, and other fresh topics.
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Whimster, Sam, ed. 1999. Max Weber and the culture of anarchy. New York: St Martin’s.
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This edited collection on anarchy connects Weber’s psychologically unsettled life around 1913–1914 with an anarchist settlement at Ascona on Lake Maggiore, with additional chapters on Weber’s study of music and his appreciation of avant-garde art. Some of Weber’s letters from Ascona are translated for the first time.
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General Theory
It is impossible to summarize all the ways in which Weber’s ideas have influenced scholarship around the world, other than to say that if a researcher wished to discuss theoretically, for example, the dynamics of bureaucratization, the nature of political leadership, ethical values in the context of scholarship or political life, the history of global capitalism, the comparative meaning of world religions, or any number of other topics, Weber’s name and work would almost surely be invoked early on. Oftentimes his name alone stands in for entire sets of complex ideas, but the works listed below go far beyond name-dropping, and instead put to vigorous and specific use some of Weber’s principal contributions to theorizing at large. Put another way, the works in this section could not have been carried out in any meaningful way had they not begun with Weber and tried to improve on him. They also characterize the breadth of writing that his ideas have inspired, and although these are not necessarily “the best” of their particular subgenre of research, they are all worthy additions to an enormous literature—from the Roman Empire to the Protestant ethic, from rationalization processes to racial theories, from the Marx versus Weber debate to Weber on temporality or music. It is indeed hard to think of another 20th-century writer in the social sciences whose influence on first-class scholarship has been so broad or deep.
Sociological Theory
As evidenced by the works in this section, Weber’s ideas have inspired, guided, goaded, and prodded sociological and political studies of all kinds, from ancient Rome to music to methodology to rural sociology and rational choice. There is a Weber to suit every taste and every research agenda—which would likely have bemused Weber himself, given his own rather modest claims for his achievements.
Antonio, Robert J. 1979. The contradiction of domination and production in bureaucracy: The contribution of organizational efficiency to the decline of the Roman Empire. American Sociological Review 44.6 (December): 895–912.
DOI: 10.2307/2094715Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber distinguished between “formal” and “substantive” rationality, especially regarding how bureaucracies operated in terms of efficient domination and production. This case study of Roman bureaucracy illustrates how the contradictions between two coexisting forms of rationality—one controlling persons and resources, the other production (and distribution) of goods and services—contributed to the decline and collapse of the Roman Empire.
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Bruun, Hans Henrik. 2008. Objectivity, value spheres, and “inherent laws”: On some suggestive isomorphisms between Weber, Bourdieu, and Luhmann. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 38.1 (March): 97–120.
DOI: 10.1177/0048393107311144Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that Parsons’s misrepresentation of Weber’s ideas in The Structure of Social Action (Parsons 1937, cited under Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1930 and 1960) turns on his un-Weberian emphasis on the normative. Conflating “factual regularities” with “normative validity” allowed Parsons to exaggerate the importance Weber assigned to normative orientations of social action, legitimacy, and social integration, and to underestimate nonnormative aspects of social action and structures of dominance. Parsons thus expanded what was a part of Weber’s sociology and very nearly made it the whole. See also Jere Cohen, Lawrence Hazelrigg, and Whitney Pope’s “De-Parsonizing Weber: A Critique of Parsons’s Interpretation of Weber’s Sociology,” American Sociological Review 40 (1975): 229–241.
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Manasse, Ernst Moritz. 1947. Max Weber on race. Social Research 14.2 (June): 191–221.
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Manasse anticipated by many years the contemporary interest in “critical race theory” by asking, for the first time, how Weber conceived of the matter. He pursues the development of Weber’s ideas on race by considering how his writings reflect changing views on four issues: the conflict between German and Polish interest in the Bismarckian Reich, Negroes in the United States, the importance of race in the formation of the Indian caste system, and the development of postexilic Judaism. He outlines Weber’s objections to modern “race mystics” and summarizes important results of Weber’s thinking for subsequent thought.
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Mayer, Carl. 1975. Max Weber’s interpretation of Karl Marx. Social Research 42.4 (Winter): 701–719.
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Weber used Marx’s categories in his sociology of religion, which could easily be transposed into the terminology of Marx’s system. Comparing their main ideas, proof for this assertion is developed around five points. The first concerns substructure versus superstructure, and the problem of ideology as the absence of any intellectual autonomy. Marx’s system is monistic, while Weber’s is dualistic. The second point concerns social change, while the third deals with social dynamics and the problem of the dialectic. The fourth point concerns the relationship of different social systems to one another within the dynamic processes of history, in connection with the differing stages of society. The fifth point concerns the meaning and purpose of historical-social development and the limitations of scientific analysis. There remain differences in detail between Marx and Weber, but not in principle.
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Munters, Q. J. 1972. Max Weber as rural sociologist. Sociologia Ruralis 12.1: 129–145.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9523.1972.tb00131.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Little is known of Weber as a rural sociologist, in spite of the fact that he was intensively concerned with agrarian and rural problems over a period of years, beginning in the late 1880s. Although he did not at the time regard himself as a sociologist, but as an economist, the sociological tendency of his rural studies is unmistakable. Weber’s lack of proper recognition among rural sociologists might be mainly due to the poor relationship between rural sociology and general sociology. A plea is made for a serious confrontation between rural sociology and the work of Max Weber. This essay should be compared with Honigsheim’s brilliant analysis in The Unknown Max Weber (Honigsheim 2000, cited under Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published since 1996).
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Norkus, Zenonas. 2000. Max Weber’s interpretive sociology and rational choice approach. Rationality and Society 12.3 (August): 259–282.
DOI: 10.1177/104346300012003001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Attempts to substantiate two theses: (1) Max Weber’s programmatic metatheoretical texts contain a description of the method of socio-scientific explanation, which anticipates a specific version of the rational choice approach (RCA) in contemporary sociology; and (2) it is possible to distinguish two versions of this description, the first being closer to the RCA than the second. The late Weberian outline of sociological theory of action is reconstructed out of his famous typology of action.
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Swedberg, Richard. 2003. The changing picture of Max Weber’s sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 29: 283–306.
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Lengthy review essay by a Weber authority, charting the most recent uses of Weber in sociology. Due to Swedberg’s own interests, he emphasizes as “new” an interpretation of Weber that fixes on his utility to economic sociology in particular.
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Tenbruck, Friedrich H. 1980. The problem of thematic unity in the works of Max Weber. British Journal of Sociology 31.3 (September): 316–351.
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A famous article, much argued over, that asks if it is possible or useful to identify substantive unity within Weber’s opera by his major terms (e.g., disenchantment, rationalization). Indeed, Weber developed a universal-historical perspective to examine a world process of disenchantment. The section headings: Economy and Society—The Assumption That It Was Weber’s Principal Work; The Historico-Religious Process of Disenchantment (Entzauberung); Occidental Rationalization and Historico-Religious Disenchantment; The Rationalization Thesis; “The Economic Ethics of the World Religions” and Its Place in Weber’s Oeuvre; Universal History and Rationality; Max Weber’s Work.
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Turley, Alan C. 2001. Max Weber and the sociology of music. Sociological Forum 16.4 (December): 633–653.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1012833928688Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This paper examines Max Weber’s contribution to the study of music, as well as proposing an extension. The author argues that Weber’s sociology of music combines urban theory, class/labor theory, and rationalization theory, and in so doing provides a starting point for interpreting the social components of music.
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Other Social Science Fields
One of the hallmarks of a “classic” author is the ability of his or her work to launch subsequent research into venues that would not have been anticipated, or perhaps even thought desirable, when the original work was being composed. So it remains with Weber, as he is brought, sometimes against his will, into discussions of postmodernism, poststructuralism, Freudianism, anthropology, the problem of time, Foucault, and what seems like an endless range of scholarly preoccupations.
Gane, Nicholas. 2002. Max Weber and postmodern theory: Rationalization versus re-enchantment. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230502512Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Illustrates parallels between Max Weber’s theory of the rationalization and disenchantment of the modern world with critiques of contemporary culture developed by Lyotard, Foucault, and Baudrillard, known broadly as part of the poststructuralist and postmodernist camps. Each was in some way responding to Weber’s understanding of modern culture with his own imaginative visions of affirmation and re-enchantment. Their writing casts new light on Weber’s sociology of rationalization and his theory of the crisis of modernity.
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Jameson, Fredric. 1974. The vanishing mediator: Narrative structure in Max Weber. New German Critique 1.1 (Winter): 52–89.
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Using a structuralist model, Jameson diagrams Weber’s theory of Protestant behavior’s effects on economic life. An early and interesting work by a literary critic later to become famous for interpretations of postmodernist thought and for developing a Marxist form of literary and cultural criticism.
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Kaye, Howard L. 1992. Rationalization as sublimation: On the cultural analyses of Weber and Freud. Theory, Culture, and Society 9.4 (November): 45–74.
DOI: 10.1177/026327692009004003Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber and Freud are examined in order to develop a social psychology of rationalization versus sublimation, since their works are mutually complementary. While Weber addresses social and cultural structure, Freud describes its impact on individual psyches. Kaye considers sublimation, rationalization, and value spheres, and finds that Freud, by furnishing a more penetrating explanation of the motives behind rationalization, can fill out Weber’s theory of macroprocesses. In return, Weber offers Freud a more adequate treatment of sublimation, understood as an internal as well as a cultural process.
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Keyes, Charles F. 2002. Weber and anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 31:233–255.
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Weber’s approach to social science profoundly influenced modern anthropology, particularly regarding the relationship between religion and political-economy. Clifford Geertz’s “interpretive anthropology” has roots in Weber’s “interpretive sociology,” as does Bourdieu’s “theory of practice.” Weber’s comparative study of the ethics of the world’s religions, and particularly the “Weber thesis,” served as the foundation of anthropological research on religion and political-economy in societies in which the major world religions have been long established. Weber’s work on politics and meaning merits reexamination in light of contemporary anthropological interest in power and knowledge (à la Foucault).
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McIntosh, Donald. 1970. Weber and Freud: On the nature and sources of authority. American Sociological Review 35.5 (October): 901–911.
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A critique of Weber’s view on authority from the point of view of Freudianism, with a consideration of psychoanalytic versus sociological modes of analysis. The two viewpoints are compared regarding charisma, traditional authority, prophetic authority, natural law, the institutionalization of authority, the secularization of authority, and nonlegitimate domination. On the whole, they appear to fit well. Weber’s ideas on traditional, charismatic, and legal authority seem to rest, respectively, on pre-Oedipal, Oedipal, and post-Oedipal psychoanalytic stages. Weber’s account of prophetic (charismatic) leadership has much in common with, and receives support from, Freud’s.
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Segre, Sandro. 2000. A Weberian theory of time. Time and Society 9.2–3: 147–170.
DOI: 10.1177/0961463X00009002001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A Weberian general theory of time, drawn from Weber’s epistemological and sociological work, is presented, including a brief digression on Husserl’s possible influence on Weber as it relates to his understanding of past and present. Focusing on Weber’s sociological analysis of time in interactional and social contexts, especially comparing formal versus informal contexts, a unitary theoretical framework is developed and analyzed in light of other sociological work that deals with time as a social construction and constraint.
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Szakolczai, Arpád. 1998. Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel life-works. Studies in Social and Political Thought 8. New York: Routledge.
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Ever since Foucault’s theory of power began to be discussed widely, in the 1980s, Weber’s name has been attached to the dialogue, because Foucault claimed to have learned much from Weber before offering his own theory. This helpful reading focuses on Weber, particularly on pp. 189–290.
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Methods
Endless squabbles among social scientists concerning how one should define and use the proper analytic tools of research have been going on at least since Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill in the 1850s, and they became a memorably fierce fight in Germany in Weber’s youth, when Carl Menger and Gustav Schmoller, plus their many followers, tried to vanquish each other during the so-called Methodenstreit in the 1880s. Menger wanted economics to follow natural science methods and arrive at indubitable “laws” of behavior, whereas Schmoller’s “historical economics” held that all periods of human activity display unique properties that cannot be subsumed under any general model. Though Weber was closer to Schmoller than Menger in his general orientation, he hoped, with assists from Henrich Rickert, Rudolf Stammler, Wilhelm Roscher, and many others, to reframe the methodological debate by refurbishing “ideal-type” (of Wilhelm Dilthey and Christoph Sigwart) along with the practice of Verstehen into a new, more realistic mode of analyzing social life, present and past. Exemplification, correction, and elaboration of these methodological innovations have kept scholars busy ever since Weber enunciated them in the second decade of the 20th century, as illustrated by the works listed in this section. Though often classed as an antipositivist historicist, Weber’s appetite for “hard data” was in fact unquenchable, and even though he believed that searching for unchanging laws of social behavior was fruitless, he did indeed seek continuities of social action within various cultural and historical settings. The difference between his methods and those of more simpleminded positivists lay in his deep and wide historical knowledge, which gave the lie to reductionism of the kind that allows sociological positivism whatever plausibility it may have.
General Methodological Debates
The works listed here cover a range of methodological issues spurred by Weber’s writings.
Brain, Robert Michael. 2001. The ontology of the questionnaire: Max Weber on measurement and mass investigation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32.4: 657–684.
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Contemporary sociologists of science have not examined Weber’s views about science. Between 1908 and 1912 he wrote a series of studies concerning the extension of scientific authority into public life. In these works he implemented the experimental psychology, or psychophysics, laboratory in factories and other real-world settings. In his critique of social measurement, Weber emphasized discontinuities between the social spaces of the laboratory versus the factory, showing how historically conditioned differences between the two settings rendered the transfer of instruments and methods between them highly problematic. In his greatest foray into empirical sociology, a survey he directed for the Verein für Sozialpolitik, he investigated the conditions and attitudes affecting the lives and performance of industrial workers. Using a different measuring instrument—the questionnaire—Weber tried to implement a concept of social measurement that implied a different ontology, drawn not from natural sciences but from the historical sciences.
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Brubaker, Rogers. 1984. The limits of rationality: An essay on the social and moral thought of Max Weber. London: Allen & Unwin.
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A handy and much cited essay by a young scholar on Weber’s ideas about rationality, originally composed as an honors thesis at Harvard, capably illustrating the outlines of what is in fact a deeply seated problem in Weber’s work.
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Burger, Thomas. 1976. Max Weber’s theory of concept formation: History, laws, and ideal types. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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Reissued as an expanded edition in 1987, with new “Postscript” (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press). A recognized work on one of Weber’s thorniest conceptions, the “ideal-type,” plus observations about other important ingredients in Weber’s practical approach to theorizing. Burger emphasizes Weber’s connection with Heinrich Rickert (as does Guy Oakes in his book on the topic) when trying to understand the former’s theory of social causation, as gingerly constructed as it was at his premature death. Yet Droysen and Toennies, among others, also likely influenced Weber as he formulated his philosophy of sociological method, published posthumously in Economy and Society (see Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology).
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Eliaeson, Sven. 2002. Max Weber’s methodologies: Interpretation and critique. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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A sturdy account of Weber’s methodological thinking, with attention to its scholarly reception. Eliaeson claims that vested interests of exegetical scholars have created biased interpretations. Weber was preoccupied with the intellectual problems of his time, so by connecting Weber’s thought and methodology with its historical context, Eliaeson reconstructs his central concerns while at the same time exploring the enduring relevance of Weber’s work for sociology today.
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Hekman, Susan J. 1983. Weber, the ideal type, and contemporary social theory. Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press.
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Also published as Max Weber and Contemporary Social Theory (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983). Reliable interpretation of Weber’s ideas as conceived by a political scientist rather than a sociologist. Hekman runs through arguments for a subjectivist/interpretative approach to social science research versus the more standard, positivist, and “objective” way of collecting and analyzing data, culminating in her strong support for a Weberian compromise, in which the ideal type is allowed to stand in for “objectivity” while at the same time accounting for the subjectively meaningful understanding of life, which characterizes human existence.
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Lazarsfeld, Paul, and Anthony Oberschall. 1965. Max Weber and empirical social research. American Sociological Review 30.2 (April): 185–199.
DOI: 10.2307/2091563Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An important article because Lazarsfeld founded the Bureau of Applied Research at Columbia University and was widely regarded as a major proponent of “scientific” sociology. Explains that Weber’s earliest involvement in empirical social research included three investigations of agricultural and industrial labor conditions, workers’ attitudes, and work histories, using both questionnaires and direct observation. He used a relatively modern statistical approach in his fourth study, concerning psychological aspects of factory work, and in a fifth episode (a critique of another person’s study of workers’ attitudes) he advocated a quantitative or typological approach to qualitative data. Weber was always concerned with quantitative techniques, arguing that the meaning of social relationships can be expressed only in probabilistic terms. Nevertheless, he was ambivalent about the ultimate value of quantitative methods and the role of empirical research in sociology, partly because he never decided whether sociology and psychology should be sharply distinguished, nor what terminology should be adopted when describing social action.
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Runciman, W. G. 1972. A critique of Max Weber’s philosophy of social science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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A brief study of Weber’s social and political theory that raises critical questions about Weber’s claims about value neutrality and explanation in the social sciences. Viscount Runciman developed his taste for Weberian sociology in later and much longer works.
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Interpretation and the Social Sciences
The works listed here cover a range of methodological issues spurred by Weber’s writings on Verstehen, “adequacy on the level of meaning,” the social action typology, and so on.
Abel, Theodore Fred. 1948. The operation called Verstehen. American Journal of Sociology 54.3 (November): 211–218.
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The application of interpretation by means of Verstehen is the main argument of social theorists who posit a dichotomy between the physical and the social sciences. Yet an analysis of the actual operation of Verstehen shows that it does not provide new knowledge and that it cannot be used as a means of verification in Popper’s sense. Lacking the fundamental attributes of scientific method, even though it does perform important auxiliary functions in research, the simple fact of Verstehen cannot be used to validate the assumption of a dichotomy of the sciences. The article was the opening salvo for a stream of articles and books that ensued over the next twenty years.
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Bruun, Hans Henrik. 1972. Science, values, and politics in Max Weber’s methodology. Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
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Reissued in 2009 with new introduction and German passages translated into English (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate). Highly regarded in its first edition, in the expanded edition the author wisely translates numerous German quotations into English, and adds a new introduction, where he discusses major issues raised since 1972. Bruun traces the relationship between values and science in Max Weber’s methodology to its central aspects: value freedom, value relation (Wertbeziehung), value analysis, the ideal type, and the special problems that pertain to the sphere of politics. All pertinent materials, published or unpublished, are examined.
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Oakes, Guy. 1988. Weber and Rickert: Concept formation in the cultural sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Traces what Oakes believes is a vital connection between Weber and the philosopher Heinrich Rickert. He reconstructs Rickert’s difficult concepts in order to isolate the important, and until now poorly understood, roots of problems in Weber’s own work, and thereby adds a new way to understand Weber by exposing his relationship to the Southwest German school of neo-Kantianism and to Rickert. Oakes offers an accessible exposition of Rickert’s theory of values, in part by drawing on Kierkegaard’s concrete moral tale, “Diary of a Seducer,” to illuminate Rickert’s failure to solve the problem of the objectivity of values. His critique of Rickert challenges the methodological basis of Weber’s solution to the problem of objectivity, elevating the discussion surrounding Weber’s methodology to a new level. The argument has not been universally accepted.
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Ringer, Fritz. 1997. Max Weber’s methodology: The unification of the cultural and social sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Interprets Weber’s methodological writings in the context of the German debates of his day. Claims that Weber bridged the intellectual gap between humanistic interpretation and causal explanation in historical and cultural studies in a way that speaks clearly to our own time, when methodological differences continue to impede fruitful cooperation between the two camps. In the place of the humanists’ subjectivism and the social scientists’ naturalism, Weber developed the flexible and realistic concepts of “objective probability” and “adequate causation.”
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Torrance, John. 1974. Max Weber: Methods and the man. Archives européennes de sociologie 15.1: 127–165.
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A well-known analysis of Weber’s methodology in the context of Simmel and Protestantism, ideal types and class, his confusion of empirical and ideal classes, his concept of chance, and ambiguity about meaning and motive. Weber’s methodological individualism pushed him toward psychologism and subjectivism, and toward “methodological existentialism.” Weber rose above the bourgeois academic establishment, but he was unable to break entirely out of his bureaucratic professional’s role in capitalist society. Faced with a choice between bourgeois radicalism and proletarian social democracy, he chose to fortify his own mandarin intellectual posture.
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Religion
“I am religiously unmusical,” Weber famously said to an intimate, which, given his mother’s devout and intelligent Pietism, was an admission he knew was filled with poignancy, particularly as he had deep respect for his mother. Thrown back and forth, emotionally and intellectually, between an unbelieving father, who embodied the practices of Realpolitik in the midst of Bismarck’s forming of modern Germany, and a religiously attuned mother with whom he shared a closer emotional bond, Weber somehow had to come to terms with religious belief. (It did not hurt that the leading historian of the Christian church, Ernst Troeltsch, was Weber’s tenant for some years, living with his family on the top floor of the Webers’ mansion in Heidelberg.) Though avoiding religiosity as a topic of research during his first period of frenetic scholarship (1886–1897), following his breakdown and partial recovery he threw himself into studies that bore one way or another on religiously inspired social action for the rest of his professional life (1904–1920). When he published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a two-part journal article in 1904–1905, he became a lightning rod for debate about the role that religious ideas played in 16th- and 17th-century northern Europe, during the early days of capitalist accumulation. Thousands of books and articles have since been written debating the merits of his arguments. But even more impressive and much longer in gestation were Weber’s three long volumes on religion in China, India, and among the ancient Jews. Again he asked himself the pivotal question: Why did capitalism flourish in Europe but not in the Middle East, despite its trader culture, nor in the Orient, despite its manifold cultural advantages of trade, language, and civilizational advances? Debate over Weber’s conclusions and incidental remarks (e.g., “Jews as a pariah religion”) will likely cease only when scholars lose all interest in how ideas contribute to socioeconomic change.
Secondary Debates about The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
The works in this subsection place Weber’s classic work in historical perspective and assess its place in comparative historical sociology.
Barbalet, Jack. 2008. Weber, passion and profits: “The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism” in context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511488757Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Barbalet characterizes Weber’s work as not only about the cultural origins of capitalism, but also as an allegory concerning Germany in his time. Situating The Protestant Ethic in Weber’s oeuvre, he records changes in his understanding of “calling” and “rationality.” Highlighting the ethical underpinnings of the capitalist spirit and of the institutional structure of capitalism, Barbalet points out Weberian continuities with Adam Smith and Thorstein Veblen. Finally, by considering Weber’s investigation of Judaism and capitalism, and the unwritten treatment of Catholicism, ignored aspects of his portrayal of Protestantism and capitalism are revealed.
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Bernert, Christopher. 1976. The diffusion of the “Weber-Thesis,” 1904–1930. Graduate Faculty Journal of Sociology 1.2: 32–52.
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A study in what the Germans call “reception theory.” The image of Weber as author of The Protestant Ethic is determined by reviewing “traces of visibility” of Weber in all widely circulated theological or social scientific outlets published during the stated period. Of sixty-seven references to Weber, forty-six identify him as author of the “Weber thesis.” References are classified by date of publication, nationality of author, and the author’s critical appraisal of Weber’s work. Authors are grouped by discipline and social circle: theologians and close associates in Germany whose works were translated into English were the first to refer to him in this way; next were English and American historians studying the 16th century; last were American sociologists. His acceptance outside Germany stemmed partly from definite social processes of diffusion and intellectual communication.
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Chalcraft, David J., and Austin Harrington, eds. 2001. The Protestant ethic debate: Max Weber’s replies to his critics, 1907–1910. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool Univ. Press.
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The first complete English translations of Weber’s four lengthy replies to reviews of the text by two German historians, written between 1907 and 1910. These replies explain Weber’s intentions in the original study, which would have clarified fruitless debates had they been published in 1930 along with the original English translation by Parsons (Weber 1930, cited under The Protestant Ethic Debate). A succinct statement of Weber’s objective in writing The Protestant Ethic is also provided, along with comments on his innovative research methods.
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Lehmann, Hartmut, and Guenther Roth, eds. 1993. Weber’s Protestant ethic: Origins, evidence, contexts. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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An important volume, this international, interdisciplinary effort throws new light on the intellectual and cultural background of Weber’s work, debates recent criticism of the Weber thesis, and confronts new historical insight on the 17th century with Weber’s interpretation. Copublished by German Historical Institute (Washington, DC).
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Marshall, Gordon. 1982. In search of the spirit of capitalism: An essay on Max Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
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A respected, workmanlike analysis of Weber’s two essays on the topic, with the increasingly common observation, well documented, that many arguments over the merit of Weber’s claims are based on a faulty understanding of what he said and what it meant.
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Tawney, R. H. 1926. Religion and the rise of capitalism. London: John Murray.
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Famous early critique of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, no longer much respected by Weber experts, but still a vigorous polemic against some aspects of Weber’s empirical claims that bear rereading. Tawney was a very famous historical economist and public intellectual when he attacked the “Weber thesis” (A. L. Rowse claimed that “Tawney exercised the widest influence of any historian of his time, politically, socially and, above all, educationally,” in his 1995 Historians I Have Known [p. 92]), so it is interesting that he has become a footnote to Weber’s work rather than the other way around.
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The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Specific Themes
The number and quality of debates that have sprung up around the “Weber thesis” have themselves become an academic specialty, as these selections indicate. The Protestant Ethic in Hungary (Molnár 1997) is only one of thousands of similar works, wherein authors try to plant Weber’s idea about religious beliefs and economic behavior into contexts wholly foreign to those that motivated Weber’s own writing. He would be chary of these transplantings as a historian, given his attention to specific detail, which is why after several years he refused to continue debating the issue.
