The Author and His Career

THOUGH an increasing number of scholars in the English-speaking world have in recent years come to know Max Weber’s work in the original German editions, the part of it which has heretofore been available in English translation has formed a wholly inadequate basis on which to understand the general character of his contributions to social science. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism¹is probably still his best-known work. This is an empirical historical essay which, in spite of its crucial significance to its author’s work as a whole, is only a fragment even of his work on historical materials, and gives only an exceedingly partial idea of the analytical scheme upon which, to a very large extent, the interpretation of its significance depends. The General Economic History²is far broader in scope but a mere sketch in development. It was put together from students’ notes of the last series of lectures Weber gave and cannot be considered an adequate statement of the results of his researches in economic or institutional history, to say nothing of sociological theory and the methodology of social science.³

Weber’s was the type of mind which was continually developing throughout his intellectually productive life. He explicitly repudiated the desire to set up a ‘system’ of scientific theory, and never completed a systematic work. There are, however, exceedingly important systematic elements in his thought, and the volume herewith presented to the world of English-speaking scholarship has been selected for translation precisely because it contains the nearest approach to a comprehensive statement of these elements of all his published works. It contains both a greatly condensed statement of the methodological foundations of his empirical and theoretical work, most of which had been more fully discussed in his earlier methodological essays, and the systematic development not of all, but of a very important part, of a comprehensive, logically integrated scheme of ‘ideal types’ of social action and relationships.

But this system of ‘sociological theory’ was not meant by Weber to stand alone. It was conceived rather as the ‘introduction’ to an enormously ambitious comparative historical study of the sociological and institutional foundations of the modern economic and social order. It has been published, in the German, as Part I of the much larger work, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. This work, even in Part I, but still more so in the later parts, was left seriously incomplete at its author’s premature death, so that the editors did not even have an authoritative table of contents in terms of which to decide on the arrangement of the existing manuscript material. Though a ‘fragment’ it is still an exceedingly comprehensive one, and gives a better conception than does any other single work of its author’s extraordinary erudition, scope of interest, and analytical power.

Before entering upon the discussion of some of the more important technical questions of social science methodology, theory, and empirical generalization which are raised by the work here translated, it will be well to give the reader a brief sketch of the author and of the more general character and setting of his work.

Max Weber⁴ was born in 1864 and died in 1920. He came from the most highly cultured portion of the German upper middle class, his father being prominent in the politics of the National Liberal Party in the Bismarckian era, and for many years a member of the Reichstag. Max was brought up in Berlin and entered on the study of law, receiving an appointment as Privatdozent at the University of Berlin. He became diverted from the legal field at a relatively early stage, however, in that he accepted an appointment as Professor of Economics at the University of Freiburg, which he soon left to become the successor of Karl Knies in the chair of economics at Heidelberg. After only a brief tenure in this position, however, he suffered a severe breakdown of health which forced his resignation from his professorship and kept him out of productive work for about four years. After that, during the most fruitful years of his life, he lived as a private scholar in a state of semi-invalidism in Heidelberg. During the latter part of World War I, however, he accepted a temporary teaching appointment at the University of Vienna, and finally, in 1919, a regular appointment to the Chair of Economics at Munich. He died suddenly of pneumonia in the second semester of his incumbency there, at the height of his intellectual powers.

Though Weber’s formal career was mainly confined to the academic sphere, his interest never was. From an early age he took a passionate interest in political affairs. For many years he was on terms of intimacy with politically important persons, and gave them considerable advice behind the scenes. He was among the first to develop strong opposition to the regime of Wilhelm II, though by no means mainly from the point of view of the ordinary ‘left’ parties. During the War he submitted several memoranda to the Government, and in the latter part of it began writing articles on current events for the Frankfurter Zeitung. He was a member of the Commission which drew up the memorandum on German war guilt for the Peace Conference, and of the Commission which submitted the first draft of the Weimar Constitution. It is not impossible that, had he lived, he would have occupied a prominent place in the politics of post-war Germany. There is a sense in which, throughout his life, he was torn between the life of the scholar and the urge to play an active part in the political arena.⁵

Weber’s intellectual career and the process by which his thought developed are intimately connected with the intellectual situation and movements in Germany in his time. He first entered upon the study of law, under the aegis of the historical school, which was then in the ascendancy in the Universities, and his early views stood in conscious reaction against the ‘formalism’ of the Neo-Kantian philosophy of law, which was most prominently represented by Stammler. This antithesis led his interest beyond the mere interest in the history of legal institutions as such, to the study of their social and economic setting. His earlier studies in this field, notably his essay on the Decline of the Roman Empire, and his economic history of the Ancient World,⁶ strongly emphasized the dependence of law on its economic and technological background. Hence the step from historical jurisprudence to historical economics was not a difficult one.