Little, David. 1974. Max Weber and the comparative study of religious ethics. Journal of Religious Ethics 2.2 (Fall): 5–40.
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An exposition and critical assessment of Weber’s typology of modes of practical reasoning and substitutes for practical reasoning, plus his definitions of “ethics” and “religion.” Little then examines the application of these elements of “the sociology of rationalism” to religious systems of ethics, pointing out a number of difficulties in Weber’s account. He concludes by insisting that it contains insights that are indispensable for the comparative study of religious ethics.
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Molnár, Attila. 1997. The Protestant ethic in Hungary. Religion 27.2 (April): 151–164.
DOI: 10.1006/reli.1996.0050Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Though about two-thirds of Hungarians belonged to the Reformed Church during the 16th and 17th centuries, the presence of the “spirit of capitalism” and the “Protestant ethic” is less apparent than one would expect based on Weber’s hypothesis. Based on a large-scale study of the Hungarian Protestant ethic in the 17th century, it can be shown that Calvinists did not play a different or decisive role in the capitalization process of Hungary at the end of the 19th century, as revealed in conduct-books. This ethic differs from Weber’s ideal-type in two respects: The Hungarian version is more pietistic and less activist, with less practical influence in everyday life because of weak religiosity. This case does not refute Weber’s thesis, but it calls attention to the reinterpreting of social context, as well as the intensity of religiosity.
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Otsuka, Hisao. 1982. The spirit of capitalism: The Max Weber thesis in an economic historical perspective. Translated by Masaomi Kondo. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
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Commentary on the relevance of the Weberian thesis in light of economic history by a Japanese scholar. Enthusiasm for Weber’s work and ideas in Japan has run high for decades.
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Robertson, Hector Menteith. 1933. Aspects of the rise of economic individualism: A critique of Max Weber and his school. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Reprinted in 1959 (New York: Kelley and Millman). Important for its errors, since Robertson early on enunciated a way of approaching Weber’s ideas that became typical of historians who did not understand the nature of Weber’s analytic goals. Talcott Parsons, Weber’s very early English translator, answered Robertson’s claims in detail in “H. M. Robertson on Max Weber and His School,” published in the Journal of Political Economy 43.5 (October 1935): 688–696. This initiated the legitimation of Weber’s sociological argument when confronted by skeptics.
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Calvinism and Capitalism
Weber’s writings on Calvinism and its affinities with capitalism, both in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and in other essays, have generated an enormous secondary literature. Some of the most important of these studies are grouped here.
Forsyth, P. T. 1910. Calvinism and capitalism. Contemporary Review 97:728–741.
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Provides the earliest English-language summary and critique of Weber’s Protestant ethic essays, with added historical details for contextual understanding. See also Part 2, “Calvinism and Capitalism,” in Contemporary Review 98 (1911): 74–87.
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Fullerton, Kemper. 1928. Calvinism and capitalism. Harvard Theological Review 21.3 (July): 163–195.
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Offers an interpretative summary of Weber’s “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” published in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 20 (1904) and 21 (1905), and reprinted in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (1920), Vol. 1, pp. 17–206. A solid performance, important in its time since the Parsons translations had not yet appeared, so all of Fullerton’s translations from the book, which were many, helped cement the argument for those without German. He begins by showing that pursuing money had been evil for medieval Christians, but by the 19th century had become the most virtuous of activities. Explanation of this change was part of Weber’s goal, of course.
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MacKinnon, Malcolm H. 1988a. Part I: Calvinism and the infallible assurance of grace: The Weber thesis reconsidered. British Journal of Sociology 39.2 (June): 143–177.
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Sociologists have not critically examined the basic theological content of the Protestant ethic thesis: that Calvinism assumes both absolute predestination and the impossibility of knowing if one is saved, creating a psychological need for business success as a this-worldly sign of divine favor. While Calvin himself advocated these theological doctrines, subsequent covenant theology made salvation available to all who honestly sought it, and offered infallible certainty of grace through introspection and otherworldly works—that is, obedience to the law. Thus, Calvinism as actually practiced following Calvin’s death did not favor the pursuit of this-worldly goals as a substitute for the unattainable goal of salvation, any more than did Lutheranism or Catholicism.
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MacKinnon, Malcolm H. 1988b. Part II: Weber’s exploration of Calvinism: The undiscovered provenance of capitalism. British Journal of Sociology 39.2 (June): 178–210.
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A critique of Weber’s argument is offered, emphasizing Weber’s conception of works as temporally framed, whereas Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist writers agreed that earthly labor had no spiritual value, and that only spiritual callings led to righteousness. Followers of Weber, including Ernst Troeltsch, R. H. Tawney, and Gordon Marshall, share the idea of sanctified labor in a mundane calling, and therefore make themselves subject to the same critique. See also MacKinnon 1988a.
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Rationalism and Religion
One of the charms of Weber’s comparative religion studies stems from the obvious fact that religious sentiments are at their base “irrational” in the deepest sense, since so many religious beliefs cannot be reconciled with factual knowledge or scientific precept, nor are they expected to be. What Weber did was show that even those most profoundly irrational sentiments by which cultures and civilizations have lived direct economic action toward more or less “rational” procedures in the marketplace, even when the two zones of action and ideas are at odds with each other. The following studies illustrate some of these antinomies.
Adair-Toteff, Christopher. 2002. Max Weber’s mysticism. European Journal of Sociology 43.3: 339–353.
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Max Weber, for much of his life, preferred the rational activity of the ascetic to the irrational passivity of the mystic. Despite this, he developed an increasing interest in Western and Eastern mysticism. Johannes Tauler and his teacher, Meister Eckhart, provided him with material with which to criticize Western mysticism. In the last years of Weber’s life, religion and mysticism were not only of intellectual interest to him but increasingly grew as a strong personal interest as well.
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Kaelber, Lutz. 1996. Weber’s lacuna: Medieval religion and the roots of rationalization. Journal of the History of Ideas 57.3 (July): 465–485.
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Kaelber analyzes Weber’s views on medieval religion as they evolved between 1904–1905 and 1920, and shows how Weber linked this exploration to his larger intellectual agenda, appropriating and transcending ideas then current in historical and religious scholarship.
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Lemmen, M. M. W. 1990. Max Weber’s sociology of religion: Its method and content in the light of the concept of rationality. Translated by H. D. Morton. Hilversum, The Netherlands: Gooi en Sticht.
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Assesses Weber’s ideas about religion from the standpoint of rationality, which served as the twin pillars around which Weber constructed his comparative studies of supernatural systems.
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Schluchter, Wolfgang. 1989. Rationalism, religion, and domination: A Weberian perspective. Translated by Neil Solomon. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Presents a unified approach to little-understood aspects of Weber’s research program. Taking the overall development of Weber’s work into account, Schluchter reconstructs Weber’s research program using a comprehensive point of view that balances historical research and systematic thought against a biographical perspective. He argues that Weber’s studies in the sociology of religion and politics provide a psychological as well as sociological analysis of Weltanschauungen—all the possible stances toward the world that humanity has taken and the modes of life conduct connected to them.
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Other Religious Traditions: China, India, and the Ancient Jews
Weber wrote widely about religious traditions outside the West. Some of the leading secondary works are discussed here. When he was working on this material, between 1912 and 1917, “comparative religion” as exemplified by Max Müller’s famous Sacred Books of the East series (50 volumes, 1879–1910) was not the highly controversial area it became after Edward Said’s Orientalism swept into the academy in 1979. Thus, Weber’s dedicated study of religious beliefs in what were later called “developing countries” was not motivated by imperialist voyeurism, but by a fundamental research question: How do varying religious beliefs and practices affect the rest of societal behavior? To that end he wrote his works in this area, and it is in examining his labor along these lines that the following works were composed.
Abraham, Gary A. 1992. Max Weber and the Jewish question: A study of the social outlook of his sociology. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.
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Though received with mixed applause, the book reminded Weberians of a vexed question for experts in the history and sociology of Judaism: To what extent was Weber’s portrayal in Ancient Judaism (Weber 1952, cited under Sociology of Comparative Religion) adequate in general, and, in particular, was Weber’s labeling of the Jews as “a pariah people” useful or justified? The book is speculative when the printed record is weak, which gives it an uncertain feeling, but the general topic is important and worth pursuing.
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Alatas, Syed Hussein. 1963. The Weber thesis and South East Asia. Archives de sociologie des religions 15:21–34.
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Using data from contemporary Southeast Asia, the Weber thesis about capitalism varying by religion does not find much support. The decisive factors that have produced capitalist behavior in various groups in that region are found in their emigrant spirit and their position outside government service (e.g., the Chinese in Malaya). The emergence of the capitalist spirit among certain groups can also be traced to cultural and historical roots that are not essentially religious in nature. The emergence of the capitalist spirit in Southeast Asia is a process that is still going on and suitable for direct observation.
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Bechert, Heinz. 1991. Max Weber and the sociology of Buddhism. Internationales Asienforum 22.3–4: 181–195.
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Weber’s writings on Buddhism analyzed by a German expert in Buddhist doctrine.
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Eisenstadt, S. N. 1971. Some reflections on the significance of Max Weber’s sociology of religions for the analysis of non-European modernity. Archives de sociologie des religions 16.32 (July–December): 29–52.
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Eisenstadt is an Old Guard comparativist in the Weberian mold. Weber’s comparative sociology of religion has mostly been known via his Protestant ethic thesis, and is rarely extended to non-Christian religions. Initially the thesis was incorrectly perceived as claiming the existence of a “causal” relation between the rise of Protestantism and capitalism. A corrective is to judge societies to the extent they facilitate or sanction the undertaking of “systematic” economic activities. Later, Weber’s thesis was examined vis-à-vis the transformational possibilities of other religions. Differences between the ways Weber analyzed European cultures and their handling of modernity, as opposed to Asian cultures, are described here. Varying responses to modernity were influenced by various civilizational “codes,” especially those relating to status and politics.
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Huff, Toby E., and Wolfgang Schluchter, eds. 1999. Max Weber and Islam. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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A rare effort by Islamic studies specialists to reexamine Weber’s perspectives on Islam and its historical development. Eight specialists on Islam and two sociologists explore Weber’s incomplete comments on Islam, along with his conceptual framework, meanwhile linking their discussions to contemporary issues and debates. Schluchter reconstructs Weber’s conceptual apparatus as it applies to Islam and its historical development. Islamic specialists then consider the developmental history of Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, reform, law and its relationship to capitalism, secularization in Islam, as well as the value of attempting to apply Weber’s concept of sects to Islam.
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Kantowsky, Detlef, ed. 1986. Recent research on Max Weber’s studies of Hinduism: Papers submitted to a conference held in New Delhi, 1.–3.3.1984. Schriftenreihe Internationales Asienforum 4. Munich: Weltforum Verlag.
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Unusual treatment of Weber’s Religion of India that includes “Max Weber on India and Indian Interpretations of Weber” by Detlef Kantowsky; “Max Weber’s Wrong Understanding of Indian Civilization” by Chaturvedi Badrinath; “Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic, the Universality of Social Science, and the Uniqueness of the East” by Walter M. Sprondel; “Max Weber’s Contributions to Indian Sociology” by Detlef Kantowsky; “Hindu Religious Rationality and Inner-Worldly Asceticism” by G. S. Aurora; “Max Weber’s Contribution to the Study of ‘Hinduization’ in India and ‘Indianization’ in Southeast Asia” by Hermann Kulke; and other papers by German, Indian, and American scholars, ending with “The Misinterpretation of Max Weber’s Study on Hinduism in India” by Kantowsky.
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Molloy, Stephen. 1980. Max Weber and the religions of China: Any way out of the maze? British Journal of Sociology 31.3 (September): 377–400.
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Weber’s study of Chinese society is presented and criticized. It is often assumed that Talcott Parsons’s theoretical framework can elucidate Weber’s analysis, but this is misleading. Weber concerned himself with three historical issues: practical ethics, the relation of economic ethics to economic organization, and two problematics—idealism and materialism. For Weber, Confucian literati defined ethical values that inhibited the development of capitalism. In dealing with Confucianism as a specific historical process, Weber avoids the problems resulting from Parsons’s abstract typological approach based solely on the contrast of material and ideal factors.
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Momigliano, Arnaldo. 1987. A note on Max Weber’s definition of Judaism as a pariah-religion. In On pagans, Jews, and Christians. By Arnaldo Momigliano, 231–237. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press.
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The leading 20th-century historian of ancient Rome and of historiographic practices through Western history weighs in on Weber’s vexed use of “pariah” when applied to the Jews, and finds it somewhat deficient, although overall he agrees with most of what Weber wrote concerning Roman economic and social life. First published in History and Theory 19.3 (1980): 313–318.
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Turner, Bryan S. 1974. Weber and Islam: A critical study. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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One of very few analyses by a Western sociologist to chronicle Weber’s incomplete writing about Islam, comparing his understanding of the religion with Marx’s “Asiatic Mode of Production,” and other topics of modern concern, like Muhammad’s charismatic leadership of his religion, the fate of the Middle East under colonial subjection, and an excursus on Marx’s and Weber’s contrasting understandings of sex, asceticism, and religiosity.
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Zeitlin, Irving M. 1984. Ancient Judaism: Biblical criticism from Max Weber to the present. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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Beginning from Weber’s classic work (Weber 1952, cited under Sociology of Comparative Religion), Zeitlin analyzes the origins of Judaism in light of more recent scholarship, criticizing both those modern scholars who have cast doubts on the scriptural account of the history of Israel, and those who hold that the religion of Israel originated either as polytheism or as a fusion of Baal and Yahweh. He finds unconvincing the nonsociological modes of approaching these questions. Following Weber’s method, Zeitlin describes the subjective meanings that the actors themselves attributed to their conduct. Drawing on biblical and extra-biblical evidence, he addresses the question of how the actors concerned—whether they were patriarchs, prophets, judges, kings, or the people—understood themselves, their world, and their faith, a technique Weber pioneered sixty years earlier through his sociology of religions, and especially in Ancient Judaism. Zeitlin ends his study by suggesting that in certain respects Weber’s views must be substantially modified in due deference to recent scholarship.
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Law
The section of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft that outlines Weber’s Rechtssoziologie, first translated by Edward Shils and Max Rheinstein, was published in 1954 by Harvard University Press. It can reasonably be claimed when evaluating this work that Weber invented Rechtssoziologie (sociology of law) in its fullest form, even though Emile Durkheim’s Division of Labor in Society appeared earlier and contains material of much interest, as does Eugen Ehrlich’s Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law (1913). Durkheim noted that modern legal systems substituted restitution of loss for vengeance, from repression to tort satisfaction, which in turn made modern business transactions possible and predictable. Ehrlich’s cosmopolitan background led him to see that “law on the books” was an insufficient avenue to understanding law in toto, and that cultural differences among societies had to be factored in for a fuller view of how law actually functions and changes. He distinguished between “positive law” in the courts and “living law” made up of normative, and often informal, control within broader society. Weber improved on both these programs by introducing, as was his style in all research, a comparative dimension, using Roman, medieval, Islamic, Chinese, Jewish, and modern legal systems as his data. As a trained lawyer (unlike Durkheim), he understood law as the force of state sanctions, but the strength of his analysis lay in showing how European and British law had evolved hand in hand with capitalism, whereas legal forms in the Middle East and Asia worked against the kind of contract law that advanced capitalism requires to function properly. What he called “khadi justice” under Islamic law is structured around the “irrational” predilections and talents of judges who create law as they hear cases. Similarly, in China, mandarins officiated as district judges, with attention to Confucian doctrine but nevertheless with wide discretionary powers. Once again, Weber found that the Western experience of legal reasoning and adjudication was quite different from legal forms in other societies, and out of these comparisons he was able to construct a convincing sociology of law that has served as a solid basis for subsequent developments by Theodore Geiger, Georges Gurvitch, and many others.
Anspach, Donald F., and S. Henry Monsen. 1989. Determinate sentencing, formal rationality, and khadi justice in Maine: An application of Weber’s typology. Journal of Criminal Justice 17.6 (November): 471–485.
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In the 1980s over twenty-five jurisdictions, including Maine, changed their sentencing policies. Yet only a few approached the goal of “determinacy” as proposed by reformers. Weber’s sociology of law provides a means to reconceptualize the problem regarding “determinacy,” particularly by applying his concept of formal rationality. Maine did not reduce judicial disparities, and determinacy was not introduced. Using data from all members of Maine’s judiciary, sentences are compared with guideline sentences in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, showing that Maine failed to reduce judicial disparities in sentencing. Widespread sentencing disparities in Maine result from a criminal code legitimating substantively irrational decision making, or khadi justice. No attempt was made to move toward a formally rational system, as advocated by proponents of determinacy.
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Beirne, Piers. 1979. Ideology and rationality in Max Weber’s sociology of law. Research in Law and Sociology 2:103–131.
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A neo-Marxist analysis of Weber’s sociology of law, quite influential when it was published and in keeping with the “critical” theory of law then being taught at some US and Canadian law schools.
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Kronman, Anthony. 1983. Max Weber. Jurists: Profiles in Legal Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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Kronman, former dean of the Yale Law School, offers a concise and accurate study of Weber’s sociology of law, more solidly connected to legal scholarship than the usual treatments. He argues that Weber’s Rechtssoziologie is not an unwieldy monument, as it is so often characterized, but the coherent work of a legal mind, and one that fits well with Weber’s other theories—of authority, power, religiously inspired economic action, and so on. “The Irrationality of Oracular Adjudication” (pp. 80–83) presents a characteristically innovative interpretation of one Weberian aperçu.
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Trubek, David M. 1972: Max Weber on law and the rise of capitalism. Wisconsin Law Review 3:720–753.
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Also published as Working Paper No. 12, from the Yale Law School Program in Law and Modernization (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Law School). A study investigating Weber’s view of law as it emerged in Europe and elsewhere, through which he showed why other civilizations failed to develop “legalism” (the domination of a society by an autonomous rule system believed to be rationally enacted). The role of legalism as it legitimizes the domination of workers by capitalists is explored, along with Weber’s concepts of law as coercion, and types of legal thought. Though Weber’s theories may need expansion for application to the contemporary world, they remain a valuable aid and a lasting contribution to the study of law in its social context.
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Stratification
The leading textbook on social stratification during the 1950s and 1960s, Class, Status, and Power, was edited by the Weberian Reinhard Bendix and his distinguished colleague, Seymour Martin Lipset, and they wisely chose the title to mimic Weber’s exposition of how social classes operate. Weber knew Marx’s work well, and admired it, yet he also sensed within its simplified interpretation of class relations a lacuna that he expressly wished to fill; thus, in a way, Weber’s class analysis could be viewed as a supplement to Marx’s. What Marx missed and Weber knew well, mostly from his personal experience, was Stand: status based on class affiliation that often has little or nothing to do with ownership of the means of production. A penniless Russian aristocrat of the kind Dostoyevsky often portrayed would have had very high status in his society, despite having exhausted his supply of capital, for he would display what Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital,” in the form of language use, manners, stylish dress, and a self-concept that demands obeisance from others—some of whom would have been the ambitious bourgeoisie, eager to marry their daughters to the penniless aristocrat’s sons. What Weber called “social closure” worked against the bourgeois aspirant and in favor of the aristocrat. Weber explored the subtleties of class relationships in various societies through history and across the globe in his posthumous masterpiece, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. This was first made available to English-language readers when Gerth and Mills translated part of it in From Max Weber (Weber 1946, cited under General Sociology) and Talcott Parsons offered his version in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Weber 1947, cited under General Sociology). Along with Marx’s writing, this work has remained the bedrock of stratification theory ever since.
Jones, Bryn. 1975. Max Weber and the concept of social class. Sociological Review 23.4 (November): 729–757.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1975.tb00538.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber refined theories of social stratification with his concept of “status group.” However, this can be challenged by recognizing that status and class are based on contradictory forms of subjectively meaningful action. Weber’s theory borrows from neo-Kantian conceptions of human knowledge and existence based upon two spheres of nature and culture: the sensible and supersensible aspects of human experience. His theory as a whole reaches contradictory unity through this distinction, while his concepts reformulate the economy, consigning classes to mere aggregates of coincident instrumental actions, while status actions are determined by regard for others, styles of life, and cultural values that alone unify the individual actors in the Weberian social world. To remove the concept of status would require the denial of any role for culture and values in social action and sociological knowledge. To remove the concept of class would first require the elimination of the sphere of calculable necessity and, therefore, rational instrumental action, investigation, and the economy.
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Peukert, Helge. 2004. Max Weber: Precursor of economic sociology and heterodox economics? American Journal of Economics and Sociology 63.5 (November): 987–1020.
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Peukert believes that Weber’s ideas do not currently work well within economic sociology and heterodox economics because of his narrow, static understanding of rationality as applied to economic relations. He missed “uncertainty” as an important component of economic action, so his interpretation of socioeconomic action is incomplete, especially in special contexts. This is mostly due to his theoretical commitment to a narrow, neoclassical understanding of rationality as defined by Austrian economics. His theory of social action is based on idealized assumptions of perfect knowledge, market exchange processes, price setting, and the functioning of full competition, none of which is very sophisticated. Weber’s genius is evident not in economics proper but in his sociology of religion and law and in his sociology of domination.
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Swedberg, Richard. 2007. Max Weber’s interpretive economic sociology. American Behavioral Scientist 50.8 (April): 1035–1055.
DOI: 10.1177/0002764207299352Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Explores a rigorous interpretive economic sociology along Weberian lines, one which applies the analytic model of social action from chapter 1 of Economy and Society (Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology) to empirical data and events. Key ideas and concepts in Weber’s interpretive sociology include adequate causation, the exploration of meaning for social actors, and what consequences these meanings have for the resulting action. What a concrete Weberian type of interpretive economic sociology will be like cannot be determined without attention to concrete, empirical content.
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Politics
When Jürgen Habermas popularized the concept of “legitimation crisis” in the early 1970s, he, like so many others, was merely climbing aboard the Weberian train of political thought. Weber’s father was an important politician, whom Weber observed in action from early youth, surrounded as he was by his father’s political colleagues. From this and his studies, he developed various typologies for analyzing all sorts of political relations, including the famous “three forms of authority: traditional, charismatic, and bureaucratic.” Whereas most of human society had been spent in thrall to convention and the force of custom, during certain periods extraordinary individuals would subvert the existing order by offering their followers an irresistible claim upon their loyalty and discipleship. Though episodic and entirely unpredictable (hence “irrational” in Weber’s terms), charismatic authority shaped entire epochs of human history. But with the advent of industrialization and modernization, bureaucratic organization became, of necessity, the norm for legitimating the distribution of goods and power, which meant that both traditional and charismatic forms of authority (or “domination”) either disappeared or were much diminished. This progression over the past several centuries has affected all aspects of political life, and whereas tradition provides stability without innovation, and charisma innovation without stability, bureaucratic authority promises incremental, planned, necessary innovation, as well as utterly predictable and documented stability, and is thus best suited for industrialization and capitalist legal relations. Weber examined these interlocking phenomena in great detail, and the scholars who have probed his work or extended his political analysis into new realms have grown in number and sophistication such that “neo-Weberian” postures vis-à-vis our understanding of political power have become normative, especially in branches of political science and history. It is very difficult to speak of power relations in modern societies without seeing them through Weber’s lens, even for those who have tried to “transcend” him.
Politics in Weber’s Time
The books in this section examine various aspects of Weber’s political activities during his lifetime, as well as the relationship of his writings to extant controversies and to the political actors and thinkers who populated his environment.
Eden, Robert. 1983. Political leadership and nihilism: A study of Weber and Nietzsche. Tampa: Univ. Presses of Florida.
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A notable comparison of the political thought of Weber and Nietzsche by a philosophically sophisticated political theorist. Eden discusses political leadership in a liberal, commercial, plebiscitary democracy and the possible threat of political nihilism, using Nieztsche as its proponent (a not entirely convincing position). Juxtaposing Nietzsche and Weber, as well as detailing the influence of former on the latter, is no longer innovative, but Eden handles the material skillfully. He draws in Woodrow Wilson’s critique of liberal ideology and his allegiance to the political values of The Federalist while also establishing the principle of “opinion leadership.” Weber’s hopes for democratic liberalism were tainted by Nietzsche’s aristocratic disdain for the masses, according to Eden’s version of the record.
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Mayer, J. P. 1944. Max Weber and German politics, a study in political sociology. London: Faber and Faber.
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Notable analysis of German politics between 1880 and 1920 as interpreted through the personality of Weber, Germany’s outstanding political theorist during this epoch. Except for Bismarck, no other German reflects more fully than Weber the political life of his country. The main sources for the study are his Jugendbriefe and Politische Briefe, together with the admirable biography, written by his wife, Marianne Weber (see Weber 1975, cited under Biographies, Handbooks, Bibliographies, Journals), which together provide us with an intimate foundation on which the historian may safely build. They provide enough reliable material to show how an epoch of modern German history reflects itself in his thought. Second revised and enlarged edition published 1956 (London: Faber and Faber); reissued with an introduction by Bryan Turner in 1988 (London: Routledge).
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Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 1984. Max Weber and German politics, 1890–1920. Translated by Michael S. Steinberg. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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See also Mommsen’s The Age of Bureaucracy: Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber (New York: HarperCollins, 1977). First published in 1974 (Oxford: Blackwell). Mommsen’s work is uniquely authoritative for many reasons, not least of which was his familial connection with Weber. The second title is a major work of German historiography, an unequaled, comprehensive account of Weber’s political views and activities, in which Mommsen claims that Weber was simultaneously an ardent liberal and a determined German nationalist and imperialist. This charge was famously repudiated by many Weber scholars. Mommsen shows the important links between these seemingly conflicting positions and provides a critique of Weber’s sociology of power and his concept of democratic rule. Mommsen drew extensively on Weber’s published and unpublished essays, newspaper articles, memoranda, and correspondence.
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Classical Study of Weber’s Interventions in German Politics during His Lifetime
A cult has grown up in political theory circles since the early 1990s surrounding Carl Schmitt, whose politics and ideals would likely have repulsed Weber, as explained by Andrew Norris (in Norris 2000). Similarly, Weiss 1986 shows that Weber’s achievements were distorted, knowingly or otherwise, by Soviet-inspired scholars for whom defeat of Weber’s worldview was essential, so that their version of Marx’s understanding of political-economics would be viewed as triumphant. Since one of Weber’s first seminars was given over to studying Das Kapital, he would have found this argument strange and unsupportable.
Norris, Andrew. 2000. Carl Schmitt’s political metaphysics: On the secularization of “the outermost sphere.” Theory & Event 4.1: 1–33.
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Carl Schmitt was resurrected in the 1980s and reclaimed for political theory from his unrepentant Nazi past when theorists began to reconsider what “the political” meant in terms of citizenship rights and the role of states in a multicultural context. His connection with Weber lies in their theorizing about state power and the fact that they are often grouped together, which makes little intellectual, and even less political, sense. Abstract available online.
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Weiss, Johannes. 1986. Weber and the Marxist world. Translated by Elizabeth King-Utz and Michael King. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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Unusual study of how Soviet Marxism intervened between Weber’s actual work and the ideologically distorted view of it that permeated the Soviet bloc countries prior to their liberation in 1989. Reprinted, with an introduction by Bryan Turner, in 1998.
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General Politics
The studies in this section examine Weber’s general contributions to political sociology, including the study of democratic politics and civil society, particularly his hesitation in endorsing democracy in any “pure” form. Some of the most astute and rigorous work in the Weber canon has been directed at his far-flung theory of politics, as evidenced by the selections below.
Baehr, Peter. 2008. Caesarism, charisma, and fate: Historical sources and modern resonances in the work of Max Weber. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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Traces various cultural perceptions of Caesar—what the author calls Caesarism—from the Middle Ages, through the founding of the American Republic, the era of Max Weber and his contemporaries, and into the 20th century in the works of writers such as Antonio Gramsci.
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Beetham, David. 1985. Max Weber and the theory of modern politics. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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Beetham used then-untranslated works by Weber to create a comprehensive account of Weber’s political theory. Weber’s writings on the politics of Wilhelmine in Germany and the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 are much less well known than his contributions to historical and theoretical sociology, yet they are essential to any overall assessment of his thought. Beetham explores Weber’s central concern with the prospects for liberal Parliamentarism in authoritarian societies, and in an age of mass politics and bureaucratic organization, showing how this concern pushed him to revise democratic theory. He argues that Weber’s analysis of the class basis of contemporary politics necessitates a modification of typical understanding of his sociology of modern capitalism.
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Bensman, Joseph, and Michael Givant. 1975. Charisma and modernity: The use and abuse of a concept. In Special issue: Charisma, legitimacy, ideology and other Weberian themes. Edited by Arthur J. Vidich. Social Research 42.4 (Winter): 570–614.
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This article reviews the origins of Weber’s concept, borrowed from the church historian Rudolf Sohm, and expanded to include political, military, or cultural leaders with powerful attraction for their adoring followers. Weber pointed out that charisma always dies out with the demise of the leader in question, and that “routinization” follows if the group is to persist. Current uses of the term have lost this sociological dimension and instead identify as charismatic any figure with unusually strong psychological or emotional appeal for a targeted audience, thus losing Weber’s insight that succession is always a problem for charismatics, which gives this form of leadership its “irrationally” exciting but vulnerable quality.
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Breiner, Peter. 1996. Max Weber and democratic politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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The author argues that the tension between the subjective and objective dimensions of Weber’s concept of rationality can be fruitfully exploited when judging the feasibility of social and political forms such as socialism, radical democracy, capitalism, and the nation. A concept of participatory democracy from within Weber’s logic of power and legitimate domination is advanced.
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Kim, Sung Ho. 2004. Max Weber’s politics of civil society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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A work by a young Korean scholar who argues that Weber was deeply influenced by some of the most critical questions in modern political thought, especially those regarding public citizenship in a mass democracy and civil society as its foundation.
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Loewenstein, Karl. 1966. Max Weber’s political ideas in the perspective of our time. Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press.
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A short book that examines Weber’s general views on bureaucracy. Lowenstein claims that the “untrammeled rule of a bureaucracy” was “Political Enemy Number 1” for Weber, and that Weber saw bureaucracy as “inescapable” because of its “specialization and efficient technical training.” He also argues that Weber anticipated the idea of bureaucrats pursuing their own interests through bureaucratic expansionism.
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Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 1989. The political and social theory of Max Weber: Collected essays. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Essays by the noted Weberian scholar, concentrating on Weber’s engagement with political issues and their influence over his more theoretical concepts, the book offers a critical analysis of Weber’s notion of democracy, distinguishing its liberal as opposed to its elitist features.
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Norkus, Zenonas. 2004. Max Weber on nations and nationalism: Political economy before political sociology. Canadian Journal of Sociology 29.3: 389–418.
DOI: 10.1353/cjs.2004.0045Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber voiced doubts about the scientific value of the concepts of “ethnicity” and “nation,” yet his work produces outlines of two theories of the nation. In his political-sociological theory (revealed in Economy and Society [Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology]), it is understood as a status group united by common historical memory, fighting for the prestige from power and culture against other nations. Additionally, in his early work, Weber outlined the political-economical (or “national-economical”) theory of nation, conceiving nation as the organizational form of economic association that is optimal in the fight for “elbow room” in the globalized “Malthusian world” described by the classical model of long-term economic dynamics. The Weberian political-economical concept of nations and nationalism is explicated using the recent idea of rent-seeking, and is applied to highlight the deficiencies of the prevailing Gellner-Hobsbawm-Anderson theory of nations and nationalism.
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Comparative Sociology
As mentioned repeatedly in this article regarding other aspects of Weberian scholarship, comparative analysis of different civilizations in time and space was as natural and fundamental to Weber’s modus operandi as it was to Marx, Spencer, Comte, or Durkheim. By means of linguistic facility and the examination of primary documents (in medieval and modern Italian and Spanish, English, French, German, Latin, Greek, Russian, and Hebrew), Weber always asked the basic question facing all historians with global ambitions: What makes a given society or epoch unique, and what makes it ordinary, when compared with others? From this basic historiography—including primary research in Roman land-use practices as well as medieval Italian and Spanish business documents—Weber forged the rudiments of a comparative sociology that only recently has been equaled or in some ways bettered (by Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, Reinhard Bendix, Michael Mann, Perry Anderson, Charles Tilly, Jack Goldstone, and a few others). Though he never offered his followers a rulebook for research practice (as had Durkheim), attentive study of his three expansive studies of world religions, or his analysis of the 1905 Russian Revolution, or of the constitutional crisis of Germany following World War I, or of his sociologies of law or music indicates how a successful comparative sociology can be carried out. Weber’s attention to historical detail was so extreme in places that he nearly defeated his implied goal of establishing some means of comparison across societies. That he was as much dedicated to historical precision as to sociological generalization is precisely what gives Weber’s monographs their extraordinary value as exemplars of comparative analysis.
Arslan, M. 2001. The work ethic values of Protestant British, Catholic Irish, and Muslim Turkish managers. Journal of Business Ethics 31.4 (June): 321–339.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1010787528465Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
One of hundreds of attempts to “test empirically” the Weber thesis, this article compares the work ethics of practicing Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim managers in Britain, Ireland, and Turkey. Previous empirical and analytical research shows broad support for Weber’s claim, but this research revealed a considerable difference between Muslim and other groups in terms of Protestant work ethic (PWE) characteristics. The Muslim group showed the highest level, the Protestant group second, and the Catholic slightly less. The possible reasons for the higher level of the PWE values of Muslim managers are discussed in the light of historical, political, social, and economic developments in Turkey.
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Axtmann, Roland. 1990. The formation of the modern state: A reconstruction of Max Weber’s arguments. History of Political Thought 11.2 (Summer): 295–311.
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Because Weber never constructed a coherent “theory of the state” as such, his ideas must be assembled from his major works, especially Economy and Society (Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology). There one learns that by using Goethe’s idea of “elective affinity,” certain social structures and forms of action “go together” in ways that allow the analyst to assign social causation, up to a point. Axtmann shows how “the independent developmental logic of different social structures,” as outlined by Weber, points to “the internal dynamic of the different structural forms of social action,” all of which led to the development of macrostructures we now call “the modern nation-state.”
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Banton, Michael. 2007. Max Weber on “ethnic communities”: A critique. Nations and Nationalism 13.1: 19–35.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8129.2007.00271.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An untitled draft found among Weber’s posthumous papers was published in English translation as “Ethnic Groups.” (In the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, it is titled “Ethnic Communities.”) Here, Weber conceptualized the collective feeling of belonging due to shared ethnic origin as a social construct that underlies a desire to monopolize power and status within a marked geographic zone. Subsequently, Weber determined to put an end to the use of collectivist concepts, but at the time of writing he treated groups as real entities rather than using the concept of group as a way to explain behavior. Since he wrote the piece, the causal connections in ethnic group formation and maintenance have been more closely linked.
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Buss, Andreas E. 1985a. Max Weber and Asia: Contributions to the sociology of development. Munich: Weltforum Verlag.
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Brief introduction to Weber’s ideas about Asian religion and economic development, paired with Buss 1985b.
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Buss, Andreas E., ed. 1985b. Max Weber in Asian studies. International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology 42. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill.
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Buss assembled a small set of essays bearing on the topic, which include “Max Weber’s Contributions to Questions of Development in Modern India” by Buss himself; “Max Weber and the Modernization of India” by the noted specialist Milton Singer; “This Worldly Transcendentalism and the Structuring of the World—Why No Capitalism in China?” by an American sociologist, Gary G. Hamilton; “Max Weber on Japan” by Karl-Heinz Golzio; “Weber and Islam in Southeast Asia” by John Clammer; and “Max Weber and the Relation of Religious to Social Change” by Trevor Ling.
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Finley, M. I. 1985. Max Weber and the Greek city-state. In Ancient history: Evidence and models. By M. I. Finley, 88–103. London: Chatto and Windus.
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The noted ancient historian comments here on Weber’s writings on the ancient world. These essays deal with methodological and historiographical issues in ancient Greek and Roman history. Despite incisive questions about uses of evidence and methods when applied to ancient sources, Finley in the end praises Weber qua ancient historian. These essays deal with methodological and historiographical issues in ancient Greek and Roman history. A final essay considers some of Max Weber’s ideas about Greek history—the debate over phylai and a supposed shift from tribal to territorial organization, the polis as a form of “charismatic domination,” and the nature of Greek law—using these as a basis for broader reflections.
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Love, John R. 1991. Antiquity and capitalism: Max Weber and the sociological foundations of Roman civilization. London and New York: Routledge.
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An application of Weber’s analytic tools and historiographical technique to the case of Rome, along the way probing the differences between “capitalism” as understood in the ancient case as opposed to the early modern European instance Weber wrote about in The Protestant Ethic (see entries under The Protestant Ethic Debate). Contrasting Marx’s with Weber’s ideas about antiquity, Love analyzes Roman social structure, politics, socioeconomic relations, and related matters not as a conventional historian, but as a sociologist. A novel work.
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Martinussen, John, ed. 1994. The theoretical heritage from Marx and Weber in development studies. Papers presented at a research training course held in Gilleleje, Denmark, in April 1994. International Development Studies, Occasional Paper 10. Roskilde, Denmark: Roskilde Univ.
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Fairly typical of its time when cosmopolitan scholars tried to bring Marx (post-USSR) and Weber together in some fruitful way when explaining global development or misdevelopment.
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Momigliano, Arnaldo. 1986. Two types of universal history: The cases of E. A. Freeman and Max Weber. Journal of Modern History 58.1 (March): 235–245.
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The nonpareil ancient historian contrasts the universal histories of Weber (oriented toward Jewish type) with E. A. Freeman (oriented toward Greek type). Momigliano was notoriously hard to impress when considering historiographical technique, yet Weber comes through his examination with high praise. Reprinted in Momigliano’s Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1987), pp. 121–134.
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Mueller, Gert H. 1990. Max Weber and the religions of Asia. In Time, place, and circumstance: Neo-Weberian studies in comparative religious history. Edited by William Swatos Jr., 17–27. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
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A useful review-essay on two of Wolfgang Schluchter’s edited collections in German, Max Weber’s Study of Confucianism and Taoism and Max Weber’s Study of Hinduism and Buddhism. Because these works were never translated into English in toto, Mueller’s analysis is welcome, especially since Schluchter and his colleagues took this kind of work to a level not otherwise available.
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Munshi, Surendra. 1988. Max Weber on India: An introductory critique. Contributions to Indian Sociology 22.1 (January–June): 1–34.
DOI: 10.1177/006996688022001001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Based on the original text, Gesammelte aufsätze zur religionssoziologie, 2 vols. (Tübingen, Germany: J. C. B. Mohr, 1920–1921), an exposition of Weber’s argument regarding Hinduism in India is presented, in part to overcome errors found in English translations. A substantive and methodological critique draws on some of Weber’s original sources and on contemporary research. Far from establishing his case, Weber, like Hegel, found himself with two irreconcilable images of India. Weber’s method in his sociology of religion is questioned insofar as he formulated an ideal negative type of India. Nonetheless, his study of Hinduism is an important work, a document on the spirit of the age that made it possible for him to assert the universal significance of exclusively Occidental phenomena.
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van der Sprenkel, Otto B. 1964. Max Weber on China. History and Theory 3.3: 348–370.
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Despite Weber’s methodological flaws, he made a fundamental contribution to Sinology. The flaw lay in faulty translations and sources, sometimes grossly misleading, as well in taking material from widely different periods of Chinese history. Weber’s writings on China contain errors of detail, and some of his generalizations are incorrect, yet his positive contributions abound. Notable are (1) Weber’s correct assignment of the beginnings of “rational” policies in internal administration, military organization, and the like, to the Warring States period; (2) the importance he gives to water control as mainly responsible for the growth of centralized political authority; and (3) his unerring identification of the “literati” as the key status group in Chinese society, and of the bureaucracy as its creation and creature. While there were indeed irrational elements in Chinese government, Weber ignored certain modifying factors and fundamental contradictions within the bureaucracy. However, he deserves high praise for recognizing lineage as central to Chinese civilization. A measure of the negative and positive sides of Weber’s analysis of China comes out magnificently in his favor. Reprinted in George H. Nadel’s Studies in the Philosophy of History (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 198–220.
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Introduction
A principal founder of modern sociology, Max Weber Jr. was born 21 April 1864, to a prominent Prussian lawyer/politician and a pious mother, in Erfurt, Prussia. He was the eldest of eight children (his brother, Alfred, also became a noted sociologist and cultural analyst). Max married his cousin, Marianne Schnitger, in 1893; the couple had no children. He died unexpectedly, a victim of the global influenza pandemic, on 14 June 1920, at age fifty-six. Raised in a wealthy suburb of Berlin, he suffered childhood illnesses that left him confined to bed, where he became bookish. His father’s large home saw gatherings of the local and national political and intellectual elite, and he overheard conversations that drew him into a realm of rarefied cultural awareness. Given his protean appetite for knowledge, he wrote essays on ponderous topics while still in middle school, yet he never took formal schooling very seriously, educating himself through reading and interaction with academic relatives and houseguests. Formally, he pursued law, economics, and philosophy at Heidelberg, Straßburg, Berlin, and Göttingen (1882–1886); served in the army reserve for two years during college; and then studied law at Berlin, graduating in 1889. He then precociously won academic appointments at Berlin and Freiburg, but was forced to retire from teaching after a massive nervous breakdown that immobilized him from 1897 until 1903. He recovered enough to take an extended trip to the United States in 1904. Freed from teaching duties by an inheritance, he spent the next sixteen years or so producing a body of sociocultural, economic, and sociological analysis that is second to none in the history of modern social science. Weber’s common fame rests on his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1930 and Weber 2002, cited under The Protestant Ethic Debate), in which he demonstrated why northern European Protestant behavior was more conducive to the formation of early capitalism than were southern European Catholic beliefs and practices, a hypothesis that has inspired thousands of commentaries and critiques. But he also contributed fundamental works to the sociology of law (which he virtually invented), the sociology of music (also a first), the sociology of the economy, the philosophy of social science method, the comparative sociology of religion (also his creation), social stratification, the sociology of bureaucracy and of power and “charisma” (his term), and so on.
The following is a chronology of Weber’s major works: On the History of Medieval Trading Companies, 1889, age 25 (120 pages); Roman Agrarian History, 1891, age 27 (280 pages); Conditions of Agricultural Workers in East Prussia, 1892, age 28 (900 pages); The Stock Market, 1894–1895, age 30 (329 pages); Agrarian Conditions in Antiquity, 1897, age 33 (400 pages); The Protestant Ethic, 1905, age 41 (250 pages); Roscher and Knies, 1903–1906 (300 pages); Bourgeois Democracy in Russia, 1906, age 42 (250 pages); Critique of Stammler, 1907, age 43 (200 pages); Psychophysics of Industrial Labor, 1908, age 44 (120 pages); Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, 1909, age 45 (400 pages); On the Categories of Interpretive Sociology, 1913, age 49 (200 pages); Religion of China, 1916, age 52 (450 pages); Religion of India (400 pages); Ancient Judaism, 1917, age 53 (500 pages); Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany, 1918, age 54 (130 pages). Other major works include the posthumously published Collected Political Writings (1921), Economy and Society (1921), Rational and Social Foundations of Music (1921), and General Economic History (1923).
Weber’s Works in German
Weber 2001 is an online version of Max Weber: Gesammelte Werke und Schriften, an electronic source for Weber’s works in German that allows for terminological searches. This collection, originally on CD-ROM and compiled by Karsten Worm, includes “all of Weber’s published writings, lectures, and articles published in journals,” according to its bibliographical description. Economy and Society (Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology), a massive study assembled posthumously (in 1922) from Weber’s papers by his wife (herself an important intellectual and feminist leader in Germany), and wholly translated into English in 1968 for the first time, is the most important single collection of Weber’s work. For complete details on the chronology of composition, see Riesebrodt 2002, an online bibliography of Weber’s works. Sica 2004 (cited under Biographies, Handbooks, Bibliographies, Journals), the standard bibliography of works in English concerning Weber, includes over 4,800 items. This list continues to grow, because as Marx and Freud become, for many scholars, less tenable as the major analysts of the modern world, Weber’s ideas become ever more pertinent and revealing.
Riesebrodt, Martin. 2002. Bibliographie zur Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck.
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Offered as part of the Mohr Gesamtausgabe, provides a comprehensive chronological bibliography and publication details of all of Weber’s writings. In German.
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Weber, Max. 2001. Max Weber: Gesammelte Werke und Schriften. Edited and compiled by Karsten Worm. Charlottesville, VA: InteLex.
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This was originally a CD-ROM but is now offered online through certain university libraries and by paid subscription. It includes “all of Weber’s published writings, lectures, and articles published in journals,” according to its bibliographical description. Also included is the first (1922) edition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, “Drei reinen Typen der legitimen Herrschaft” from the Preussische Jahrbücher (1922), plus all seven volumes of his Gesammelte Aufsätze on social science and policy, politics, comparative religion, and economic history. Six extra articles from the Frankfurter Zeitung are also included, along with his writings about Russia, as well as important review-essays on books by Adolf Weber and A. Lewenstein.
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Selected Works in English Translation
The publication date of an English translation of one of Weber’s works bears no relation to either the date of composition or the date of publication in German.
Early Work on History and Political-Economics
Weber was trained first as a lawyer, second as a political-economist, and third as a historian. He did superior work in the second and third categories, though he very seldom practiced law and was rejected from the first legal job to which he applied. His academic work was superior in that he combined economics, historical archival work, and the nascent field of sociology into a mixture that was heretofore absent from German intellectual life (with the exception of Ferdinand Toennies’s Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887). Weber learned the craft of rigorous analytic thinking from his legal training, and the requirements of archival interpretation from his work in ancient and medieval history. This proved to be an exquisite combination for what would become “Weberian” sociology.
Weber, Max. 1979. Developmental tendencies in the situation of East Elbian rural labourers. Translated by Keith Tribe. Economy and Society 8.2 (May): 177–205.
DOI: 10.1080/03085147900000007Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber analyzes the results of the third survey (1894; surveys were also administered in 1849 and 1873) of rural laborers, executed by means of a questionnaire given to landowners in a discussion of changes in the lives of laborers and the arrangement of labor, particularly as affected by the extent to which the large landowners chose to participate in global markets. Reprinted in Keith Tribe’s Reading Weber (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 158–187.
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Weber, Max. 1985. “Roman” and “Germanic” law. International Journal of the Sociology of Law 13.3 (August): 237–246.
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Weber details the relationship between law and capitalism, emphasizing the distinction between the two forms of legal development and how each affected commerce differently. First published in 1895.
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Weber, Max. 2000. “Commerce on the stock and commodity exchanges.” Translated by Steven Lestition. Theory and Society 29.3 (June): 339–371.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1007003313032Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber’s description of the inner workings of exchanges of the period, based in part on his knowledge of his extended family’s commercial dealings going back several generations.
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Weber, Max. 2002. The history of commercial partnerships in the Middle Ages. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lutz Kaelber. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
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This work, Weber’s first dissertation, is an examination of the formation of commercial law. This constitutes something of a bridge between Weber’s earlier works on law and ancient history and later works such as The Protestant Ethic. The editor also supplies translations of ancillary material that Weber used in writing the book.
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Weber, Max. 2008. Roman agrarian history. Translated by Richard I. Frank. Claremont, CA: Regina.
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This early work qualified Weber for university-level teaching. It addresses Roman property use and related law. Its technical nature required Weber to study sparse documents of the time and enter into a public debate with Theodor Mommsen, the leading historian of his period and an old family friend of the Webers.
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General Sociology
As sociology was being formed between about 1850 and 1900—in Britain (principally) by Herbert Spencer; in France by Emile Durkheim; in the United States by Lester Ward, Franklin Giddings, and Albion Small (at the “Chicago School”); and in Germany by Weber, Georg Simmel, and Ferdinand Toennies—Weber’s style of work provided a unique perspective that is now known as “macrosociology” or “comparative-historical sociology,” and sometimes as “action theory.” It was this macro perspective, featuring large-scale social structures, that complemented Simmel’s microsociological analysis of face-to-face interaction. Weber’s posthumous masterwork (assembled by his wife, Marianne, and her colleagues), Economy and Society (Weber 1968a), provided the most elaborate analytic framework for the macro dimension, a role that it continues to fill even today.
Weber, Max. 1906. The relations of the rural community to other branches of social science. Translated by Charles W. Seidenadel. In Congress of Arts and Science, Universal Exposition, St. Louis. Vol. 7, Economics, politics, jurisprudence, social science. Edited by Howard J. Rogers, 725–746. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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A lengthy speech delivered in part in St. Louis during the Webers’ transformative US trip, in which he discussed the particularities of social conditions of life in rural areas versus the city, comparing Europe with the United States. Unlike Weber’s other work.
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Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in sociology. Translated and edited, with an introduction, by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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This is a classic collection of newly translated selections from Weber’s major works, organized into sections on Weber’s biography, science and politics, power, religion, and social structures. The most widely read collection of Weber in print, not likely to be superseded, especially due to the canonical introduction, with information provided by Gerth, and prose by Mills. Reissued with a new preface by Bryan S. Turner (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2009).
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Weber, Max. 1947. The theory of social and economic organization. Translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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The longest and earliest translation from Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, accompanied by a lengthy Parsons introduction that locates Weber in Parsons’s developing scheme of “grand theory.” This work was subsumed in the Roth edition of Economy and Society (Weber 1968a), which first appeared twenty years later. The Parsons volume was canonical until Roth’s appeared, yet Parsons’s remained important because it was much cheaper and less unwieldy than the complete version published by Bedminster Press.
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Weber, Max. 1954. Max Weber on law in economy and society. Edited by Max Rheinstein. Translated by Max Rheinstein and Edward Shils. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954.
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Contains selections from Economy and Society that are focused on law, along with a masterful, essential introduction by Rheinstein. Basic work in comparative legal studies with emphases on the differences between common law and Roman, Islamic, Confucian, and ancient Jewish traditions, and comparisons between these and modern German law as known to Weber as a trained lawyer.
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Weber, Max. 1956. “Max Weber on bureaucratization in 1909.” In German politics: A study in political sociology. 2d. rev. and enlarged ed. Edited by J. P. Mayer, 125–131. London: Faber and Faber.
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Stenographic record of a speech on bureaucracy given to the Verein fuer Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy) in Vienna in 1909.
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Weber, Max. 1968a. Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology. 3 vols. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. New York: Bedminster.
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Reprinted in two volumes (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978). This is Weber’s defining work, assembled posthumously by his wife and students, and it is one of the most important works in social science. Many passages in this exploration of the interactions of culture and structure are classics themselves. Weber covers topics such as religion, law, action, the economy, and the organization of society, with an eye to the dynamics of power differentials.
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Weber, Max. 1968b. Max Weber on charisma and institution building: Selected papers. Edited by S. N. Eisenstadt. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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This collection of previously translated material brings together relevant selections on the relationship between charisma and various aspects of institution building. Reflecting the editor’s interests, Weber’s work from various periods is somewhat artificially joined under headings that emphasize how charismatic power interacts with a variety of social structures. Usefully connects Weber’s writing with contemporary research interests of the 1960s.
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Weber, Max. 1971. Max Weber: The interpretation of social reality. Edited by J. E. T. Eldridge. New York: Scribner.