Weber was not, however, satisfied for long with this phase of his thinking. He was insistent on the observance of rigorous canons of factual objectivity in historical research, and could not tolerate the metaphysical ‘cloudiness’ of idealistic philosophers of history who saw everything readily explained by the process of unfolding of a Volksgeist. But neither could he be satisfied with the exclusive attention to questions of detailed historical fact which was so prominent in the work of the historical schools of his time. His was a mind which eagerly sought after broad generalization, however rigorous his standards of detailed scholarship, and early in his career he became absorbed in empirical problems of such scope as to be inaccessible to such methods alone. Part of the outcome of these dissatisfactions was the methodological reorientation, the starting point of which was a devastating critique of the logical foundations of the historical school of economics.⁷

Both in the emphasis on economic rather than formal legal factors, and in the statement of his empirical problems as revolving about the genesis of ‘capitalism’ in the Western World, Weber’s earlier development took a course which brought him into close contact with the Marxian position. But he soon recoiled from this, becoming convinced of the indispensability of an important role of ‘ideas’ in the explanation of great historical processes. The first document of this new conviction was the study of the Protestant Ethic as an element in the genesis of modern capitalism. This was not, however, a final work but became the starting point of a long series of comparative empirical studies of the relations of religious movements and the economic order, which, though incomplete, have been brought together in the three volumes of his Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie.

It may perhaps be said that it is out of his insight into and conviction of the inadequacy both of German Historical Economics and Jurisprudence and of Marxism to solve the problems he had become interested in that Weber launched on the development of an independent line of broad theoretical analysis in the social field, in particular into the development of a science of ‘sociology.’ It is in essentials the theoretical result of this intellectual development, so far as he stated it systematically at all, which is contained in the present volume. It stands in marked contrast to most of the main line of German social thought of his time,but is none the less understandable only in terms of the problems inherent in the German intellectual movements of the day. It is, in view of its almost purely German genesis, all the more remarkable that the major part of the theoretical structure Weber developed should with remarkable exactitude have converged with the work, done at about the same time, of various other scholars in other countries, notably that of Emile Durkheim in France and Vilfredo Pareto in Switzerland.⁸ The theoretical scheme of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft was very closely bound to the problems growing out of specifically German movements of thought. Its author specifically disclaimed any idea of putting forward a system of social or sociological theory. Finally, in many respects its statement and organization show that the process of systematic development and of methodological clarification were, even according to the standards which can now be applied, seriously incomplete. But in spite of these limitations this work must be regarded as one of the very few most fundamental contributions to the modern theoretical social sciences. Though he ‘hid his light under a bushel’ its author will unquestionably rank among the select few who have in a scientific sense been genuinely eminent theorists in the social field.⁹

1 Translated by Talcott Parsons from vol. i of Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religions-soziologie. Published, with a foreword by R. H. Tawney, by George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London, 1930.

2 Translated by Frank H. Knight from the volume entitled in German Wirtschafts-geschichte. Published by George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London, 1927.

3 3 A major addition to the English translations of Weber’s works has recently been made by the publication of From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Oxford University Press, New York, Inc., 1946.

4 For Weber’s biography, including a great deal of discussion of his work, see Marianne Weber’s excellent Max Weber, Ein Lebensbild. This also contains a complete bibliography of his writings. See also the introduction to the volume translated by Gerth and Mills, cited above in note 3.

5 This conflict is documented in his two remarkable essays: Wissenschaft als Beruf and Politik als Beruf, both translated by Gerth and Mills.

6 Both reprinted in the volume Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.

7 Weber never wrote a connected study of methodology. His various essays in the field have been collected since his death in the volume Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. The most important for his early polemical orientation are Roscher und Knies und die logischen Probleme der historischen Nationalökonomie and R. Stammlers Überwindung der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung. For his own positive position see in particular Die Objektivität sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis, Der Sinn der ‘Wertfreikeit’ der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften, and Methodische Grundlagen der Soziologie (chap. i, sec. I of the present volume).

8 See the editor’s Structure of Social Action for a detailed analysis of this process of convergence.

9 The Structure of Social Action, especially chaps, xvi and xvii, contains a considerably more detailed critical analysis of Weber’s theory and methodology than is possible in the present introductory essay.