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Selections drawn from a broad range of Weber’s work. Includes the first English translation of his plan for the study of occupational mobility, and reissues his important article on the reasons for Rome’s decline.
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Weber, Max. 1978. Max Weber: Selections in translation. Edited by W. G. Runciman. Translated by Eric Matthews. Cambidge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511810831Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A broad selection of Weber’s writings, organized into sections on methods, ideology, politics, and history, among others, including several otherwise unavailable translations, most notably his pungent 1907 polemic against Freudianism as practiced by the libertine Otto Gross.
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Weber, Max. 1994. Sociological writings. Edited by Wolf Heydebrand. New York: Continuum.
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Retranslations from Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft by Martin Black and Lance Garmer (pp. 28–122). This collection consists of a wide variety of selections from Weber’s work, including some then-new translations: “The Concept of Social Action,” “Power, Authority, and Imperative Control,” “Bureaucratic Authority,” “The Distribution of Power within the Political Community,” “The Chinese Literati,” “The Origins of Modern Capitalism,” “Judaism, Christianity, and the Socioeconomic Order,” “Definition of Sociology,” “Ideal-Type Constructs,” “Science as a Vocation,” and other essays.
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Weber, Max. 2004. The essential Weber: A reader. Edited by Sam Whimster. London: Routledge.
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Central themes highlighted in the collection include the developmental logic of world religions, the rise of modern capitalism, the multidimensionality of power in societies, the dilemmas of modernity, the theory of social action, ideal types, and the objectivity of knowledge. Most of the selections are newly translated to improve accuracy and allow Weber to speak in a more contemporary idiom.
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Weber, Max. 2005. Max Weber: Readings and commentary on modernity. Edited by Stephen Kalberg. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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Gathers Weber’s writings on a broad array of themes, including the nature of work, the political culture of democracy, the uniqueness of the West, the character of the family and race relations, the role of science, and the fate of ethical action in the modern world. Organizational topics guided by a pivotal theme of Weberian thought: “How do we live?” and “How can we live in the industrial society?”
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Methodology
These works are some of Weber’s most difficult to translate and to comprehend in English. His fierce and highly technical debates with Rudolf Stammler, Benedetto Croce, Wilhelm Roscher, Wilhelm Dilthey, and dozens of other “epistemologists” active during his lifetime illustrate Weber’s unending pursuit of a methodological platform from which sociology could launch its studies without appearing to ape either the natural sciences or the arts.
Lassman, Peter, Irving Velody, and Herminio Martins, eds. 1989. Max Weber’s “Science as a vocation.” London: Unwin Hyman.
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This collection includes some original translations and includes selections from Weber’s followers and opponents in the 1920s, which provide context for Weber’s thought on the subject. Little of this material has been available in English.
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Weber, Max. 1975a. R. Stammler’s “surmounting” of the materialist conception of history, part I. Translated by Martin Albrow. Journal of Law and Society 2.2: 129–152.
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Weber critically reviews the second edition of philosopher of law Rudolph Stammler’s work, which was itself a critique of and response to Marx. This piece explains in part Weber’s stance on methodology. Part 2 in British Journal of Law and Society 3.1 (1976): 17–43.
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Weber, Max. 1975b. Roscher and Knies: The logical problems of historical economics. Translated by Guy Oakes. New York: Free Press.
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Here, Weber is concerned less with those named in the title than he is with a general critique of the logical and methodological bases of the discipline of historical economics. They were both more established and recognized experts on historical methods, and the “logic” that they believed should direct historical analysis. Weber’s critique of their work is unforgiving.
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Weber, Max. 1977. Critique of Stammler. Translated by Guy Oakes. New York: Free Press.
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Weber’s extended critique of Rudolf Stammler’s Refutation of the Materialist Conception of History (1906; also known as The Historical Materialist Conception of Economy and Law: A Sociophilosophical Investigation). Shows Weber to have been a careful student of epistemological debates of the time, arguing not only with Stammler, but with many other scholars who at the time were deciding how to contend with Marxist interpretations of history.
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Weber, Max. 1981. Some categories of interpretive sociology. Translated by Edith Graber. Sociological Quarterly 22.1 (Winter): 151–180.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-8525.1981.tb00654.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
See also Graber’s “Translator’s Introduction to Max Weber’s Essay on Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology,” Sociological Quarterly 22.1 (Winter): 145–150. Weber’s detailed sketch of his method of interpretive sociology, including sections on action and institutions, and the relationship of interpretive sociology to psychology and legal dogmatics.
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Weber, Max. 1995. On the method of social-psychological inquiry and its treatment. Translated by Thomas W. Segady. Sociological Theory 13.1 (March): 100–106.
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Weber’s review of works by Adolf Levenstein, including a critique of survey research methods. First published 1909.
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Weber, Max. 2011. Methodology of social sciences. Translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, with a new introduction by Robert J. Antonio and Alan Sica. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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A collection of Weber’s most widely read writings on methodology, which proved influential upon their initial appearance in English. Here, Weber introduces “ideal-types,” “value-freedom,” and other concepts concerning the success with which social science might approach an ideal of “objectivity.” This volume is a reset and corrected edition of Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949).
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Weber, Max. 2012. Max Weber: Collected methodological writings. Edited by Hans Henrik Bruun and Sam Whimster. Translated by Hans Henrik Bruun. London: Routledge.
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The most complete selection in English of Weber’s essays on methodology, broadly defined. Bruun’s 1972 monograph on Weber’s methodology set a high standard for such works, and his translation is likely the most accurate currently available. An essential source for serious students of Weber’s epistemology.
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The Protestant Ethic Debate
Weber became instantly famous in 1904–1905 when two articles in a fairly obscure academic journal were suddenly being read very widely, even beyond Germany’s borders. Weber argued that capitalism’s roots lay in beliefs and social action more attuned to Protestant sects of northern Europe and England (and, later, in the United States) than in the Catholic countries of the Mediterranean, or elsewhere in the world. Naturally, Catholic scholars, among others, took immediate offense, and the debate has raged ever since. One bibliography many years ago already listed 1,600 scholarly items that dealt with “the Weber thesis.”
Chalcraft, David, and Austin Harrington, eds. 2001. The Protestant ethic debate: Max Weber’s replies to his critics, 1907–1910. Translated by Mary Shields. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2001.
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A collection of Weber’s exchanges with his critics Karl Fischer and Felix Rachfahl. Includes an introduction detailing the history of this ongoing debate.
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Weber, Max. 1930. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. Preface by R. H. Tawney. London: Allen and Unwin.
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Reprinted in paperback in 1958 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons). Reprinted with a new introduction by Anthony Giddens in 1976 (London: Allen and Unwin); same edition reprinted in 1992 (New York: Routledge). Reprinted and reset with a new introduction by Randall Collins in 1995 (Los Angeles: Roxbury); second edition published in 1998, with the addition of “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” as translated in From Max Weber; third edition, translated and introduced by Stephen Kalberg, published in 2001, with addition of “‘Prefatory Notes’ to the Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion,” and reissued by Oxford University Press, with supplementary materials, in 2011. Parsons’s translation was the initial English translation of this classic work. One of the most widely debated works in international social science, here Weber posits the idea that certain normatively powerful religious ideas unintentionally supported particular types of economic development in the early modern period in northern Europe, particularly those represented in Lutheranism, Calvinism, and other Protestant sects. Using Ben Franklin as a later, secularized exemplar of “the Protestant Ethic” in the United States, Weber argues that Marx’s “superstructure” could indeed motivate economic action rather than simply follow it. The debate rages on.
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Weber, Max. 1978. Anti-critical last word on The Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Wallace M. Davis. American Journal of Sociology 83.5 (March): 1105–1131.
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Felix Rachfahl was the most significant of Weber’s critics during his own lifetime, and this is the last of Weber’s responses in the published exchanges between the two.
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Weber, Max. 2002. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, and other writings. Edited and translated by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. New York: Penguin.
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A new translation of the classic. Parsons’s translation contained consequential inaccuracies that these translators seek to correct. Also includes a new translation of Weber’s writings on sects.
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Sociology of Comparative Religion
One of Weber’s many scholarly gifts was facility with foreign languages, which is a principal requirement for solid comparative analysis. As a young man he learned Hebrew for Bible study, and later in school he acquired Latin, Greek, English, and French. For his dissertation work he learned medieval Spanish and Italian, and in a six-week period of being tutored by émigrés, he gleaned enough Russian to read newspaper accounts of the 1905 Revolution as it unfolded. He did not learn Asian languages, but instead relied on some world-class “Orientalists” he knew well for help with translations and transliterations. It was on these bases that he wrote his incomparable studies of the relationship between religious beliefs and socioeconomic action in India, China, and Israel. He planned to write studies of Islam and medieval Catholicism as well, but ran out of time.
Weber, Max. 1951. The religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
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One of Weber’s four important studies of the various roles and effects of religion in society. In this volume, he focuses mostly on Confucianism and Taoism, and compares the economic development of this region to that in the West, insofar as it relates to religion. Sinologists have long regarded this as a fundamental work, despite arguments with Weber’s portrayal of Chinese society under the influence of Confucian ethics and their effect on commerce.
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Weber, Max. 1952. Ancient Judaism. Edited and translated by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
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The most substantial of Weber’s four major works on religion focuses on Judaism’s influence on and differences from Islam and Christianity, with many sidelong glances into other topics of sociological importance (e.g., the “pariah” condition of Jews). Probably the most lastingly important of his three books on comparative religion, largely due to Weber’s knowledge of Hebrew.
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Weber, Max. 1958. The religion of India: The sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
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Despite problems with the translation and transliteration of technical terms, this book remains essential for understanding Weber’s interpretation of religious beliefs, religiously motivated action, and the development of economic systems. Carefully relying on the best available scholarship (e.g., that of Paul Deussen), and despite lacking Sanskrit or Hindi, Weber persuasively analyzes the pivotal role of dharma throughout Indian history, showing how it constrained economic development among castes. He also comments on Ceylon, Korea, China, and Japan in terms of their religious and economic development.
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Weber, Max. 1963. The sociology of religion. Translated by Ephraim Fischoff. Introduction by Talcott Parsons. Boston: Beacon, 1963.
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This is the most complete and concise description of Weber’s sociology of religion, a lengthy excerpt from Economy and Society (and therefore subsumed in Roth’s complete edition; see Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology). It covers the emergence of modern religion, its association with various aspects of social strata, and its implications for the development of various types of societies. Reissued in 1993 with a new foreword by Ann Swidler.
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Weber, Max. 1973. Max Weber on church, sect, and mysticism. Translated by Jerome Gittleman. Sociological Analysis 34.2 (Summer): 140–149.
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Comments delivered by Weber at a colloquium held during the first meeting of the German Sociological Society. Other participants to whom Weber refers included Ferdinand Toennies, Ernst Troeltsch, and Georg Simmel.
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Weber, Max. 1985. “Churches” and “sects” in North America: An ecclesiastical socio-political sketch. Translated by Colin Loader. Sociological Theory 3.1 (Spring): 7–13.
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A precursor to later works such as The Protestant Ethic, written following Weber’s travels in the United States.
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Politics
Weber was born into politics, as his father was an associate of Bismarck and other prominent political actors in the Prussian state, as well as holding office himself. There was considerable speculation that Weber would run for office immediately following the removal of the German Kaiser in 1918 (against whom Weber wrote publicly), but his sudden death removed that possibility. Weber was intensely alert to the relationships among political power, economic power, legitimacy, tradition, and other components of political life and analysis, and in this he was a much better analyst than were Marx, Durkheim, or Simmel, each of whom understood parts of political life but lacked the comparative-historical breadth of Weber’s vision.
Weber, Max. 1967. A letter from Max Weber. Translated and introduced by Bruce B. Frye. Journal of Modern History 39.2 (June): 119–125.
DOI: 10.1086/240023Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber’s letter of resignation from a committee of the German Democratic Party, and an explanation for his action.
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Weber, Max. 1972. Max Weber’s proposal for the sociological study of voluntary associations. Translated by Everett C. Hughes. Journal of Voluntary Action Research 1.1 (January): 20–23.
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Translation of Geschäftsbericht (Market report), published in 1911. Describes Weber’s view of the significance of such associations and suggests a path for their study. Translated by an important American sociologist not usually associated with Weber studies.
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Weber, Max. 1980. The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address). Translated by Keith Tribe. Economy and Society 9.4 (November): 428–449.
DOI: 10.1080/03085148008538611Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Speech given by Weber upon his appointment to the University of Freiburg. An example of Weber’s simultaneous involvement in academia and politics. Reprinted in Keith Tribe’s Reading Weber (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 188–209.
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Weber, Max. 1986. The Reich president. Translated by Gordon C. Wells. Social Research 53.1: 125–132.
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Weber’s proposal for the governing of Germany as World War I came to an end. He was considered for, but was not appointed to, a high-ranking position. It was, in fact, his wife who was elected to political office around this time.
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Weber, Max. 1994. Weber: Political writings. Edited by Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This compilation of Weber’s writings on politics covers his thoughts on politics in the modern West as well as German politics specifically, including his important essay on socialism, another analyzing Russia’s prospects for democratic rule, and another on the spread of voting rights in Germany.
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Weber, Max. 1995. The Russian revolutions. Translated and edited by Gordon C. Wells and Peter Baehr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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Weber reflects on the 1905 Russian Revolution and possible paths forward for the nation. Weber was tutored by Russian émigrés in Heidelberg, learned the language in several months, read contemporary newspaper accounts from Russia about the 1905 Revolution, and wrote two extended treatments of those events which have, according to experts, held up remarkably well given the proximity of his analysis to the actual events as they occurred.
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Weber, Max. 2002. Voluntary associational life (Vereinswesen). Translated by Sung Ho Kim. Max Weber Studies 2.2 (May): 199–209.
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Weber’s thoughts on civil life, including voluntary associations, which were an ongoing focus in his work, both regarding politics as well as his fundamental theory of social action.
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Historical Economics
Weber’s first professorship was in a chair of political-economics, and because he was quite young by German standards to hold this job, he must have been very highly regarded as an economist. (At the time there were no professorships of “sociology” proper.) Weber’s second dissertation probed intricacies of Roman political-economy and land ownership practices, and his first dissertation had used archival materials from Italy and Spain to comprehend economic law and custom as applied to merchant shipping practices in the Middle Ages. Thus, it can be said that Weber came to sociology by way of law and economics—which is why he always held Marx, whose fascination with economics was equally profound, in high regard.
Weber, Max. 1950. The social causes of the decay of ancient civilization. Translated by Christian Mackauer. Journal of General Education 5.1: 75–88.
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From a lecture at Freiburg. Describes the internal characteristics of ancient, classical civilization that contributed to its deterioration.
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Weber, Max. 1976. The agrarian sociology of ancient civilizations. Translated by Richard I. Frank. London: NLB.
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This monograph is a comparative economic, political, and social history of ancient civilizations, including Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Rome. Of particular interest are the differences between Western and Eastern civilizations, insofar as they are the roots of modern differences; also includes “The Social Causes of the Decline of Ancient Civilization.” Reissued in 1988 by Verso Press, and in a “second edition” by Verso Classics in 1998.
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Weber, Max. 1981. General economic history. Translated by Frank H. Knight. New introduction by Ira J. Cohen. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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First published 1927 (London: Allen and Unwin). US edition published in 1927 (Greenberg Publishers); reissued 1950 (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 401 pages); reissued 1961 (New York: Collier Books, pages reset; 288 pages). This 1981 edition is also a reissue. After his death, this compilation was assembled from Weber’s lecture notes by his students. It is broad ranging and discusses the role of institutions and law in the economy, and although drier and less authoritative than Weber’s polished works, it has remained a vital resource in understanding economic development from a sociological point of view. The first third analyzes feudal social relations in Europe.
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Political-Economics
Weber’s book widely known in English as The City is in fact an excerpt from Economy and Society (Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology), and is more a history of cities as loci of economic and political development than a study of “urban sociology” of the type we would recognize as such today. Throughout Weber’s work, the connection between economics and all other aspects of social life was an intimate, even necessary one, and his ability to write technically sophisticated treatments of economics per se comes as a surprise to sociologists who know him for his more conventionally sociological research.
Tritsch, Walter. 1985. A conversation between Joseph Schumpeter and Max Weber. History of Sociology 6.1 (Fall): 167–172.
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Unusual document showing the friendly tension that existed between the two giants of 20th-century economics, intellectually similar but personally distant, with Schumpeter very much the junior scholar. Recorded from memory by Tritsch.
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Weber, Max. 1958. The city. Translated and edited by Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
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Weber’s comparative theory of urbanization through history, to be compared with Fustel de Coulanges’s work. The first English translation of this work, which is part of his Economy and Society. Remains fundamental for urban and comparative-historical sociology. Critics have disparaged the quality of the translation, which was repaired in the Roth/Wittich complete edition of Economy and Society (Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology).
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Weber, Max. 1975. Marginal utility theory and the so-called fundamental law of psychophysics. Translated by Louis Schneider. Social Science Quarterly 56:1 (June): 21–36.
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First published 1908. Weber reviews Lujo Brentano’s The Development of Value Theory, and as part of this effort also addresses the relationship between certain theories of psychology and economics. Specifically, Weber evaluates the utility of the Weber-Fechner Law—a notion named for two German psychologists, Ernst Weber (no relation to Max) and Gustav Fechner—as it might pertain to marginal utility theory. It posits that any change in sense perception is closely and proportionally related to any change in the intensity of the stimuli that were originally acting on the senses. Weber’s response to the application of this “law” to economic analysis was not warm.
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Weber, Max. 1999. Essays in economic sociology. Edited by Richard Swedberg. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Long introduction by the editor, along with a useful glossary of Weber’s economic terms, plus selections from previously published Weber translations. This collection of Weber’s writings on the economy is usefully organized into sections on the development of the economy, politics and law, religion and culture, and theoretical aspects.
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Weber, Max. 2000. Stock and commodity exchanges. Translated by Steven Lestition. Theory and Society 29.3 (June): 305–338.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1007042728962Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber describes the organization and purposes of, as well as differences between, various exchanges of the 19th century, informed not only by his research, but also by the long record of his extended family’s participation in these markets.
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Weber, Max. 2006a. Germany—Agriculture and forestry. Max Weber Studies 6.2: 207–230.
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Recently rediscovered, Weber outlines industry practices and economic structure, with some comparison to the United States. Introduction by Guenther Roth. First published in Encyclopedia Americana, 1907–1908.
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Weber, Max. 2006b. Germany—Industries. Max Weber Studies 6.2: 219–230.
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As with Weber 2006a, recently rediscovered. Weber outlines industry practices and economic structure, with some comparison to the United States.
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Sociology of Culture
It is fair to say that Weber invented the sociology of the press and the sociology of music, was the only classical theorist to interact personally with important African American intellectuals, and had planned on writing a large-scale study of Tolstoy’s novels and philosophy had he lived longer. He was a trained pianist and music theorist, read widely in literature, and was an art collector. His interest in what we now call the sociology of culture was lifelong and innovative, so much so that his small monograph on music (Weber 1958) has not been surpassed in the century since it was written. All this points to an aspect of Weber’s achievement that is underappreciated.
Shils, Edward, ed. and trans. 1974. Max Weber on universities: The power of the state and the dignity of the academic calling in Imperial Germany. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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A collection of Weber’s occasional comments on academic life, concerned mostly with what he saw as troubling developments in German universities, but also including comparisons with American universities. First published in Minerva 11.4 (October 1973): 571–632.
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Weber, Max. 1904. Letters to Booker T. Washington, September 25 and November 6, 1904. In Bryn Mawr College Archives. Bryn Mawr, PA: Bryn Mawr College.
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Letters from Weber to Washington about a potential meeting and the exchange of materials. Recovered by Lawrence Scaff, June 1994.
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Weber, Max. 1958. The rational and social foundations of music. Edited by Don Martindale and Johannes Riedel. Translated by Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrude Neuwirth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1958.
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A musicologically technical text in which Weber applies to music his idea that all aspects of Western society are becoming rationalized, which he does by comparing Western theories of harmony with those of the Middle East and Asia. He had been trained as a pianist. The quality of the translation has been disparaged by Weber specialists, but it has not been retranslated. Reprinted in 2009 (Mansfield Center, CT: Martino).
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Weber, Max. 1971. Max Weber on race and society. Introduction by Benjamin Nelson. Translated by Jerome Gittleman. Social Research 38.1 (Spring): 30–41.
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Weber’s speech to the German Sociological Association on the subject of race. The speech is largely a response to the application of crude Darwinism to the subject of race.
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Weber, Max. 1972. Georg Simmel as sociologist. Translated by Donald N. Levine. Social Research 39.1 (Spring): 155–163.
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Weber was both influenced by and critical of his close friend Simmel, and this is the only critique of his work of any length that Weber penned. It was not published during Weber’s lifetime, but was discovered later at the University of Munich.
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Weber, Max. 1973. Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois, March 30, 1905. In The correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois. Vol. 1, Selections, 1877–1934. Edited by Herbert Aptheker, 106–107. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press.
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Having met with Du Bois during his trip to the United States in 1904, and Du Bois having attended some of Weber’s early lectures at Berlin in the 1890s, Weber writes to Du Bois of his interest in having some of Du Bois’s work and other scholarship on the question of race in the United States translated into German.
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Weber, Max. 1976. Towards a sociology of the press. Journal of Communication 26.3 (Summer): 96–101.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.1976.tb01910.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
From a speech to the Congress of Sociologists in Frankfurt, 1910. Presents Weber’s ideas on how to proceed with, and the important questions to be addressed in, such a line of study, with emphases upon questions of method and reflections on the importance of mass communication.
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Weber, Max. 1979. Speech to German Sociological Association. Translated by Hanno Hardt. In Social theories of the press: Early German and American perspectives. By Hanno Hardt, 174–182. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE.
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In this translation of the first half of the 1910 speech on Zeitungwesen, Weber outlines his plan for a study of Germany’s newspapers, as well as the bases for a sociology of the press.
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Weber, Max. 1984. “Energetic” theories of culture. Translated by John Mark Mikkelson. Mid-American Review of Sociology 9.2: 33–58.
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This is a vigorous critique of the work of Wilhelm Ostwald, who sought to apply principles of the physical sciences to sociology, in Darwinist fashion. See accompanying “Note” by J. Mikkelson and Charles Schwartz (pp. 27–31). First published in 1909.
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Weber, Max. 1988. A letter from Indian Territory. Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology 16.2 (November): 133–136.
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Written during Weber’s trip through the United States, where he met a rich Cherokee Indian land agent in Muskogee and took a canoe trip through the swamps of eastern Oklahoma, meanwhile doing a quick ethnographic study of the local inhabitants, and reporting to his mother. Originally published in 1904.
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Weber, Max. 1998. Preliminary report on a proposed survey for a sociology of the press. Translated by Keith Tribe. History of the Human Sciences 11.2 (May): 111–120.
DOI: 10.1177/095269519801100207Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber’s proposed plan for a study of the press, designed to address such topics as the inner workings of the industry as well as the role of the press in the production of public opinion.
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Weber, Max. 1999. Letters from Ascona. In Max Weber and the culture of anarchy. Edited by Sam Whimster, 41–71. London: Macmillan.
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Letters written by Weber to his wife, Marianne, during his stays in Ascona, Switzerland. A group of liberated quasi-Freudians met there, many of whom were known to Weber—who served as their legal counsel when they were arrested in Italy—and he analyzed their beliefs and their behavior.
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Weber, Max, Alfred Ploetz, and W. E. B. Du Bois. 1973. Max Weber, Dr. Alfred Ploetz, and W. E. B. Du Bois (Max Weber on race and society II). Translated by Benjamin Nelson and Jerome Gittleman. Sociological Analysis 34.4: 308–312.
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Excerpts from proceedings of the German Sociological Society involving dialogue between Ploetz and Weber, in which Weber refers to Du Bois.
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Biographies, Handbooks, Bibliographies, Journals
Over the past seventy years or so, Weber’s ideas have inspired thousands of monographs, chapters, and articles in all the major world languages (see Sica 2004), and such works are now featured in a journal exclusively dedicated to his work, Max Weber Studies. In addition, there are a handful of nonredundant, seminal works without which an understanding of Weber’s remarkable background and its formative impact on his work cannot be understood. Most are in English and are listed here.
Baumgarten, Eduard, ed. 1964. Max Weber: Werk und person. Tübingen, West Germany: J. C. B. Mohr.
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A lengthy, essential collection of documentary materials and commentary, assembled by one of Weber’s relatives, which has played an important role in all subsequent Weber studies. Sadly, never translated into English.
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Diehl, Carl. 1923. The life and work of Max Weber. Quarterly Journal of Economics 38.1 (November): 87–107.
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One of the earliest accounts of Weber just postmortem in English, illustrating his importance to historical economists and other social scientists even before any of his major works were translated into English. Includes sections on Weber’s life, his position on methods, the “ideal-type” and its relevance for economics, and Weber’s sociology and its relationship to other social sciences.
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Green, Martin. 1988. The von Richthofen sisters: The triumphant and the tragic modes of love; Else and Frieda von Richthofen, Otto Gross, Max Weber, and D. H. Lawrence, in the years 1870–1970. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press.
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Controversial but illuminating study by a literary critic of the two women who captivated a number of important intellectuals in Weber’s circle, including Weber himself, his brother Alfred, Otto Gross, Edgar Jaffé, and the British novelist D. H. Lawrence. First book to document Weber’s romantic relationship with Else von Richthofen, the eventual lifelong companion to his brother, though via speculative evidence. Originally published in 1974 (New York: Basic Books).
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Kivisto, Peter, and William H. Swatos Jr. 1988. Max Weber: A bio-bibliography. New York: Greenwood.
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A valuable, trustworthy annotated bibliography of 902 items, in English and divided by topic; remains useful for material published until the mid-1980s. Includes a concise biographical study, an essay about Weber’s reception in the United States, plus lists of works under topics of biography and intellectual history, methodology, religion, politics and social classes, and modernity, rationalization, and bureaucracy. Indexed by author and topic.
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Max Weber Studies. 2000–.
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A semiannual, begun in 2000; editor’s office is at London Metropolitan University.
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Meurer, Bärbel. 2010. Marianne Weber: Leben und werk. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck.
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The only detailed biography of Weber’s wife, the first half of which deals with her life as Weber’s companion, nurse, and intellectual partner, as well as her own writings as an early German feminist. Also treats her lifelong effort to protect and expand Weber’s scholarly reputation following his premature death, including her relations with American scholars who developed the Weberian tradition after World War II. Shows that her work as feminist theorist was achieved without much overt aid from her husband.
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Mitzman, Arthur. 1984. The iron cage: An historical interpretation of Max Weber. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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Originally published 1969 (New York: Alfred Knopf). An essential biography written by an accomplished intellectual historian who also wrote about Tönnies, Sombart, and Michels. Attacked by some as psychologistic and reductionistic, the book was the first to give Weber a human dimension as he worked his way through the difficulties of maturing in an authoritarian family and state, and as he came to terms with the irrationality central to interpersonal as well as societal life during his adulthood. Well counterposed to Bendix’s biographical study (Bendix 1960, cited under Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1960 and 1970).
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Mommsen, Wolfgang J., and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds. 1987. Max Weber and his contemporaries. London and Boston: Allen & Unwin.
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A unique, lengthy volume published by the German Historical Institute in which top Weber experts and other scholars assess the personal, professional, or intellectual relationship Weber had with (and his influence upon) many authors, including his brother Alfred, Sombart, Schumpeter, Michels, Mosca and Pareto, Sorel, Durkheim, Lutherans, Troeltsch, Karl Lamprecht, Otto Hintze, Friedrich Naumann, Walther Rathenau, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, and many others, including Nietzsche.
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Palyi, Melchior, ed. 1923. Hauptprobleme der soziologie: Erinnerungsgabe für Max Weber. 2 vols. Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.
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Palyi (b. 1892–d. 1970), eventually a conservative economist and US newspaper columnist, worked with Marianne Weber after Max’s death in assembling his General Economic History from lecture notes. He also gathered this volume of reminiscences from scholars and friends who knew Weber personally, including Sombart, Kantorowicz, Tönnies, Carl Schmitt, Gustav Landauer, Emil Lederer, Paul Honigsheim, and others. There is no comparable volume.
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Radkau, Joachim. 2009. Max Weber: A biography. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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Only detailed biography (by a nonspecialist) that competes with Marianne Weber’s account of eighty years before. Well received generally, though too psychologistic for some readers, and too speculative in terms of Weber’s psychopathology, sexual and otherwise. Likely too “presentist” in part, yet likely to become the standard until more revealing letters are slowly published and another attempt is made some years hence. Useful supplement but hardly a substitute for Marianne’s version (see Weber 1975).
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Schroeter, Gerd. 1980. Max Weber as outsider: His nominal influence on German sociology in the twenties. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16.4: 317–332.
DOI: 10.1002/1520-6696(198010)16:4%3C317::AID-JHBS2300160404%3E3.0.CO;2-ASave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Schroeter was an unusually careful native German scholar who immigrated to Canada when young and wrote penetrating essays in English on intellectual history, including this unusual analysis of Weber’s rapid loss of intellectual influence in the decade following his death. This topic has seldom been examined elsewhere. Important themes during the Weimar Republic are presented, including social integration, the shattered faith in reason, and the attempt to create a uniquely “German” sociology. Neither Weber’s conception of sociology nor his methodological formulations had much impact during this period, because he died too early, German sociology lacked the necessary institutionalization, and there was a reorientation in scholarship following World War I, which Weber’s ideas could not bridge. Reprinted in Peter Hamilton’s Max Weber: Critical Assessments, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 33–51.
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Seyfarth, Constans, and Gert Schmidt, comps. 1977. Max Weber bibliographie: Eine dokumentation der sekundärliteratur. Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag.
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The only extensive bibliography of works pertaining to Weber up to the point of its publication, listing 2,348 items without annotation, mostly in German and English, arranged chronologically from 1919 forward. Some introductory material in both languages. Divided into (1) Weber’s works; (2) books and dissertations on Weber; and (3) articles and chapters on Weber. Printed in typescript and poorly bound; detailed separate indices by name and by subject. Second, unchanged edition published in 1982.
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Sica, Alan. 2004. Max Weber: A comprehensive bibliography. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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As comprehensive in scope as possible up to its point of publication, this work lists all of Weber’s works in English translation, selected reviews of his works in English, most theses and dissertations pertaining to Weber, and a sub-bibliography of works concerning Weber’s concept of “rationalization,” concluding with a long list of works, organized alphabetically by author, that bear on Weber and his work, totaling nearly 5,000 items.
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Swedberg, Richard, comp., with Olga Agevall. 2005. The Max Weber dictionary: Key words and central concepts. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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Uniquely useful reference tool by a leading authority on Weber (as well as on Schumpeter and Tocqueville). Not only are all the major and minor conceptual distinctions in Weber defined in English, but the German originals are usually stated at the same time for ease of cross-reference. German and English texts where Weber uses a particular term are specified precisely. There is also an excellent bibliography of Weberian works.
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Turner, Stephen P., ed. 2000. The Cambridge companion to Weber. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Turner, an acute Weberian, invited first-rate specialists to write about most aspects of Weber’s ideas and life that still inspire scholarship. Chapters include “Rationality, Economy, and Society” by Jon Elster; “Rationalization and Culture” by Alan Sica; “Psychophysics and Culture” by Wolfgang Schluchter; “The Rule of Man over Man: Politics, Power, and Legitimation” by Peter Lassman; “Weber on the Cultural Situation of the Modern Age” by Lawrence A. Scaff; “Global Capitalism and Multi-Ethnicity: Max Weber Then and Now” by Guenther Roth; “Constitutional Caesarism: Weber’s Politics in Their German Context” by Sven Eliaeson; “Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” by Alastair Hamilton; “Max Weber’s Orient” by John Love; “Max Weber’s Ancient Judaism” by John Love; “Max Weber as Legal Historian” by Harold J. Berman and Charles J. Reid Jr.; “From Agrarian History to Cross-Cultural Comparisons: Weber on Greco-Roman Antiquity” by Wilfried Nippel; and “Max Weber as Economist and Economic Historian” by Stanley L. Engerman.
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Weber, Marianne. 1975. Max Weber: A biography. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Wiley.
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Reissued with a new introduction by Guenther Roth in 1988 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction). Marianne Weber defined Weber for all interested parties as soon as she published her biography in 1926. Even though no English translation was available for fifty years thereafter, serious students of Weber read her book in the original, so it was widely known. Some critics refer to the book dismissively as hagiography, but aside from her undeniable yet canny celebration of Weber, the book includes analysis of his heritage and work that is unavailable elsewhere. First German edition: Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild (Tübingen: Mohr, 1926).
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Broadscale Studies and Monographs
Many leading Anglophone sociologists have “had a go” at interpreting Weber for their less theoretically inclined colleagues, beginning with Talcott Parsons’s effort in 1937 (Parsons 1937, cited under Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1930 and 1960). Over time, it has become obvious that not all informed readers can agree on “the one best way” of interpreting his work, which means that a half-dozen arguable positions exist—Weber as functionalist, neo-functionalist, quasi-Marxist, anti-Marxist, cultural theorist, religionist, lawyer, obsessive rationalist, and so on—and each carries the day for a while, then subsides. If serving as the launching pad for heated argument is the measure of true importance in the history of social science theorizing, then Weber is at least as important as anybody else, including Marx, Durkheim, or Freud. The difficulty facing novices is not knowing where to jump into the long-standing fray. The books, articles, and chapters listed in this section would very likely fall into any serious Weberian’s syllabus of essential works, realizing all the while that studying them would require many years. Put another way, any of these works would offer a view of Weber that is not fundamentally distorting, and many of them have the added virtue of offering a reading of the works that is far clearer than the originals.
Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1930 and 1960
Karl Löwith was twenty-three when Weber died, and even though he became Heidegger’s student, eventually he would become professor of philosophy at Heidelberg University, Weber’s home for many years. The influence of Weber’s ideas on Löwith’s generation was deep and broad, and his major books reveal this sensitivity to Weber’s philosophical dimension (see Löwith 1982). Similarly, Talcott Parsons, though American by birth, received his doctorate at Heidelberg very soon after Weber’s death, and he, too, relied on Weber’s ideas throughout his career, not only translating Weber for English speakers but also interpreting his work for decades (see Parsons 1937). There were many other articles and books about Weber published during this period, but the work of these two men was unusually influential.
Löwith, Karl. 1982. Max Weber and Karl Marx. Edited by Tom Bottomore and William Outhwaite. Translated by Hans Fantel. London: Allen & Unwin.
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Originally published 1932; reissued with a new preface by Bryan Turner (London: Routledge, 1993). Löwith (or Loewith) was a student of Heidegger and the author of the notable From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). He wrote this short book in order to pose his own existentialist concerns alongside the alienation theory of Marx versus the rationalization theory of Weber. After eighty years it remains the best shorthand guide to the philosophical meaning of the two complementary yet distinct arguments, both of which were fired in the oven of capitalist development. It probes the question “What does capitalism do to individual consciousness?”.
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Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The structure of social action: A study in social theory with special reference to a group of recent European writers. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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Reprinted in paperback in two volumes (New York: Free Press, 1968). See pp. 500–694. Though at first little noticed, this book slowly changed the landscape of social theorizing in the United States and Britain as its author became progressively more famous. Parsons believed that Durkheim, Weber, Alfred Marshall, and Vilfredo Pareto (omitting Marx and Simmel) “converged” in their understanding of human action, getting away from the overly simple models of rational behavior popular among marginalist economists, and embracing normatively driven theories that became, in Parsons’s hands, the structural-functionalism he and Merton pushed to the sociological foreground during the 1950s and 1960s.
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Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1960 and 1970
This was a golden age in Weber interpretation, though each writer came at Weber from a distinctive angle. Raymond Aron was the doyen of French intellectuals in the social sciences, but his youth in Alsace gave him a familiarity with German language and culture, which fruitfully complemented his Gallic work setting (see Aron 1967). Reinhard Bendix, a German who spent his entire career in the United States, was instructed by his father, a scholarly judge, to study Weber and others of his era, and his biography of Weber (Bendix 1960) was for decades the principal source of information for readers in the Anglophone sphere. Julien Freund’s book (Freund 1968) is one of the most astute to have come out of this period; in it he probes Weber’s concern with irrationality and other matters given shorter shrift in Aron 1967 and Bendix 1960. Alfred Schutz tried to join the ideas of Husserl, his teacher, with those of Weber regarding social action, in a unique fusion that strongly influenced many scholars who did research informed by phenomenology or action theory (see Schutz 1967).
Aron, Raymond. 1967. Main currents in sociological thought. Vol. 2. Translated by Richard Howard and Helen Weaver. New York: Basic Books.
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Aron was for several decades the leading French interpreter of German social thought, and after his works were translated into English during the 1960s, his influence broadened. His analysis of Weber is “elegant” in true French fashion, in that, unlike so many German Weberians, he did not clog his books with burdensome scholarly apparatus. The Weber volume of his Main Currents was the primer of choice among college teachers during the 1960s and 1970s, so that many students knew Weber only through Aron’s interpretation, which emphasizes the philosophical underpinnings of macro concepts, especially political power, to which Aron committed other books, and of which he was an acknowledged expert. Also see Aron’s German Sociology, translated by Mary and Thomas Bottomore (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), pp. 67–106, 140–141; reprinted in 1964.
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Bendix, Reinhard. 1960. Max Weber: An intellectual portrait. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
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Reissued in 1977, with an introduction by Guenther Roth (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press). Bendix’s solid “portrait” of Weber was the standard work between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, and was as close as most students got to Weber himself. It remains in print. Roth, a student of Bendix at Berkeley, carried on in this distinctly German tradition of Weber analysis (unlike Aron’s), in which the comparative-historical thread is highlighted, especially regarding religion. Bendix’s Weber was opposed to Parsons’s, and was less concerned with social-psychological or philosophical ruminations than were later interpretations. His book remains sensibly valuable in a time of unsupported speculation. See also Bendix, Reinhard, and Guenther Roth’s Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971).
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Freund, Julien. 1968. The sociology of Max Weber. Translated by Mary Ilford. New York: Pantheon.
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Reprinted, with introduction by Bryan Turner, in 1998 (London: Routledge). Not unlike Franco Ferrarotti’s work (Ferrarotti 1982, cited under Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1970 and 1985), though far more influential in the United States, Freund’s approach to Weber is distinctly European in nature, emphasizing (in ways that Bendix’s fundamental work avoided) the “underside” of Weberianism. His analysis of the Irrationalitätsproblem (problem of irrationality) is particularly welcome and acute when compared with most other works. His understanding of Weber as a thinker who created a body of work in a very specific cultural milieu could only have been written by a scholar of Alsatian origins, looking to both sides of the Rhine with equal knowingness. A stimulating and reliable guide.
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Oberschall, Anthony. 1965. Empirical social research in Germany, 1848–1914. New York: Basic Books.
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A valuable monograph that offers reliable commentaries on Weber’s huge study of Prussian/Polish agricultural workers in 1890 for the Verein fuer Sozialpolitik that made his reputation as an empirical researcher, plus remarks on his time-and-motion analysis of a textile mill owned by relatives in 1908, which gave Weber a niche in the early history of industrial sociology. As there are few such works, this one remains useful.
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Schutz, Alfred. 1967. The phenomenology of the social world. Translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press.
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Originally published in 1932 as a dissertation. Schutz was a lawyer, economist, and successful businessman, as well as a part-time philosophy professor in New York City after leaving Europe in 1939. His early work, here translated thirty-five years after being written, was an attempt to blend Husserl’s phenomenology and Bergson’s dualistic philosophy with Weber’s action theory. Schutz wished to invest Weber’s theory with a more finely tuned appreciation of human consciousness by means of phenomenological technique, especially with regard to meaning and the concept of rationality in its various forms. He also probed Weber’s understanding of objectivity and subjectivity. See in particular pp. 1–44.
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Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1970 and 1985
By the time these commentaries were written, an “orthodoxy” in Weberian studies had emerged, composed mainly by Parsons, Bendix, and Aron, with serious challenges posed in Germany by Wolfgang Mommsen and Habermas. For younger scholars like Giddens, it became a rite of passage to say something important about Weber, on one’s way to “one’s own” theorizing (see Giddens 1972). Interestingly, there are many instances in which the study a given scholar gave to Weber’s work became some of the best work produced by that scholar.
Andreski, Stanislav. 1984. Max Weber’s insights and errors. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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Andreski is famously heterodox in his view of social theory, and bold enough to correct classical thinkers, including Comte, Spencer, and Weber, whose works he has edited. This brief work asks a fundamental question: Based on what we now know that Weber could not, and based on “advances” in analytic thinking, what of Weber’s work remains inviolably useful, and what of it should be discarded? Andreski goes briskly through Weber’s main ideas regarding law, religion, power, bureaucracy, charisma, and feudalism/patrimonialism. Given his own work in comparative sociology, his suggestions for correction are interesting, if not entirely convincing in all points.
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Ferrarotti, Franco. 1982. Max Weber and the destiny of reason. Translated by John Fraser. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
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Originally published in 1965. A style of presentation common to members of the European intellectual and political elite (Ferrarotti served in the Italian Parliament), this is a dense analysis of Weber’s work in toto, with special attention given to his relationship with Marx. Unlike many treatments, this one does not cater to an imagined audience of undergraduate students, but is written at a higher, more concise level that offers, without frills, the basic Weberian notions that continue to be useful in sociological work, such as ideal-types, objectivity, rationalization, and so on.
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Giddens, Anthony. 1972. Politics and sociology in the thought of Max Weber. London: Macmillan.
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A very brief study done when the author was quite young, yet already exhibiting the firm grasp Giddens had on Weber’s ideas, even if not so firm as his reading of Durkheim. His widely admired Capitalism and Social Theory (1971) is a companion volume. Reprinted in Giddens’s Politics, Sociology, and Social Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 15–56.
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Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. Max Weber’s theory of rationalization. In The theory of communicative action. Vol. 1. Translated by T. McCarthy, 143–271. Boston: Beacon.
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In the 1970s, Habermas’s main project of defining the nature of a nonoppressive societal setting for interaction and communication took him to Weber and other classical theorists. His detailed examination of their main texts often reveals more about his own theoretical goals than about the works being interrogated, yet because he is creatively theoretical, his treatment is worth studying, less for hermeneutic precision than for extension.
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Murvar, Vatro, ed. 1985. Theory of liberty, legitimacy, and power: New directions in the intellectual and scientific legacy of Max Weber. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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Based on papers delivered at the Max Weber Colloquia (Milwaukee), this set of ten studies probes unusual aspects of Weber’s work, including its applicability to ecological studies, sultanism, music and the arts, sociology of law, political freedom, patrimonialism in China and Islamic countries, and Maoism. A good indicator of the high-level Weber work of the period, prior to the Gallic transformation of contemporary social thought.
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Roth, Guenther, and Wolfgang Schluchter. 1979. Max Weber’s vision of history: Ethics and methods. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Roth and Schluchter have long been captains of the Weber industry, the former offering four essays here that touch on charisma in the counterculture, revolutionary ideas and religiosity, the relationship between Fernand Braudel’s historiography and Weber’s theory of rationalization, and Weber’s understanding of history. Schluchter’s two essays concern the paradoxical qualities of rationalization processes and the issue of value neutrality and ethics. The two are always worth reading, even when taking contentious positions regarding the “proper” Weberian legacy.
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Schweitzer, Arthur. 1984. The age of charisma. Chicago: Nelson-Hall.
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A thorough introduction and application of one of Weber’s most famous and useful terms (borrowed and elaborated from a historian of the early Christian church), in which Schweitzer analyzes an exhaustive grouping of 20th-century political leaders with claims to genuine charisma (including Gandhi, Nehru, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Clemenceau, Churchill, de Gaulle, Lenin, Mao, Mussolini, Hitler, and many others). He categorizes charismatic leaders as “giants, luminaries, failures, or aspirants,” thereby providing one of the best applications of a Weberian analytic term to date, especially in the political realm.
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Stammer, Otto, ed. 1971. Max Weber and sociology today. New York: Harper & Row.
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When the Weber centenary was celebrated in Heidelberg in 1964, the German government made it possible for luminaries of all political persuasion to attend and argue vigorously about Weber’s continuing role in German cultural and political life. This belated translation became famous for the disputes that were aired in response to papers of Talcott Parsons, Raymond Aron, and Herbert Marcuse—by Theodor Adorno, a young Jürgen Habermas, Wolfgang Mommsen, Reinhard Bendix, Benjamin Nelson, and others. Marcuse’s attack on Weber’s politics gave the volume instant notoriety and lasting importance.
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Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1986 and 1989
This set of commentaries evidenced a sophistication, and a critical distance as well, which was not as much evident in earlier studies, in which “laying out the basic ideas”—there being so many of them—had been the primary motivation for writing. Randall Collins’s interpretation of Weber (in Collins 1986), for instance, constituted a deviation from his own work in conflict theory and microanalysis, for which he became famous. Yet registering a viewpoint regarding Weber remained a valuable and laudable activity for social theorists, so long as one took a slightly critical stance that moved beyond the didactic treatments of the 1960s and 1970s. Harvey Goldman and Bryan Green took Weber studies into a new zone by connecting his work with high literacy, a hint of things to come after postmodernism rediscovered the classical tradition in social theory (see Goldman 1988 and Green 1988).
Campbell, Colin. 1989. The Romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell.
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By combining the insights of Weber on the Protestant ethic and Veblen (among others) on consumption as a pervasively modern behavior pattern, Campbell puts forth the novel notion that Romanticism and Sentimentalism were joined to create “the other Protestant Ethic” that led to modern consciousness. He tries to answer a puzzling question: If the early Protestants eschewed consumption and vanity, how did that mindset convert into one that continues to produce great output but is joined with an insatiable desire for consumer goods?
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Collins, Randall. 1986. Weberian sociological theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511557682Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is likely the least read of Collins’s many books of social theory and analysis, because the Weberian clique found it insufficiently precise and admiring with regard to “The Master’s” work, while the much larger audience discovered that its density of ideas and data were perhaps too Weberian for their comfort. Collins manages to discuss intelligently and lucidly themes that he finds in Weber, such as the high Middle Ages, technology, Weber and Schumpeter, imperialism, Russia, alienation, the family, and the status of women. All in all, a book Weber would have found interesting.
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Goldman, Harvey. 1988. Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the shaping of the self. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Goldman, a political theorist by training, wrote an extraordinary dissertation that he turned into two volumes: this one and Politics, Death, and the Devil: Self and Power in Max Weber and Thomas Mann (1992). Here, he deeply probes the German “soul” by juxtaposing the life and works of Weber and Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize novelist. Mann’s Buddenbrooks is highly instructive when compared with Marianne Weber’s biography of Weber, helping secure a more complete picture of his era and his family’s history back to 1800.
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Green, Bryan S. 1988. Literary methods and sociological theory: Case studies of Simmel and Weber. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Green is a sociologist but writes with the skill and analytic tools of a literary critic, which gives this book its special utility. By examining Weber’s work as texts produced within a literary context and with literary intentions, Green shows that Weber’s work was influenced by 17th-century theological casuistry as well as 18th-century English novels, and that concern about prose style affects theorizing in ways that are seldom discussed in this literature. See in particular pp. 179–266.
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Hinkle, Gisela. 1986. The Americanization of Max Weber. Current Perspectives in Social Theory 7:87–104.
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English translations of Weber have introduced shifts in meanings, a process termed “Americanization,” which is defined as an interpretive transformation not only of Weber’s words, but also of his ideas, styles of thinking, modes of expression, mental imagery, and assumptions. Three works are analyzed: (1) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (translated by Talcott Parsons; see Weber 1930, cited under The Protestant Ethic Debate); (2) Economy and Society, Vols. I–II (edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich; see Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology); and (3) “Objectivity in Social Science,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences (edited and translated by Edward A. Shils and Harry Finch; see Weber 2011, cited under Methodology). Accuracy in translation cannot be assumed, as demonstrated in misrepresentations of Weber’s scientific intentions in the examples analyzed. His intellectual and methodological context has been altered through word selection and syntactical changes, and his neo-Kantian commitments have been ignored, replaced with empiricist and positivistic tendencies absent in the originals.
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Jaspers, Karl. 1989. On Max Weber. Translated by Robert J. Whelan. Edited and introduced by John Dreijmanis. New York: Paragon House.
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Following World War II, Jaspers was the “good German,” explaining though not justifying to a large Anglophone audience his country’s shocking behavior during the war. He had known Weber since 1909, venerated him as a heroic figure, understood Weber’s psychopathology based on his psychiatric training, and wrote extremely sympathetic and insightful essays about the man and his ideas after his untimely death. He famously referred to Weber as “the greatest German of our era,” and he hypothesized that the Nazis would have had a more difficult time establishing hegemony had Weber and his followers been available to obstruct them.
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Käsler, Dirk. 1988. Max Weber: An introduction to his life and work. Translated by Philippa Hurd. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Widely regarded as the best concise overview of Weber’s work and life in English, this brisk study also includes an excellent chronology and bibliography of Weber’s works, limited in utility only because the German original was published in 1979. Does not penetrate much beyond the fundamentals within each of Weber’s many zones of research, but is an excellent port into the Weberian sea.
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Murphy, Raymond. 1988. Social closure: The theory of monopolization and exclusion. Oxford: Clarendon.
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The literature on “social closure,” derived from fleeting passages in Weber’s Economy and Society (Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology), is not large, and this book provides a good summary of the arguments as of some years ago. The idea has been extended into various studies concerning the mechanisms that professional groups and other “status groups,” as defined by Weber, use to secure their borders and control membership. The American Medical Association’s refusal to accredit more medical schools than they think is good for their professional prospects is an obvious example. See in particular pp. 1–37, 64–70, 113–126, 132–136, 169–178, 195–218.
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Scaff, Lawrence A. 1989. Fleeing the iron cage: Culture, politics, and modernity in the thought of Max Weber. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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A well-regarded set of connected essays (half previously published) that skillfully compares Weber’s and Simmel’s views of modernity, plus close scrutiny of the Weber archives in Germany with an eye toward embellishing our understanding of Weber that, by comparison, makes others seem colorless and inhuman. Scaff is among the best US interpreters of Weber’s work, and his Max Weber in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2011) continues his careful, archivally based labors, providing the fullest account of Weber’s transformative 1904 trip.
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Sica, Alan. 1988. Weber, irrationality, and social order. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Analyzes Weber’s work and legacy, emphasizing his confrontation with “das Irrationalitätsproblem” in its many forms—how to accommodate fundamentally irrational social action within a model built on the presupposition of rational calculation—and the theoretical and existential problems this posed for Weber himself, some of which he failed to resolve. Also briefly introduces Vilfredo Pareto as a useful corrective and foil to Weber’s emphasis on rational action in economic settings, plus an excursus on hermeneutic practice. Revised paperback edition published in 1990.
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Tribe, Keith, ed. 1989. Reading Weber. London: Routledge.
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“The work of reading Max Weber is a task that has barely begun,” writes Tribe, who has translated many texts either by or about Weber, and along the way produced a series of articles that are unusually sensitive to scholarly matters often ignored by other Weberians. This well-regarded collection not only includes important essays by Lawrence Scaff, Friedrich Tenbruck, and Martin Riesebrodt, but also boasts three otherwise unavailable translations of Weber’s work on political-economic and industrial topics, anchored by Tribe’s essay, which contextualizes the translations.
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Whimster, Sam, and Scott Lash, eds. 1987. Max Weber, rationality, and modernity. London: Allen & Unwin.
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Whimster is the editor and publisher of Max Weber Studies, has translated a new collection of Weber’s work into English, and has written a series of enlightening works pertaining to Weber over the last thirty years. This sturdy volume brings together a notable group of Weber specialists, and others, who direct their inquiries to the general question of how securely Weber’s ideas are locked within a “modernist” gaze, and to what extent his ideas can continue to inform social research. (Note: Editors’ names are printed in reversed order on the cover of the paperback edition vis-à-vis the title page.)
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Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1990 and 1995
With postmodern theory firmly in the saddle, the modernist stream from which Weber was alleged to have come fell under constant attack, so defending or explaining his viewpoint and that of his colleagues became itself a scholarly specialty. Roslyn Bologh’s study (Bologh 1990) was the first by a woman (nearly all Weberian monographs had been written by white males to that point), and it focused on Weber’s personal life, trying to connect his psychosexual identity with his formal sociology. Weber was also connected overtly to the sociology of culture for the first time, and his training as a lawyer was shown to have influenced his way of going about research and of understanding social action, a connection not previously made in the literature.
Albrow, Martin. 1990. Max Weber’s construction of social theory. New York: St. Martin’s.
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A distinguished British sociologist, Albrow wrote this general study thirty years after first trying to comprehend Weber’s achievement (via Marianne Weber’s biography; see Weber 1975, cited under Biographies, Handbooks, Bibliographies, Journals). He personally consulted a number of leading theorists while writing the work (e.g., Norbert Elias, Anthony Giddens, Johannes Winckelmann, Gert Schmidt), which gives the work more weightiness and thoroughness than is often the case with primers. He deals with the makeup of Weber’s Weltanschauung (Kant, Nietzsche, Goethe, Freud), then deals with the questions of rationality, power, interpretation, values, and the market, each in some detail.
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Bologh, Roslyn Wallach. 1990. Love or greatness: Max Weber and masculine thinking—A feminist inquiry. London: Unwin Hyman.
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Bologh proposes in her unique volume a somewhat “new” interpretation of Weber, building on the notions of Arthur Mitzman and Martin Green that gender identity and sexuality saturated Weber’s vision of the social world in ways he did not overtly acknowledge or perhaps even understand (see Mitzman 1984 and Green 1988, cited under Biographies, Handbooks, Bibliographies, Journals). Bologh proposes that Weber’s theorizing of power, bureaucracy, religion, and private life is uniformly “masculine” in nature, and she interprets his works in ways that prove her point. She concludes with an alternative through feminism and Marxism, which she views as compatible.
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Cahnman, Werner J. 1995. Weber and Toennies: Comparative sociology in historical perspective. Edited by Joseph Maier, Judith Marcus, and Zoltan Tarr. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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Tönnies, Weber, and Simmel cofounded the German Sociological Society in 1909. At the time, Tönnies was the best-known sociologist among them—his Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) had already reached classic status, and his championing of Marx was risky and courageous. That his posthumous fame would be so eclipsed by his two colleagues would have surprised all of them. Cahnman is one of few scholars who has probed their relationship as comparative researchers, which gives this book of essays its special value. See in particular pp. 23–69, 81–85, 109–123.
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Horowitz, Asher, and Terry Maley, eds. 1994. The barbarism of reason: Max Weber and the twilight of enlightenment. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press.
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The title is darker than the substance of this collection, the point of which is to assess once again Weber’s concept of “rationalization” and the processes of “purpose-rational” versus “value-rational” types of action in modern societies as their denizens try to avoid the “iron cage” of inhibitions, rules, authoritarian governments, and other unhappy results that come with bureaucratization. The contributors disagree as to how hopeless the modern situation might be, depending on their enthusiasm for Kant versus Nietzsche—and Weber’s place between them.
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Kalberg, Stephen E. 1994. Max Weber’s comparative-historical sociology. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Kalberg has devoted many years to demonstrating that hidden within Weber’s torrential output of historical studies, tangled with substantive details and organized around troubling “ideal-types,” there lies a coherent methodology of comparative analysis that not only served Weber well, but could also be adopted with profit by today’s scholars. This interpretation, strongly argued as it is, has not persuaded as many Weberians as Kalberg might wish, yet his serious, close reading of Weber’s works (in German) gives the book value.
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Sadri, Mahmoud. 1992. Max Weber’s sociology of intellectuals. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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A short treatment of a neglected subtopic within Weber studies, focusing on how intellectuals, broadly defined, are categorized, analyzed, and historically located in Weber’s sociology of comparative religion, as well as his political writings.
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Schroeder, Ralph. 1992. Max Weber and the sociology of culture. London and Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
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A concise argument that Weber’s work should be reviewed as a coherent contribution to cultural analysis rather than simply unrelated studies of religion, law, economics, historical change, or other possible avenues of analysis. Seeing a “thematic unity” within the entire corpus, and borrowing heavily from Schluchter’s studies of Weber’s comparative religion, Schroeder proposes reading Weber as offering a sustained worldview.
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Turner, Charles. 1992. Modernity and politics in the work of Max Weber. London: Routledge.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203414194Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The strength of this monograph lies in its illustrating how Weber’s difficult Zwischenbetrachtungen (summary study of comparative religions) can be fitted with a theory of personality, modernity, and the tragedy of culture that so intrigued Weber and his colleagues around the fin de siècle. Turner highlights Weber’s Kantian value system, its role in giving him tools with which to probe the meaning of modern culture for the ethical individual.
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Turner, Stephen P., and Regis A. Factor. 1994. Max Weber: The lawyer as social thinker. New York: Routledge.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203202043Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Stephen Turner’s various works on Weber are always worth study, since they combine an acute sense of what is important qua social theory with deeper philosophical meanings. This book is unique in that it explains how Weber’s early legal training and his accompanying study of the philosophy of law allowed him to visualize “social action” as would an attorney, or an economist with a legal background, giving it a twist that is absent in other classical theories.
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Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published since 1996
Full-scale treatments of Weber occupying entire books were beginning to become scarcer in the 1990s than they had been during the preceding forty years, since the sustained attack on “dead white European males” had taken its desired effect on publishers and readers. Yet still, a noted historian not known for Weber work turned his hand to Weber (Diggins 1996); one of Germany’s finest Weberian scholars published more essays, though with a small press (Hennis 2000); one of Weber’s last students was given a final platform for his uniquely informative memoir and commentaries (Honigsheim 2000); and the dean of Germany’s Weber studies also produced an important monograph (Schluchter 1996). Thus, “the Weber Industry” has lumbered along.
Diggins, John P. 1996. Max Weber: Politics and the spirit of tragedy. New York: Basic Books.
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A widely noted general study of Weber by an Americanist scholar best known for his biography of Veblen. Diggins wrote the book for a large audience, relying throughout on standard sources, mostly in English, and far removed from the hermeneutic subtleties that undergird much recent Weber scholarship. Given his long-standing scholarly interests, the book gives more attention to Weber’s politics than do other general studies. Because it was published by a trade house, it has probably introduced more readers to Weber than monographs more intimately connected to primary sources, yet it has not been accepted as authoritative by specialists.
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Hennis, Wilhelm. 2000. Max Weber’s science of man. Translated by Keith Tribe. Berkshire, UK: Threshold Press.
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See also Hennis’s Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, translated by Keith Tribe (London and Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1988). Hennis represents a heterodox wing of German Weber studies, setting him at odds with other notable specialists who cannot accept his portrayal of Weber’s achievement. Due in part to his training in law and political theory, but as much simply reflecting his virtuosic interpretations, he concludes that Weber’s “central question” is “nothing less than the requisite comprehension of the genesis of modern man—No! Menschentum—by way of a historical-differential investigation.” Via Nietzsche and others, Hennis also tends to Weber’s concern with irrationality.
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Honigsheim, Paul. 2000. The unknown Max Weber. Edited and with an introduction by Alan Sica. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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This is a reprint of Honigsheim’s On Max Weber (1968), plus four previously uncollected articles on Weber’s early work. A student and friend of Weber’s, Honigsheim wrote his dissertation on Jansenism under Weber’s direction, but also, and more importantly, composed in the 1940s and 1950s a series of uniquely concise and comprehensive essays on Weber as anthropologist, historian of agriculture, and rural sociologist, and on his personal sense of religiosity. In addition, he wrote a substantial memoir about Weber. None of these works has been supplanted in the literature.
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Schluchter, Wolfgang. 1996. Paradoxes of modernity: Culture and conduct in the theory of Max Weber. Translated by Neil Solomon. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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Long regarded as one of Germany’s leading Weber specialists and keeper of his archival materials, Schluchter regards Weber’s most important achievement as the documentation of Western historical development through the mode of civilizational “rationalization.” His Rationalism, Religion, and Domination (Schluchter 1989, cited under Rationalism and Religion) is an exhaustive account of Weber’s sociology of comparative religion. Paradoxes of Modernity considers Weber’s theory of values and how ethics affect political action, plus more analyses of the sociology of religion, with particular attention to Weber’s unfinished examination of Islam. See also The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History, translated by Guenther Roth (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981).
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Sica, Alan. 2004. Max Weber and the new century. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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Considers the continuing utility of Weber as a theorist and iconic presence in the literature, with special reference to his increasing availability to public discourse. Also offers a detailed rhetorical analysis of the opening passages from Economy and Society (Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology), where Weber explains his theory of social action.
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Swedberg, Richard. 1998. Max Weber and the idea of economic sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Over the past decade or two, Princeton University Press and the university’s sociology department have become sponsors and disseminators of “economic sociology,” and in this book, Swedberg, one of its major participants, anoints Weber as a founder of the perspective. Working his way through the major writings, Swedberg shows how Weber’s sociological economics dealt with politics, laws, religion, and the history of capitalism in the West in a way that is superior to conventional economic reasoning, as well as ordinary sociology.
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Turner, Bryan, ed. 1999. Max Weber: Critical responses. 3 vols. London: Routledge.
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Bryan Turner’s contribution to Weberian studies is long and deep, going back nearly forty years. His Weber and Islam was the first to deal with that vexed topic, and his later writings, like For Max Weber, have added to a solid interpretation of Weber’s ideas and continuing relevance based on a close reading of the German texts as well as English translations. This multivolume collection serves as a handy introduction to the secondary literature. See, in particular, “An Introduction to Max Weber’s Sociology” (pp. 1–20), by the editor. Turner’s 1992 volume of essays, Max Weber, from History to Modernity (London and New York: Routledge), brings Weber into contiguity with postmodernism, body studies, Simmel and Nietzsche, and other fresh topics.
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Whimster, Sam, ed. 1999. Max Weber and the culture of anarchy. New York: St Martin’s.
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This edited collection on anarchy connects Weber’s psychologically unsettled life around 1913–1914 with an anarchist settlement at Ascona on Lake Maggiore, with additional chapters on Weber’s study of music and his appreciation of avant-garde art. Some of Weber’s letters from Ascona are translated for the first time.
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General Theory
It is impossible to summarize all the ways in which Weber’s ideas have influenced scholarship around the world, other than to say that if a researcher wished to discuss theoretically, for example, the dynamics of bureaucratization, the nature of political leadership, ethical values in the context of scholarship or political life, the history of global capitalism, the comparative meaning of world religions, or any number of other topics, Weber’s name and work would almost surely be invoked early on. Oftentimes his name alone stands in for entire sets of complex ideas, but the works listed below go far beyond name-dropping, and instead put to vigorous and specific use some of Weber’s principal contributions to theorizing at large. Put another way, the works in this section could not have been carried out in any meaningful way had they not begun with Weber and tried to improve on him. They also characterize the breadth of writing that his ideas have inspired, and although these are not necessarily “the best” of their particular subgenre of research, they are all worthy additions to an enormous literature—from the Roman Empire to the Protestant ethic, from rationalization processes to racial theories, from the Marx versus Weber debate to Weber on temporality or music. It is indeed hard to think of another 20th-century writer in the social sciences whose influence on first-class scholarship has been so broad or deep.
Sociological Theory
As evidenced by the works in this section, Weber’s ideas have inspired, guided, goaded, and prodded sociological and political studies of all kinds, from ancient Rome to music to methodology to rural sociology and rational choice. There is a Weber to suit every taste and every research agenda—which would likely have bemused Weber himself, given his own rather modest claims for his achievements.
Antonio, Robert J. 1979. The contradiction of domination and production in bureaucracy: The contribution of organizational efficiency to the decline of the Roman Empire. American Sociological Review 44.6 (December): 895–912.
DOI: 10.2307/2094715Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber distinguished between “formal” and “substantive” rationality, especially regarding how bureaucracies operated in terms of efficient domination and production. This case study of Roman bureaucracy illustrates how the contradictions between two coexisting forms of rationality—one controlling persons and resources, the other production (and distribution) of goods and services—contributed to the decline and collapse of the Roman Empire.
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Bruun, Hans Henrik. 2008. Objectivity, value spheres, and “inherent laws”: On some suggestive isomorphisms between Weber, Bourdieu, and Luhmann. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 38.1 (March): 97–120.
DOI: 10.1177/0048393107311144Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that Parsons’s misrepresentation of Weber’s ideas in The Structure of Social Action (Parsons 1937, cited under Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published between 1930 and 1960) turns on his un-Weberian emphasis on the normative. Conflating “factual regularities” with “normative validity” allowed Parsons to exaggerate the importance Weber assigned to normative orientations of social action, legitimacy, and social integration, and to underestimate nonnormative aspects of social action and structures of dominance. Parsons thus expanded what was a part of Weber’s sociology and very nearly made it the whole. See also Jere Cohen, Lawrence Hazelrigg, and Whitney Pope’s “De-Parsonizing Weber: A Critique of Parsons’s Interpretation of Weber’s Sociology,” American Sociological Review 40 (1975): 229–241.
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Manasse, Ernst Moritz. 1947. Max Weber on race. Social Research 14.2 (June): 191–221.
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Manasse anticipated by many years the contemporary interest in “critical race theory” by asking, for the first time, how Weber conceived of the matter. He pursues the development of Weber’s ideas on race by considering how his writings reflect changing views on four issues: the conflict between German and Polish interest in the Bismarckian Reich, Negroes in the United States, the importance of race in the formation of the Indian caste system, and the development of postexilic Judaism. He outlines Weber’s objections to modern “race mystics” and summarizes important results of Weber’s thinking for subsequent thought.
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Mayer, Carl. 1975. Max Weber’s interpretation of Karl Marx. Social Research 42.4 (Winter): 701–719.
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Weber used Marx’s categories in his sociology of religion, which could easily be transposed into the terminology of Marx’s system. Comparing their main ideas, proof for this assertion is developed around five points. The first concerns substructure versus superstructure, and the problem of ideology as the absence of any intellectual autonomy. Marx’s system is monistic, while Weber’s is dualistic. The second point concerns social change, while the third deals with social dynamics and the problem of the dialectic. The fourth point concerns the relationship of different social systems to one another within the dynamic processes of history, in connection with the differing stages of society. The fifth point concerns the meaning and purpose of historical-social development and the limitations of scientific analysis. There remain differences in detail between Marx and Weber, but not in principle.
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Munters, Q. J. 1972. Max Weber as rural sociologist. Sociologia Ruralis 12.1: 129–145.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9523.1972.tb00131.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Little is known of Weber as a rural sociologist, in spite of the fact that he was intensively concerned with agrarian and rural problems over a period of years, beginning in the late 1880s. Although he did not at the time regard himself as a sociologist, but as an economist, the sociological tendency of his rural studies is unmistakable. Weber’s lack of proper recognition among rural sociologists might be mainly due to the poor relationship between rural sociology and general sociology. A plea is made for a serious confrontation between rural sociology and the work of Max Weber. This essay should be compared with Honigsheim’s brilliant analysis in The Unknown Max Weber (Honigsheim 2000, cited under Studies and Commentaries on Weber’s Work Published since 1996).
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Norkus, Zenonas. 2000. Max Weber’s interpretive sociology and rational choice approach. Rationality and Society 12.3 (August): 259–282.
DOI: 10.1177/104346300012003001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Attempts to substantiate two theses: (1) Max Weber’s programmatic metatheoretical texts contain a description of the method of socio-scientific explanation, which anticipates a specific version of the rational choice approach (RCA) in contemporary sociology; and (2) it is possible to distinguish two versions of this description, the first being closer to the RCA than the second. The late Weberian outline of sociological theory of action is reconstructed out of his famous typology of action.
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Swedberg, Richard. 2003. The changing picture of Max Weber’s sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 29: 283–306.
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Lengthy review essay by a Weber authority, charting the most recent uses of Weber in sociology. Due to Swedberg’s own interests, he emphasizes as “new” an interpretation of Weber that fixes on his utility to economic sociology in particular.
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Tenbruck, Friedrich H. 1980. The problem of thematic unity in the works of Max Weber. British Journal of Sociology 31.3 (September): 316–351.
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A famous article, much argued over, that asks if it is possible or useful to identify substantive unity within Weber’s opera by his major terms (e.g., disenchantment, rationalization). Indeed, Weber developed a universal-historical perspective to examine a world process of disenchantment. The section headings: Economy and Society—The Assumption That It Was Weber’s Principal Work; The Historico-Religious Process of Disenchantment (Entzauberung); Occidental Rationalization and Historico-Religious Disenchantment; The Rationalization Thesis; “The Economic Ethics of the World Religions” and Its Place in Weber’s Oeuvre; Universal History and Rationality; Max Weber’s Work.
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Turley, Alan C. 2001. Max Weber and the sociology of music. Sociological Forum 16.4 (December): 633–653.
DOI: 10.1023/A:1012833928688Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This paper examines Max Weber’s contribution to the study of music, as well as proposing an extension. The author argues that Weber’s sociology of music combines urban theory, class/labor theory, and rationalization theory, and in so doing provides a starting point for interpreting the social components of music.
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Other Social Science Fields
One of the hallmarks of a “classic” author is the ability of his or her work to launch subsequent research into venues that would not have been anticipated, or perhaps even thought desirable, when the original work was being composed. So it remains with Weber, as he is brought, sometimes against his will, into discussions of postmodernism, poststructuralism, Freudianism, anthropology, the problem of time, Foucault, and what seems like an endless range of scholarly preoccupations.
Gane, Nicholas. 2002. Max Weber and postmodern theory: Rationalization versus re-enchantment. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230502512Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Illustrates parallels between Max Weber’s theory of the rationalization and disenchantment of the modern world with critiques of contemporary culture developed by Lyotard, Foucault, and Baudrillard, known broadly as part of the poststructuralist and postmodernist camps. Each was in some way responding to Weber’s understanding of modern culture with his own imaginative visions of affirmation and re-enchantment. Their writing casts new light on Weber’s sociology of rationalization and his theory of the crisis of modernity.
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Jameson, Fredric. 1974. The vanishing mediator: Narrative structure in Max Weber. New German Critique 1.1 (Winter): 52–89.
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Using a structuralist model, Jameson diagrams Weber’s theory of Protestant behavior’s effects on economic life. An early and interesting work by a literary critic later to become famous for interpretations of postmodernist thought and for developing a Marxist form of literary and cultural criticism.
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Kaye, Howard L. 1992. Rationalization as sublimation: On the cultural analyses of Weber and Freud. Theory, Culture, and Society 9.4 (November): 45–74.
DOI: 10.1177/026327692009004003Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber and Freud are examined in order to develop a social psychology of rationalization versus sublimation, since their works are mutually complementary. While Weber addresses social and cultural structure, Freud describes its impact on individual psyches. Kaye considers sublimation, rationalization, and value spheres, and finds that Freud, by furnishing a more penetrating explanation of the motives behind rationalization, can fill out Weber’s theory of macroprocesses. In return, Weber offers Freud a more adequate treatment of sublimation, understood as an internal as well as a cultural process.
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Keyes, Charles F. 2002. Weber and anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 31:233–255.
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Weber’s approach to social science profoundly influenced modern anthropology, particularly regarding the relationship between religion and political-economy. Clifford Geertz’s “interpretive anthropology” has roots in Weber’s “interpretive sociology,” as does Bourdieu’s “theory of practice.” Weber’s comparative study of the ethics of the world’s religions, and particularly the “Weber thesis,” served as the foundation of anthropological research on religion and political-economy in societies in which the major world religions have been long established. Weber’s work on politics and meaning merits reexamination in light of contemporary anthropological interest in power and knowledge (à la Foucault).
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McIntosh, Donald. 1970. Weber and Freud: On the nature and sources of authority. American Sociological Review 35.5 (October): 901–911.
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A critique of Weber’s view on authority from the point of view of Freudianism, with a consideration of psychoanalytic versus sociological modes of analysis. The two viewpoints are compared regarding charisma, traditional authority, prophetic authority, natural law, the institutionalization of authority, the secularization of authority, and nonlegitimate domination. On the whole, they appear to fit well. Weber’s ideas on traditional, charismatic, and legal authority seem to rest, respectively, on pre-Oedipal, Oedipal, and post-Oedipal psychoanalytic stages. Weber’s account of prophetic (charismatic) leadership has much in common with, and receives support from, Freud’s.
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Segre, Sandro. 2000. A Weberian theory of time. Time and Society 9.2–3: 147–170.
DOI: 10.1177/0961463X00009002001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A Weberian general theory of time, drawn from Weber’s epistemological and sociological work, is presented, including a brief digression on Husserl’s possible influence on Weber as it relates to his understanding of past and present. Focusing on Weber’s sociological analysis of time in interactional and social contexts, especially comparing formal versus informal contexts, a unitary theoretical framework is developed and analyzed in light of other sociological work that deals with time as a social construction and constraint.
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Szakolczai, Arpád. 1998. Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel life-works. Studies in Social and Political Thought 8. New York: Routledge.
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Ever since Foucault’s theory of power began to be discussed widely, in the 1980s, Weber’s name has been attached to the dialogue, because Foucault claimed to have learned much from Weber before offering his own theory. This helpful reading focuses on Weber, particularly on pp. 189–290.
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Methods
Endless squabbles among social scientists concerning how one should define and use the proper analytic tools of research have been going on at least since Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill in the 1850s, and they became a memorably fierce fight in Germany in Weber’s youth, when Carl Menger and Gustav Schmoller, plus their many followers, tried to vanquish each other during the so-called Methodenstreit in the 1880s. Menger wanted economics to follow natural science methods and arrive at indubitable “laws” of behavior, whereas Schmoller’s “historical economics” held that all periods of human activity display unique properties that cannot be subsumed under any general model. Though Weber was closer to Schmoller than Menger in his general orientation, he hoped, with assists from Henrich Rickert, Rudolf Stammler, Wilhelm Roscher, and many others, to reframe the methodological debate by refurbishing “ideal-type” (of Wilhelm Dilthey and Christoph Sigwart) along with the practice of Verstehen into a new, more realistic mode of analyzing social life, present and past. Exemplification, correction, and elaboration of these methodological innovations have kept scholars busy ever since Weber enunciated them in the second decade of the 20th century, as illustrated by the works listed in this section. Though often classed as an antipositivist historicist, Weber’s appetite for “hard data” was in fact unquenchable, and even though he believed that searching for unchanging laws of social behavior was fruitless, he did indeed seek continuities of social action within various cultural and historical settings. The difference between his methods and those of more simpleminded positivists lay in his deep and wide historical knowledge, which gave the lie to reductionism of the kind that allows sociological positivism whatever plausibility it may have.
General Methodological Debates
The works listed here cover a range of methodological issues spurred by Weber’s writings.
Brain, Robert Michael. 2001. The ontology of the questionnaire: Max Weber on measurement and mass investigation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32.4: 657–684.
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Contemporary sociologists of science have not examined Weber’s views about science. Between 1908 and 1912 he wrote a series of studies concerning the extension of scientific authority into public life. In these works he implemented the experimental psychology, or psychophysics, laboratory in factories and other real-world settings. In his critique of social measurement, Weber emphasized discontinuities between the social spaces of the laboratory versus the factory, showing how historically conditioned differences between the two settings rendered the transfer of instruments and methods between them highly problematic. In his greatest foray into empirical sociology, a survey he directed for the Verein für Sozialpolitik, he investigated the conditions and attitudes affecting the lives and performance of industrial workers. Using a different measuring instrument—the questionnaire—Weber tried to implement a concept of social measurement that implied a different ontology, drawn not from natural sciences but from the historical sciences.
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Brubaker, Rogers. 1984. The limits of rationality: An essay on the social and moral thought of Max Weber. London: Allen & Unwin.
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A handy and much cited essay by a young scholar on Weber’s ideas about rationality, originally composed as an honors thesis at Harvard, capably illustrating the outlines of what is in fact a deeply seated problem in Weber’s work.
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Burger, Thomas. 1976. Max Weber’s theory of concept formation: History, laws, and ideal types. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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Reissued as an expanded edition in 1987, with new “Postscript” (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press). A recognized work on one of Weber’s thorniest conceptions, the “ideal-type,” plus observations about other important ingredients in Weber’s practical approach to theorizing. Burger emphasizes Weber’s connection with Heinrich Rickert (as does Guy Oakes in his book on the topic) when trying to understand the former’s theory of social causation, as gingerly constructed as it was at his premature death. Yet Droysen and Toennies, among others, also likely influenced Weber as he formulated his philosophy of sociological method, published posthumously in Economy and Society (see Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology).
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Eliaeson, Sven. 2002. Max Weber’s methodologies: Interpretation and critique. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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A sturdy account of Weber’s methodological thinking, with attention to its scholarly reception. Eliaeson claims that vested interests of exegetical scholars have created biased interpretations. Weber was preoccupied with the intellectual problems of his time, so by connecting Weber’s thought and methodology with its historical context, Eliaeson reconstructs his central concerns while at the same time exploring the enduring relevance of Weber’s work for sociology today.
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Hekman, Susan J. 1983. Weber, the ideal type, and contemporary social theory. Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press.
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Also published as Max Weber and Contemporary Social Theory (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983). Reliable interpretation of Weber’s ideas as conceived by a political scientist rather than a sociologist. Hekman runs through arguments for a subjectivist/interpretative approach to social science research versus the more standard, positivist, and “objective” way of collecting and analyzing data, culminating in her strong support for a Weberian compromise, in which the ideal type is allowed to stand in for “objectivity” while at the same time accounting for the subjectively meaningful understanding of life, which characterizes human existence.
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Lazarsfeld, Paul, and Anthony Oberschall. 1965. Max Weber and empirical social research. American Sociological Review 30.2 (April): 185–199.
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An important article because Lazarsfeld founded the Bureau of Applied Research at Columbia University and was widely regarded as a major proponent of “scientific” sociology. Explains that Weber’s earliest involvement in empirical social research included three investigations of agricultural and industrial labor conditions, workers’ attitudes, and work histories, using both questionnaires and direct observation. He used a relatively modern statistical approach in his fourth study, concerning psychological aspects of factory work, and in a fifth episode (a critique of another person’s study of workers’ attitudes) he advocated a quantitative or typological approach to qualitative data. Weber was always concerned with quantitative techniques, arguing that the meaning of social relationships can be expressed only in probabilistic terms. Nevertheless, he was ambivalent about the ultimate value of quantitative methods and the role of empirical research in sociology, partly because he never decided whether sociology and psychology should be sharply distinguished, nor what terminology should be adopted when describing social action.
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Runciman, W. G. 1972. A critique of Max Weber’s philosophy of social science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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A brief study of Weber’s social and political theory that raises critical questions about Weber’s claims about value neutrality and explanation in the social sciences. Viscount Runciman developed his taste for Weberian sociology in later and much longer works.
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Interpretation and the Social Sciences
The works listed here cover a range of methodological issues spurred by Weber’s writings on Verstehen, “adequacy on the level of meaning,” the social action typology, and so on.
Abel, Theodore Fred. 1948. The operation called Verstehen. American Journal of Sociology 54.3 (November): 211–218.
DOI: 10.1086/220318Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The application of interpretation by means of Verstehen is the main argument of social theorists who posit a dichotomy between the physical and the social sciences. Yet an analysis of the actual operation of Verstehen shows that it does not provide new knowledge and that it cannot be used as a means of verification in Popper’s sense. Lacking the fundamental attributes of scientific method, even though it does perform important auxiliary functions in research, the simple fact of Verstehen cannot be used to validate the assumption of a dichotomy of the sciences. The article was the opening salvo for a stream of articles and books that ensued over the next twenty years.
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Bruun, Hans Henrik. 1972. Science, values, and politics in Max Weber’s methodology. Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
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Reissued in 2009 with new introduction and German passages translated into English (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate). Highly regarded in its first edition, in the expanded edition the author wisely translates numerous German quotations into English, and adds a new introduction, where he discusses major issues raised since 1972. Bruun traces the relationship between values and science in Max Weber’s methodology to its central aspects: value freedom, value relation (Wertbeziehung), value analysis, the ideal type, and the special problems that pertain to the sphere of politics. All pertinent materials, published or unpublished, are examined.
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Oakes, Guy. 1988. Weber and Rickert: Concept formation in the cultural sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Traces what Oakes believes is a vital connection between Weber and the philosopher Heinrich Rickert. He reconstructs Rickert’s difficult concepts in order to isolate the important, and until now poorly understood, roots of problems in Weber’s own work, and thereby adds a new way to understand Weber by exposing his relationship to the Southwest German school of neo-Kantianism and to Rickert. Oakes offers an accessible exposition of Rickert’s theory of values, in part by drawing on Kierkegaard’s concrete moral tale, “Diary of a Seducer,” to illuminate Rickert’s failure to solve the problem of the objectivity of values. His critique of Rickert challenges the methodological basis of Weber’s solution to the problem of objectivity, elevating the discussion surrounding Weber’s methodology to a new level. The argument has not been universally accepted.
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Ringer, Fritz. 1997. Max Weber’s methodology: The unification of the cultural and social sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Interprets Weber’s methodological writings in the context of the German debates of his day. Claims that Weber bridged the intellectual gap between humanistic interpretation and causal explanation in historical and cultural studies in a way that speaks clearly to our own time, when methodological differences continue to impede fruitful cooperation between the two camps. In the place of the humanists’ subjectivism and the social scientists’ naturalism, Weber developed the flexible and realistic concepts of “objective probability” and “adequate causation.”
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Torrance, John. 1974. Max Weber: Methods and the man. Archives européennes de sociologie 15.1: 127–165.
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A well-known analysis of Weber’s methodology in the context of Simmel and Protestantism, ideal types and class, his confusion of empirical and ideal classes, his concept of chance, and ambiguity about meaning and motive. Weber’s methodological individualism pushed him toward psychologism and subjectivism, and toward “methodological existentialism.” Weber rose above the bourgeois academic establishment, but he was unable to break entirely out of his bureaucratic professional’s role in capitalist society. Faced with a choice between bourgeois radicalism and proletarian social democracy, he chose to fortify his own mandarin intellectual posture.
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Religion
“I am religiously unmusical,” Weber famously said to an intimate, which, given his mother’s devout and intelligent Pietism, was an admission he knew was filled with poignancy, particularly as he had deep respect for his mother. Thrown back and forth, emotionally and intellectually, between an unbelieving father, who embodied the practices of Realpolitik in the midst of Bismarck’s forming of modern Germany, and a religiously attuned mother with whom he shared a closer emotional bond, Weber somehow had to come to terms with religious belief. (It did not hurt that the leading historian of the Christian church, Ernst Troeltsch, was Weber’s tenant for some years, living with his family on the top floor of the Webers’ mansion in Heidelberg.) Though avoiding religiosity as a topic of research during his first period of frenetic scholarship (1886–1897), following his breakdown and partial recovery he threw himself into studies that bore one way or another on religiously inspired social action for the rest of his professional life (1904–1920). When he published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a two-part journal article in 1904–1905, he became a lightning rod for debate about the role that religious ideas played in 16th- and 17th-century northern Europe, during the early days of capitalist accumulation. Thousands of books and articles have since been written debating the merits of his arguments. But even more impressive and much longer in gestation were Weber’s three long volumes on religion in China, India, and among the ancient Jews. Again he asked himself the pivotal question: Why did capitalism flourish in Europe but not in the Middle East, despite its trader culture, nor in the Orient, despite its manifold cultural advantages of trade, language, and civilizational advances? Debate over Weber’s conclusions and incidental remarks (e.g., “Jews as a pariah religion”) will likely cease only when scholars lose all interest in how ideas contribute to socioeconomic change.
Secondary Debates about The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
The works in this subsection place Weber’s classic work in historical perspective and assess its place in comparative historical sociology.
Barbalet, Jack. 2008. Weber, passion and profits: “The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism” in context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511488757Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Barbalet characterizes Weber’s work as not only about the cultural origins of capitalism, but also as an allegory concerning Germany in his time. Situating The Protestant Ethic in Weber’s oeuvre, he records changes in his understanding of “calling” and “rationality.” Highlighting the ethical underpinnings of the capitalist spirit and of the institutional structure of capitalism, Barbalet points out Weberian continuities with Adam Smith and Thorstein Veblen. Finally, by considering Weber’s investigation of Judaism and capitalism, and the unwritten treatment of Catholicism, ignored aspects of his portrayal of Protestantism and capitalism are revealed.
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Bernert, Christopher. 1976. The diffusion of the “Weber-Thesis,” 1904–1930. Graduate Faculty Journal of Sociology 1.2: 32–52.
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A study in what the Germans call “reception theory.” The image of Weber as author of The Protestant Ethic is determined by reviewing “traces of visibility” of Weber in all widely circulated theological or social scientific outlets published during the stated period. Of sixty-seven references to Weber, forty-six identify him as author of the “Weber thesis.” References are classified by date of publication, nationality of author, and the author’s critical appraisal of Weber’s work. Authors are grouped by discipline and social circle: theologians and close associates in Germany whose works were translated into English were the first to refer to him in this way; next were English and American historians studying the 16th century; last were American sociologists. His acceptance outside Germany stemmed partly from definite social processes of diffusion and intellectual communication.
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Chalcraft, David J., and Austin Harrington, eds. 2001. The Protestant ethic debate: Max Weber’s replies to his critics, 1907–1910. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool Univ. Press.
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The first complete English translations of Weber’s four lengthy replies to reviews of the text by two German historians, written between 1907 and 1910. These replies explain Weber’s intentions in the original study, which would have clarified fruitless debates had they been published in 1930 along with the original English translation by Parsons (Weber 1930, cited under The Protestant Ethic Debate). A succinct statement of Weber’s objective in writing The Protestant Ethic is also provided, along with comments on his innovative research methods.
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Lehmann, Hartmut, and Guenther Roth, eds. 1993. Weber’s Protestant ethic: Origins, evidence, contexts. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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An important volume, this international, interdisciplinary effort throws new light on the intellectual and cultural background of Weber’s work, debates recent criticism of the Weber thesis, and confronts new historical insight on the 17th century with Weber’s interpretation. Copublished by German Historical Institute (Washington, DC).
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Marshall, Gordon. 1982. In search of the spirit of capitalism: An essay on Max Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
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A respected, workmanlike analysis of Weber’s two essays on the topic, with the increasingly common observation, well documented, that many arguments over the merit of Weber’s claims are based on a faulty understanding of what he said and what it meant.
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Tawney, R. H. 1926. Religion and the rise of capitalism. London: John Murray.
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Famous early critique of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, no longer much respected by Weber experts, but still a vigorous polemic against some aspects of Weber’s empirical claims that bear rereading. Tawney was a very famous historical economist and public intellectual when he attacked the “Weber thesis” (A. L. Rowse claimed that “Tawney exercised the widest influence of any historian of his time, politically, socially and, above all, educationally,” in his 1995 Historians I Have Known [p. 92]), so it is interesting that he has become a footnote to Weber’s work rather than the other way around.
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The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Specific Themes
The number and quality of debates that have sprung up around the “Weber thesis” have themselves become an academic specialty, as these selections indicate. The Protestant Ethic in Hungary (Molnár 1997) is only one of thousands of similar works, wherein authors try to plant Weber’s idea about religious beliefs and economic behavior into contexts wholly foreign to those that motivated Weber’s own writing. He would be chary of these transplantings as a historian, given his attention to specific detail, which is why after several years he refused to continue debating the issue.
Little, David. 1974. Max Weber and the comparative study of religious ethics. Journal of Religious Ethics 2.2 (Fall): 5–40.
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An exposition and critical assessment of Weber’s typology of modes of practical reasoning and substitutes for practical reasoning, plus his definitions of “ethics” and “religion.” Little then examines the application of these elements of “the sociology of rationalism” to religious systems of ethics, pointing out a number of difficulties in Weber’s account. He concludes by insisting that it contains insights that are indispensable for the comparative study of religious ethics.
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Molnár, Attila. 1997. The Protestant ethic in Hungary. Religion 27.2 (April): 151–164.
DOI: 10.1006/reli.1996.0050Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Though about two-thirds of Hungarians belonged to the Reformed Church during the 16th and 17th centuries, the presence of the “spirit of capitalism” and the “Protestant ethic” is less apparent than one would expect based on Weber’s hypothesis. Based on a large-scale study of the Hungarian Protestant ethic in the 17th century, it can be shown that Calvinists did not play a different or decisive role in the capitalization process of Hungary at the end of the 19th century, as revealed in conduct-books. This ethic differs from Weber’s ideal-type in two respects: The Hungarian version is more pietistic and less activist, with less practical influence in everyday life because of weak religiosity. This case does not refute Weber’s thesis, but it calls attention to the reinterpreting of social context, as well as the intensity of religiosity.
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Otsuka, Hisao. 1982. The spirit of capitalism: The Max Weber thesis in an economic historical perspective. Translated by Masaomi Kondo. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
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Commentary on the relevance of the Weberian thesis in light of economic history by a Japanese scholar. Enthusiasm for Weber’s work and ideas in Japan has run high for decades.
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Robertson, Hector Menteith. 1933. Aspects of the rise of economic individualism: A critique of Max Weber and his school. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Reprinted in 1959 (New York: Kelley and Millman). Important for its errors, since Robertson early on enunciated a way of approaching Weber’s ideas that became typical of historians who did not understand the nature of Weber’s analytic goals. Talcott Parsons, Weber’s very early English translator, answered Robertson’s claims in detail in “H. M. Robertson on Max Weber and His School,” published in the Journal of Political Economy 43.5 (October 1935): 688–696. This initiated the legitimation of Weber’s sociological argument when confronted by skeptics.
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Calvinism and Capitalism
Weber’s writings on Calvinism and its affinities with capitalism, both in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and in other essays, have generated an enormous secondary literature. Some of the most important of these studies are grouped here.
Forsyth, P. T. 1910. Calvinism and capitalism. Contemporary Review 97:728–741.
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Provides the earliest English-language summary and critique of Weber’s Protestant ethic essays, with added historical details for contextual understanding. See also Part 2, “Calvinism and Capitalism,” in Contemporary Review 98 (1911): 74–87.
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Fullerton, Kemper. 1928. Calvinism and capitalism. Harvard Theological Review 21.3 (July): 163–195.
DOI: 10.1017/S0017816000005939Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Offers an interpretative summary of Weber’s “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” published in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 20 (1904) and 21 (1905), and reprinted in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (1920), Vol. 1, pp. 17–206. A solid performance, important in its time since the Parsons translations had not yet appeared, so all of Fullerton’s translations from the book, which were many, helped cement the argument for those without German. He begins by showing that pursuing money had been evil for medieval Christians, but by the 19th century had become the most virtuous of activities. Explanation of this change was part of Weber’s goal, of course.
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MacKinnon, Malcolm H. 1988a. Part I: Calvinism and the infallible assurance of grace: The Weber thesis reconsidered. British Journal of Sociology 39.2 (June): 143–177.
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Sociologists have not critically examined the basic theological content of the Protestant ethic thesis: that Calvinism assumes both absolute predestination and the impossibility of knowing if one is saved, creating a psychological need for business success as a this-worldly sign of divine favor. While Calvin himself advocated these theological doctrines, subsequent covenant theology made salvation available to all who honestly sought it, and offered infallible certainty of grace through introspection and otherworldly works—that is, obedience to the law. Thus, Calvinism as actually practiced following Calvin’s death did not favor the pursuit of this-worldly goals as a substitute for the unattainable goal of salvation, any more than did Lutheranism or Catholicism.
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MacKinnon, Malcolm H. 1988b. Part II: Weber’s exploration of Calvinism: The undiscovered provenance of capitalism. British Journal of Sociology 39.2 (June): 178–210.
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A critique of Weber’s argument is offered, emphasizing Weber’s conception of works as temporally framed, whereas Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist writers agreed that earthly labor had no spiritual value, and that only spiritual callings led to righteousness. Followers of Weber, including Ernst Troeltsch, R. H. Tawney, and Gordon Marshall, share the idea of sanctified labor in a mundane calling, and therefore make themselves subject to the same critique. See also MacKinnon 1988a.
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Rationalism and Religion
One of the charms of Weber’s comparative religion studies stems from the obvious fact that religious sentiments are at their base “irrational” in the deepest sense, since so many religious beliefs cannot be reconciled with factual knowledge or scientific precept, nor are they expected to be. What Weber did was show that even those most profoundly irrational sentiments by which cultures and civilizations have lived direct economic action toward more or less “rational” procedures in the marketplace, even when the two zones of action and ideas are at odds with each other. The following studies illustrate some of these antinomies.
Adair-Toteff, Christopher. 2002. Max Weber’s mysticism. European Journal of Sociology 43.3: 339–353.
DOI: 10.1017/S0003975602001133Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Max Weber, for much of his life, preferred the rational activity of the ascetic to the irrational passivity of the mystic. Despite this, he developed an increasing interest in Western and Eastern mysticism. Johannes Tauler and his teacher, Meister Eckhart, provided him with material with which to criticize Western mysticism. In the last years of Weber’s life, religion and mysticism were not only of intellectual interest to him but increasingly grew as a strong personal interest as well.
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Kaelber, Lutz. 1996. Weber’s lacuna: Medieval religion and the roots of rationalization. Journal of the History of Ideas 57.3 (July): 465–485.
DOI: 10.1353/jhi.1996.0026Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Kaelber analyzes Weber’s views on medieval religion as they evolved between 1904–1905 and 1920, and shows how Weber linked this exploration to his larger intellectual agenda, appropriating and transcending ideas then current in historical and religious scholarship.
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Lemmen, M. M. W. 1990. Max Weber’s sociology of religion: Its method and content in the light of the concept of rationality. Translated by H. D. Morton. Hilversum, The Netherlands: Gooi en Sticht.
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Assesses Weber’s ideas about religion from the standpoint of rationality, which served as the twin pillars around which Weber constructed his comparative studies of supernatural systems.
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Schluchter, Wolfgang. 1989. Rationalism, religion, and domination: A Weberian perspective. Translated by Neil Solomon. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Presents a unified approach to little-understood aspects of Weber’s research program. Taking the overall development of Weber’s work into account, Schluchter reconstructs Weber’s research program using a comprehensive point of view that balances historical research and systematic thought against a biographical perspective. He argues that Weber’s studies in the sociology of religion and politics provide a psychological as well as sociological analysis of Weltanschauungen—all the possible stances toward the world that humanity has taken and the modes of life conduct connected to them.
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Other Religious Traditions: China, India, and the Ancient Jews
Weber wrote widely about religious traditions outside the West. Some of the leading secondary works are discussed here. When he was working on this material, between 1912 and 1917, “comparative religion” as exemplified by Max Müller’s famous Sacred Books of the East series (50 volumes, 1879–1910) was not the highly controversial area it became after Edward Said’s Orientalism swept into the academy in 1979. Thus, Weber’s dedicated study of religious beliefs in what were later called “developing countries” was not motivated by imperialist voyeurism, but by a fundamental research question: How do varying religious beliefs and practices affect the rest of societal behavior? To that end he wrote his works in this area, and it is in examining his labor along these lines that the following works were composed.
Abraham, Gary A. 1992. Max Weber and the Jewish question: A study of the social outlook of his sociology. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.
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Though received with mixed applause, the book reminded Weberians of a vexed question for experts in the history and sociology of Judaism: To what extent was Weber’s portrayal in Ancient Judaism (Weber 1952, cited under Sociology of Comparative Religion) adequate in general, and, in particular, was Weber’s labeling of the Jews as “a pariah people” useful or justified? The book is speculative when the printed record is weak, which gives it an uncertain feeling, but the general topic is important and worth pursuing.
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Alatas, Syed Hussein. 1963. The Weber thesis and South East Asia. Archives de sociologie des religions 15:21–34.
DOI: 10.3406/assr.1963.1719Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Using data from contemporary Southeast Asia, the Weber thesis about capitalism varying by religion does not find much support. The decisive factors that have produced capitalist behavior in various groups in that region are found in their emigrant spirit and their position outside government service (e.g., the Chinese in Malaya). The emergence of the capitalist spirit among certain groups can also be traced to cultural and historical roots that are not essentially religious in nature. The emergence of the capitalist spirit in Southeast Asia is a process that is still going on and suitable for direct observation.
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Bechert, Heinz. 1991. Max Weber and the sociology of Buddhism. Internationales Asienforum 22.3–4: 181–195.
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Weber’s writings on Buddhism analyzed by a German expert in Buddhist doctrine.
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Eisenstadt, S. N. 1971. Some reflections on the significance of Max Weber’s sociology of religions for the analysis of non-European modernity. Archives de sociologie des religions 16.32 (July–December): 29–52.
DOI: 10.3406/assr.1971.1864Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Eisenstadt is an Old Guard comparativist in the Weberian mold. Weber’s comparative sociology of religion has mostly been known via his Protestant ethic thesis, and is rarely extended to non-Christian religions. Initially the thesis was incorrectly perceived as claiming the existence of a “causal” relation between the rise of Protestantism and capitalism. A corrective is to judge societies to the extent they facilitate or sanction the undertaking of “systematic” economic activities. Later, Weber’s thesis was examined vis-à-vis the transformational possibilities of other religions. Differences between the ways Weber analyzed European cultures and their handling of modernity, as opposed to Asian cultures, are described here. Varying responses to modernity were influenced by various civilizational “codes,” especially those relating to status and politics.
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Huff, Toby E., and Wolfgang Schluchter, eds. 1999. Max Weber and Islam. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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A rare effort by Islamic studies specialists to reexamine Weber’s perspectives on Islam and its historical development. Eight specialists on Islam and two sociologists explore Weber’s incomplete comments on Islam, along with his conceptual framework, meanwhile linking their discussions to contemporary issues and debates. Schluchter reconstructs Weber’s conceptual apparatus as it applies to Islam and its historical development. Islamic specialists then consider the developmental history of Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, reform, law and its relationship to capitalism, secularization in Islam, as well as the value of attempting to apply Weber’s concept of sects to Islam.
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Kantowsky, Detlef, ed. 1986. Recent research on Max Weber’s studies of Hinduism: Papers submitted to a conference held in New Delhi, 1.–3.3.1984. Schriftenreihe Internationales Asienforum 4. Munich: Weltforum Verlag.
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Unusual treatment of Weber’s Religion of India that includes “Max Weber on India and Indian Interpretations of Weber” by Detlef Kantowsky; “Max Weber’s Wrong Understanding of Indian Civilization” by Chaturvedi Badrinath; “Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic, the Universality of Social Science, and the Uniqueness of the East” by Walter M. Sprondel; “Max Weber’s Contributions to Indian Sociology” by Detlef Kantowsky; “Hindu Religious Rationality and Inner-Worldly Asceticism” by G. S. Aurora; “Max Weber’s Contribution to the Study of ‘Hinduization’ in India and ‘Indianization’ in Southeast Asia” by Hermann Kulke; and other papers by German, Indian, and American scholars, ending with “The Misinterpretation of Max Weber’s Study on Hinduism in India” by Kantowsky.
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Molloy, Stephen. 1980. Max Weber and the religions of China: Any way out of the maze? British Journal of Sociology 31.3 (September): 377–400.
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Weber’s study of Chinese society is presented and criticized. It is often assumed that Talcott Parsons’s theoretical framework can elucidate Weber’s analysis, but this is misleading. Weber concerned himself with three historical issues: practical ethics, the relation of economic ethics to economic organization, and two problematics—idealism and materialism. For Weber, Confucian literati defined ethical values that inhibited the development of capitalism. In dealing with Confucianism as a specific historical process, Weber avoids the problems resulting from Parsons’s abstract typological approach based solely on the contrast of material and ideal factors.
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Momigliano, Arnaldo. 1987. A note on Max Weber’s definition of Judaism as a pariah-religion. In On pagans, Jews, and Christians. By Arnaldo Momigliano, 231–237. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press.
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The leading 20th-century historian of ancient Rome and of historiographic practices through Western history weighs in on Weber’s vexed use of “pariah” when applied to the Jews, and finds it somewhat deficient, although overall he agrees with most of what Weber wrote concerning Roman economic and social life. First published in History and Theory 19.3 (1980): 313–318.
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Turner, Bryan S. 1974. Weber and Islam: A critical study. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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One of very few analyses by a Western sociologist to chronicle Weber’s incomplete writing about Islam, comparing his understanding of the religion with Marx’s “Asiatic Mode of Production,” and other topics of modern concern, like Muhammad’s charismatic leadership of his religion, the fate of the Middle East under colonial subjection, and an excursus on Marx’s and Weber’s contrasting understandings of sex, asceticism, and religiosity.
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Zeitlin, Irving M. 1984. Ancient Judaism: Biblical criticism from Max Weber to the present. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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Beginning from Weber’s classic work (Weber 1952, cited under Sociology of Comparative Religion), Zeitlin analyzes the origins of Judaism in light of more recent scholarship, criticizing both those modern scholars who have cast doubts on the scriptural account of the history of Israel, and those who hold that the religion of Israel originated either as polytheism or as a fusion of Baal and Yahweh. He finds unconvincing the nonsociological modes of approaching these questions. Following Weber’s method, Zeitlin describes the subjective meanings that the actors themselves attributed to their conduct. Drawing on biblical and extra-biblical evidence, he addresses the question of how the actors concerned—whether they were patriarchs, prophets, judges, kings, or the people—understood themselves, their world, and their faith, a technique Weber pioneered sixty years earlier through his sociology of religions, and especially in Ancient Judaism. Zeitlin ends his study by suggesting that in certain respects Weber’s views must be substantially modified in due deference to recent scholarship.
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Law
The section of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft that outlines Weber’s Rechtssoziologie, first translated by Edward Shils and Max Rheinstein, was published in 1954 by Harvard University Press. It can reasonably be claimed when evaluating this work that Weber invented Rechtssoziologie (sociology of law) in its fullest form, even though Emile Durkheim’s Division of Labor in Society appeared earlier and contains material of much interest, as does Eugen Ehrlich’s Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law (1913). Durkheim noted that modern legal systems substituted restitution of loss for vengeance, from repression to tort satisfaction, which in turn made modern business transactions possible and predictable. Ehrlich’s cosmopolitan background led him to see that “law on the books” was an insufficient avenue to understanding law in toto, and that cultural differences among societies had to be factored in for a fuller view of how law actually functions and changes. He distinguished between “positive law” in the courts and “living law” made up of normative, and often informal, control within broader society. Weber improved on both these programs by introducing, as was his style in all research, a comparative dimension, using Roman, medieval, Islamic, Chinese, Jewish, and modern legal systems as his data. As a trained lawyer (unlike Durkheim), he understood law as the force of state sanctions, but the strength of his analysis lay in showing how European and British law had evolved hand in hand with capitalism, whereas legal forms in the Middle East and Asia worked against the kind of contract law that advanced capitalism requires to function properly. What he called “khadi justice” under Islamic law is structured around the “irrational” predilections and talents of judges who create law as they hear cases. Similarly, in China, mandarins officiated as district judges, with attention to Confucian doctrine but nevertheless with wide discretionary powers. Once again, Weber found that the Western experience of legal reasoning and adjudication was quite different from legal forms in other societies, and out of these comparisons he was able to construct a convincing sociology of law that has served as a solid basis for subsequent developments by Theodore Geiger, Georges Gurvitch, and many others.
Anspach, Donald F., and S. Henry Monsen. 1989. Determinate sentencing, formal rationality, and khadi justice in Maine: An application of Weber’s typology. Journal of Criminal Justice 17.6 (November): 471–485.
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In the 1980s over twenty-five jurisdictions, including Maine, changed their sentencing policies. Yet only a few approached the goal of “determinacy” as proposed by reformers. Weber’s sociology of law provides a means to reconceptualize the problem regarding “determinacy,” particularly by applying his concept of formal rationality. Maine did not reduce judicial disparities, and determinacy was not introduced. Using data from all members of Maine’s judiciary, sentences are compared with guideline sentences in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, showing that Maine failed to reduce judicial disparities in sentencing. Widespread sentencing disparities in Maine result from a criminal code legitimating substantively irrational decision making, or khadi justice. No attempt was made to move toward a formally rational system, as advocated by proponents of determinacy.
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Beirne, Piers. 1979. Ideology and rationality in Max Weber’s sociology of law. Research in Law and Sociology 2:103–131.
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A neo-Marxist analysis of Weber’s sociology of law, quite influential when it was published and in keeping with the “critical” theory of law then being taught at some US and Canadian law schools.
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Kronman, Anthony. 1983. Max Weber. Jurists: Profiles in Legal Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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Kronman, former dean of the Yale Law School, offers a concise and accurate study of Weber’s sociology of law, more solidly connected to legal scholarship than the usual treatments. He argues that Weber’s Rechtssoziologie is not an unwieldy monument, as it is so often characterized, but the coherent work of a legal mind, and one that fits well with Weber’s other theories—of authority, power, religiously inspired economic action, and so on. “The Irrationality of Oracular Adjudication” (pp. 80–83) presents a characteristically innovative interpretation of one Weberian aperçu.
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Trubek, David M. 1972: Max Weber on law and the rise of capitalism. Wisconsin Law Review 3:720–753.
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Also published as Working Paper No. 12, from the Yale Law School Program in Law and Modernization (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Law School). A study investigating Weber’s view of law as it emerged in Europe and elsewhere, through which he showed why other civilizations failed to develop “legalism” (the domination of a society by an autonomous rule system believed to be rationally enacted). The role of legalism as it legitimizes the domination of workers by capitalists is explored, along with Weber’s concepts of law as coercion, and types of legal thought. Though Weber’s theories may need expansion for application to the contemporary world, they remain a valuable aid and a lasting contribution to the study of law in its social context.
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Stratification
The leading textbook on social stratification during the 1950s and 1960s, Class, Status, and Power, was edited by the Weberian Reinhard Bendix and his distinguished colleague, Seymour Martin Lipset, and they wisely chose the title to mimic Weber’s exposition of how social classes operate. Weber knew Marx’s work well, and admired it, yet he also sensed within its simplified interpretation of class relations a lacuna that he expressly wished to fill; thus, in a way, Weber’s class analysis could be viewed as a supplement to Marx’s. What Marx missed and Weber knew well, mostly from his personal experience, was Stand: status based on class affiliation that often has little or nothing to do with ownership of the means of production. A penniless Russian aristocrat of the kind Dostoyevsky often portrayed would have had very high status in his society, despite having exhausted his supply of capital, for he would display what Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital,” in the form of language use, manners, stylish dress, and a self-concept that demands obeisance from others—some of whom would have been the ambitious bourgeoisie, eager to marry their daughters to the penniless aristocrat’s sons. What Weber called “social closure” worked against the bourgeois aspirant and in favor of the aristocrat. Weber explored the subtleties of class relationships in various societies through history and across the globe in his posthumous masterpiece, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. This was first made available to English-language readers when Gerth and Mills translated part of it in From Max Weber (Weber 1946, cited under General Sociology) and Talcott Parsons offered his version in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Weber 1947, cited under General Sociology). Along with Marx’s writing, this work has remained the bedrock of stratification theory ever since.
Jones, Bryn. 1975. Max Weber and the concept of social class. Sociological Review 23.4 (November): 729–757.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1975.tb00538.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber refined theories of social stratification with his concept of “status group.” However, this can be challenged by recognizing that status and class are based on contradictory forms of subjectively meaningful action. Weber’s theory borrows from neo-Kantian conceptions of human knowledge and existence based upon two spheres of nature and culture: the sensible and supersensible aspects of human experience. His theory as a whole reaches contradictory unity through this distinction, while his concepts reformulate the economy, consigning classes to mere aggregates of coincident instrumental actions, while status actions are determined by regard for others, styles of life, and cultural values that alone unify the individual actors in the Weberian social world. To remove the concept of status would require the denial of any role for culture and values in social action and sociological knowledge. To remove the concept of class would first require the elimination of the sphere of calculable necessity and, therefore, rational instrumental action, investigation, and the economy.
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Peukert, Helge. 2004. Max Weber: Precursor of economic sociology and heterodox economics? American Journal of Economics and Sociology 63.5 (November): 987–1020.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1536-7150.2004.00332.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Peukert believes that Weber’s ideas do not currently work well within economic sociology and heterodox economics because of his narrow, static understanding of rationality as applied to economic relations. He missed “uncertainty” as an important component of economic action, so his interpretation of socioeconomic action is incomplete, especially in special contexts. This is mostly due to his theoretical commitment to a narrow, neoclassical understanding of rationality as defined by Austrian economics. His theory of social action is based on idealized assumptions of perfect knowledge, market exchange processes, price setting, and the functioning of full competition, none of which is very sophisticated. Weber’s genius is evident not in economics proper but in his sociology of religion and law and in his sociology of domination.
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Swedberg, Richard. 2007. Max Weber’s interpretive economic sociology. American Behavioral Scientist 50.8 (April): 1035–1055.
DOI: 10.1177/0002764207299352Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Explores a rigorous interpretive economic sociology along Weberian lines, one which applies the analytic model of social action from chapter 1 of Economy and Society (Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology) to empirical data and events. Key ideas and concepts in Weber’s interpretive sociology include adequate causation, the exploration of meaning for social actors, and what consequences these meanings have for the resulting action. What a concrete Weberian type of interpretive economic sociology will be like cannot be determined without attention to concrete, empirical content.
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Politics
When Jürgen Habermas popularized the concept of “legitimation crisis” in the early 1970s, he, like so many others, was merely climbing aboard the Weberian train of political thought. Weber’s father was an important politician, whom Weber observed in action from early youth, surrounded as he was by his father’s political colleagues. From this and his studies, he developed various typologies for analyzing all sorts of political relations, including the famous “three forms of authority: traditional, charismatic, and bureaucratic.” Whereas most of human society had been spent in thrall to convention and the force of custom, during certain periods extraordinary individuals would subvert the existing order by offering their followers an irresistible claim upon their loyalty and discipleship. Though episodic and entirely unpredictable (hence “irrational” in Weber’s terms), charismatic authority shaped entire epochs of human history. But with the advent of industrialization and modernization, bureaucratic organization became, of necessity, the norm for legitimating the distribution of goods and power, which meant that both traditional and charismatic forms of authority (or “domination”) either disappeared or were much diminished. This progression over the past several centuries has affected all aspects of political life, and whereas tradition provides stability without innovation, and charisma innovation without stability, bureaucratic authority promises incremental, planned, necessary innovation, as well as utterly predictable and documented stability, and is thus best suited for industrialization and capitalist legal relations. Weber examined these interlocking phenomena in great detail, and the scholars who have probed his work or extended his political analysis into new realms have grown in number and sophistication such that “neo-Weberian” postures vis-à-vis our understanding of political power have become normative, especially in branches of political science and history. It is very difficult to speak of power relations in modern societies without seeing them through Weber’s lens, even for those who have tried to “transcend” him.
Politics in Weber’s Time
The books in this section examine various aspects of Weber’s political activities during his lifetime, as well as the relationship of his writings to extant controversies and to the political actors and thinkers who populated his environment.
Eden, Robert. 1983. Political leadership and nihilism: A study of Weber and Nietzsche. Tampa: Univ. Presses of Florida.
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A notable comparison of the political thought of Weber and Nietzsche by a philosophically sophisticated political theorist. Eden discusses political leadership in a liberal, commercial, plebiscitary democracy and the possible threat of political nihilism, using Nieztsche as its proponent (a not entirely convincing position). Juxtaposing Nietzsche and Weber, as well as detailing the influence of former on the latter, is no longer innovative, but Eden handles the material skillfully. He draws in Woodrow Wilson’s critique of liberal ideology and his allegiance to the political values of The Federalist while also establishing the principle of “opinion leadership.” Weber’s hopes for democratic liberalism were tainted by Nietzsche’s aristocratic disdain for the masses, according to Eden’s version of the record.
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Mayer, J. P. 1944. Max Weber and German politics, a study in political sociology. London: Faber and Faber.
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Notable analysis of German politics between 1880 and 1920 as interpreted through the personality of Weber, Germany’s outstanding political theorist during this epoch. Except for Bismarck, no other German reflects more fully than Weber the political life of his country. The main sources for the study are his Jugendbriefe and Politische Briefe, together with the admirable biography, written by his wife, Marianne Weber (see Weber 1975, cited under Biographies, Handbooks, Bibliographies, Journals), which together provide us with an intimate foundation on which the historian may safely build. They provide enough reliable material to show how an epoch of modern German history reflects itself in his thought. Second revised and enlarged edition published 1956 (London: Faber and Faber); reissued with an introduction by Bryan Turner in 1988 (London: Routledge).
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Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 1984. Max Weber and German politics, 1890–1920. Translated by Michael S. Steinberg. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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See also Mommsen’s The Age of Bureaucracy: Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber (New York: HarperCollins, 1977). First published in 1974 (Oxford: Blackwell). Mommsen’s work is uniquely authoritative for many reasons, not least of which was his familial connection with Weber. The second title is a major work of German historiography, an unequaled, comprehensive account of Weber’s political views and activities, in which Mommsen claims that Weber was simultaneously an ardent liberal and a determined German nationalist and imperialist. This charge was famously repudiated by many Weber scholars. Mommsen shows the important links between these seemingly conflicting positions and provides a critique of Weber’s sociology of power and his concept of democratic rule. Mommsen drew extensively on Weber’s published and unpublished essays, newspaper articles, memoranda, and correspondence.
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Classical Study of Weber’s Interventions in German Politics during His Lifetime
A cult has grown up in political theory circles since the early 1990s surrounding Carl Schmitt, whose politics and ideals would likely have repulsed Weber, as explained by Andrew Norris (in Norris 2000). Similarly, Weiss 1986 shows that Weber’s achievements were distorted, knowingly or otherwise, by Soviet-inspired scholars for whom defeat of Weber’s worldview was essential, so that their version of Marx’s understanding of political-economics would be viewed as triumphant. Since one of Weber’s first seminars was given over to studying Das Kapital, he would have found this argument strange and unsupportable.
Norris, Andrew. 2000. Carl Schmitt’s political metaphysics: On the secularization of “the outermost sphere.” Theory & Event 4.1: 1–33.
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Carl Schmitt was resurrected in the 1980s and reclaimed for political theory from his unrepentant Nazi past when theorists began to reconsider what “the political” meant in terms of citizenship rights and the role of states in a multicultural context. His connection with Weber lies in their theorizing about state power and the fact that they are often grouped together, which makes little intellectual, and even less political, sense. Abstract available online.
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Weiss, Johannes. 1986. Weber and the Marxist world. Translated by Elizabeth King-Utz and Michael King. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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Unusual study of how Soviet Marxism intervened between Weber’s actual work and the ideologically distorted view of it that permeated the Soviet bloc countries prior to their liberation in 1989. Reprinted, with an introduction by Bryan Turner, in 1998.
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General Politics
The studies in this section examine Weber’s general contributions to political sociology, including the study of democratic politics and civil society, particularly his hesitation in endorsing democracy in any “pure” form. Some of the most astute and rigorous work in the Weber canon has been directed at his far-flung theory of politics, as evidenced by the selections below.
Baehr, Peter. 2008. Caesarism, charisma, and fate: Historical sources and modern resonances in the work of Max Weber. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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Traces various cultural perceptions of Caesar—what the author calls Caesarism—from the Middle Ages, through the founding of the American Republic, the era of Max Weber and his contemporaries, and into the 20th century in the works of writers such as Antonio Gramsci.
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Beetham, David. 1985. Max Weber and the theory of modern politics. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
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Beetham used then-untranslated works by Weber to create a comprehensive account of Weber’s political theory. Weber’s writings on the politics of Wilhelmine in Germany and the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 are much less well known than his contributions to historical and theoretical sociology, yet they are essential to any overall assessment of his thought. Beetham explores Weber’s central concern with the prospects for liberal Parliamentarism in authoritarian societies, and in an age of mass politics and bureaucratic organization, showing how this concern pushed him to revise democratic theory. He argues that Weber’s analysis of the class basis of contemporary politics necessitates a modification of typical understanding of his sociology of modern capitalism.
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Bensman, Joseph, and Michael Givant. 1975. Charisma and modernity: The use and abuse of a concept. In Special issue: Charisma, legitimacy, ideology and other Weberian themes. Edited by Arthur J. Vidich. Social Research 42.4 (Winter): 570–614.
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This article reviews the origins of Weber’s concept, borrowed from the church historian Rudolf Sohm, and expanded to include political, military, or cultural leaders with powerful attraction for their adoring followers. Weber pointed out that charisma always dies out with the demise of the leader in question, and that “routinization” follows if the group is to persist. Current uses of the term have lost this sociological dimension and instead identify as charismatic any figure with unusually strong psychological or emotional appeal for a targeted audience, thus losing Weber’s insight that succession is always a problem for charismatics, which gives this form of leadership its “irrationally” exciting but vulnerable quality.
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Breiner, Peter. 1996. Max Weber and democratic politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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The author argues that the tension between the subjective and objective dimensions of Weber’s concept of rationality can be fruitfully exploited when judging the feasibility of social and political forms such as socialism, radical democracy, capitalism, and the nation. A concept of participatory democracy from within Weber’s logic of power and legitimate domination is advanced.
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Kim, Sung Ho. 2004. Max Weber’s politics of civil society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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A work by a young Korean scholar who argues that Weber was deeply influenced by some of the most critical questions in modern political thought, especially those regarding public citizenship in a mass democracy and civil society as its foundation.
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Loewenstein, Karl. 1966. Max Weber’s political ideas in the perspective of our time. Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press.
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A short book that examines Weber’s general views on bureaucracy. Lowenstein claims that the “untrammeled rule of a bureaucracy” was “Political Enemy Number 1” for Weber, and that Weber saw bureaucracy as “inescapable” because of its “specialization and efficient technical training.” He also argues that Weber anticipated the idea of bureaucrats pursuing their own interests through bureaucratic expansionism.
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Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 1989. The political and social theory of Max Weber: Collected essays. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Essays by the noted Weberian scholar, concentrating on Weber’s engagement with political issues and their influence over his more theoretical concepts, the book offers a critical analysis of Weber’s notion of democracy, distinguishing its liberal as opposed to its elitist features.
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Norkus, Zenonas. 2004. Max Weber on nations and nationalism: Political economy before political sociology. Canadian Journal of Sociology 29.3: 389–418.
DOI: 10.1353/cjs.2004.0045Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Weber voiced doubts about the scientific value of the concepts of “ethnicity” and “nation,” yet his work produces outlines of two theories of the nation. In his political-sociological theory (revealed in Economy and Society [Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology]), it is understood as a status group united by common historical memory, fighting for the prestige from power and culture against other nations. Additionally, in his early work, Weber outlined the political-economical (or “national-economical”) theory of nation, conceiving nation as the organizational form of economic association that is optimal in the fight for “elbow room” in the globalized “Malthusian world” described by the classical model of long-term economic dynamics. The Weberian political-economical concept of nations and nationalism is explicated using the recent idea of rent-seeking, and is applied to highlight the deficiencies of the prevailing Gellner-Hobsbawm-Anderson theory of nations and nationalism.
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Comparative Sociology
As mentioned repeatedly in this article regarding other aspects of Weberian scholarship, comparative analysis of different civilizations in time and space was as natural and fundamental to Weber’s modus operandi as it was to Marx, Spencer, Comte, or Durkheim. By means of linguistic facility and the examination of primary documents (in medieval and modern Italian and Spanish, English, French, German, Latin, Greek, Russian, and Hebrew), Weber always asked the basic question facing all historians with global ambitions: What makes a given society or epoch unique, and what makes it ordinary, when compared with others? From this basic historiography—including primary research in Roman land-use practices as well as medieval Italian and Spanish business documents—Weber forged the rudiments of a comparative sociology that only recently has been equaled or in some ways bettered (by Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, Reinhard Bendix, Michael Mann, Perry Anderson, Charles Tilly, Jack Goldstone, and a few others). Though he never offered his followers a rulebook for research practice (as had Durkheim), attentive study of his three expansive studies of world religions, or his analysis of the 1905 Russian Revolution, or of the constitutional crisis of Germany following World War I, or of his sociologies of law or music indicates how a successful comparative sociology can be carried out. Weber’s attention to historical detail was so extreme in places that he nearly defeated his implied goal of establishing some means of comparison across societies. That he was as much dedicated to historical precision as to sociological generalization is precisely what gives Weber’s monographs their extraordinary value as exemplars of comparative analysis.
Arslan, M. 2001. The work ethic values of Protestant British, Catholic Irish, and Muslim Turkish managers. Journal of Business Ethics 31.4 (June): 321–339.
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One of hundreds of attempts to “test empirically” the Weber thesis, this article compares the work ethics of practicing Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim managers in Britain, Ireland, and Turkey. Previous empirical and analytical research shows broad support for Weber’s claim, but this research revealed a considerable difference between Muslim and other groups in terms of Protestant work ethic (PWE) characteristics. The Muslim group showed the highest level, the Protestant group second, and the Catholic slightly less. The possible reasons for the higher level of the PWE values of Muslim managers are discussed in the light of historical, political, social, and economic developments in Turkey.
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Axtmann, Roland. 1990. The formation of the modern state: A reconstruction of Max Weber’s arguments. History of Political Thought 11.2 (Summer): 295–311.
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Because Weber never constructed a coherent “theory of the state” as such, his ideas must be assembled from his major works, especially Economy and Society (Weber 1968a, cited under General Sociology). There one learns that by using Goethe’s idea of “elective affinity,” certain social structures and forms of action “go together” in ways that allow the analyst to assign social causation, up to a point. Axtmann shows how “the independent developmental logic of different social structures,” as outlined by Weber, points to “the internal dynamic of the different structural forms of social action,” all of which led to the development of macrostructures we now call “the modern nation-state.”
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Banton, Michael. 2007. Max Weber on “ethnic communities”: A critique. Nations and Nationalism 13.1: 19–35.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8129.2007.00271.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An untitled draft found among Weber’s posthumous papers was published in English translation as “Ethnic Groups.” (In the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, it is titled “Ethnic Communities.”) Here, Weber conceptualized the collective feeling of belonging due to shared ethnic origin as a social construct that underlies a desire to monopolize power and status within a marked geographic zone. Subsequently, Weber determined to put an end to the use of collectivist concepts, but at the time of writing he treated groups as real entities rather than using the concept of group as a way to explain behavior. Since he wrote the piece, the causal connections in ethnic group formation and maintenance have been more closely linked.
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Buss, Andreas E. 1985a. Max Weber and Asia: Contributions to the sociology of development. Munich: Weltforum Verlag.
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Brief introduction to Weber’s ideas about Asian religion and economic development, paired with Buss 1985b.
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Buss, Andreas E., ed. 1985b. Max Weber in Asian studies. International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology 42. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill.
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Buss assembled a small set of essays bearing on the topic, which include “Max Weber’s Contributions to Questions of Development in Modern India” by Buss himself; “Max Weber and the Modernization of India” by the noted specialist Milton Singer; “This Worldly Transcendentalism and the Structuring of the World—Why No Capitalism in China?” by an American sociologist, Gary G. Hamilton; “Max Weber on Japan” by Karl-Heinz Golzio; “Weber and Islam in Southeast Asia” by John Clammer; and “Max Weber and the Relation of Religious to Social Change” by Trevor Ling.
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Finley, M. I. 1985. Max Weber and the Greek city-state. In Ancient history: Evidence and models. By M. I. Finley, 88–103. London: Chatto and Windus.
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The noted ancient historian comments here on Weber’s writings on the ancient world. These essays deal with methodological and historiographical issues in ancient Greek and Roman history. Despite incisive questions about uses of evidence and methods when applied to ancient sources, Finley in the end praises Weber qua ancient historian. These essays deal with methodological and historiographical issues in ancient Greek and Roman history. A final essay considers some of Max Weber’s ideas about Greek history—the debate over phylai and a supposed shift from tribal to territorial organization, the polis as a form of “charismatic domination,” and the nature of Greek law—using these as a basis for broader reflections.
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Love, John R. 1991. Antiquity and capitalism: Max Weber and the sociological foundations of Roman civilization. London and New York: Routledge.
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An application of Weber’s analytic tools and historiographical technique to the case of Rome, along the way probing the differences between “capitalism” as understood in the ancient case as opposed to the early modern European instance Weber wrote about in The Protestant Ethic (see entries under The Protestant Ethic Debate). Contrasting Marx’s with Weber’s ideas about antiquity, Love analyzes Roman social structure, politics, socioeconomic relations, and related matters not as a conventional historian, but as a sociologist. A novel work.
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Martinussen, John, ed. 1994. The theoretical heritage from Marx and Weber in development studies. Papers presented at a research training course held in Gilleleje, Denmark, in April 1994. International Development Studies, Occasional Paper 10. Roskilde, Denmark: Roskilde Univ.
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Fairly typical of its time when cosmopolitan scholars tried to bring Marx (post-USSR) and Weber together in some fruitful way when explaining global development or misdevelopment.
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Momigliano, Arnaldo. 1986. Two types of universal history: The cases of E. A. Freeman and Max Weber. Journal of Modern History 58.1 (March): 235–245.
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The nonpareil ancient historian contrasts the universal histories of Weber (oriented toward Jewish type) with E. A. Freeman (oriented toward Greek type). Momigliano was notoriously hard to impress when considering historiographical technique, yet Weber comes through his examination with high praise. Reprinted in Momigliano’s Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1987), pp. 121–134.
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Mueller, Gert H. 1990. Max Weber and the religions of Asia. In Time, place, and circumstance: Neo-Weberian studies in comparative religious history. Edited by William Swatos Jr., 17–27. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
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A useful review-essay on two of Wolfgang Schluchter’s edited collections in German, Max Weber’s Study of Confucianism and Taoism and Max Weber’s Study of Hinduism and Buddhism. Because these works were never translated into English in toto, Mueller’s analysis is welcome, especially since Schluchter and his colleagues took this kind of work to a level not otherwise available.
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Munshi, Surendra. 1988. Max Weber on India: An introductory critique. Contributions to Indian Sociology 22.1 (January–June): 1–34.
DOI: 10.1177/006996688022001001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Based on the original text, Gesammelte aufsätze zur religionssoziologie, 2 vols. (Tübingen, Germany: J. C. B. Mohr, 1920–1921), an exposition of Weber’s argument regarding Hinduism in India is presented, in part to overcome errors found in English translations. A substantive and methodological critique draws on some of Weber’s original sources and on contemporary research. Far from establishing his case, Weber, like Hegel, found himself with two irreconcilable images of India. Weber’s method in his sociology of religion is questioned insofar as he formulated an ideal negative type of India. Nonetheless, his study of Hinduism is an important work, a document on the spirit of the age that made it possible for him to assert the universal significance of exclusively Occidental phenomena.
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van der Sprenkel, Otto B. 1964. Max Weber on China. History and Theory 3.3: 348–370.
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Despite Weber’s methodological flaws, he made a fundamental contribution to Sinology. The flaw lay in faulty translations and sources, sometimes grossly misleading, as well in taking material from widely different periods of Chinese history. Weber’s writings on China contain errors of detail, and some of his generalizations are incorrect, yet his positive contributions abound. Notable are (1) Weber’s correct assignment of the beginnings of “rational” policies in internal administration, military organization, and the like, to the Warring States period; (2) the importance he gives to water control as mainly responsible for the growth of centralized political authority; and (3) his unerring identification of the “literati” as the key status group in Chinese society, and of the bureaucracy as its creation and creature. While there were indeed irrational elements in Chinese government, Weber ignored certain modifying factors and fundamental contradictions within the bureaucracy. However, he deserves high praise for recognizing lineage as central to Chinese civilization. A measure of the negative and positive sides of Weber’s analysis of China comes out magnificently in his favor. Reprinted in George H. Nadel’s Studies in the Philosophy of History (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 198–220.
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