Classical Sociology

CHAPTER 4
MAX WEBER ON ECONOMY
AND SOCIETY
Introduction: Approaching Max Weber
It is common to refer to concepts which are the subject of endless dispute
as ‘essentially contested’ (Gallie, 1955–6). We might usefully extend the
idea to talk about ‘essentially contested authors’, that is authors the interpretation
of whom gives rise inevitably and endlessly to controversy. Max
Weber (1864–1920) is pre-eminently such an author. In recent years there
has been a great revival of interest in Weber and Weberian sociology, but
we do not appear to be anywhere near a scholarly consensus about the
importance or meaning of his work. Weber has been attacked as a reactionary
prophet of despair, as a bourgeois sociologist whose views on domination
were part of the background of fascism, as one of the greatest
minds of the twentieth century, or as a philosopher of modernity whose
views on rationalization prepared the way towards the current dispute
between modernists and postmodernists. These disputes over the meaning
of Weber’s work are ironic, since Weber regarded the interpretation of
meanings which actors attach to social action as an essential aspect of sociology
as a science. For Weber, sociology was interpretative sociology (verstehende
soziologie). In interpreting Weber, there is the problem of whether
Weber’s work contradicts itself, namely whether Weber’s own methodological
writings are undermined by his substantive research (Scaff, 1984;
Turner, 1974). There is the deeper question of whether Weber the person
contradicts his work.
The aim of this chapter is to consider these changing interpretations of
Weber’s sociology as an appreciation of the enduring merits of Hans Gerth
and C. Wright Mills’s introduction to Weber (Gerth and Mills, 1948). Their
selections and translations from Weber remain one of the most balanced
introductions to Weber, in English, which we possess. Furthermore, given
the notorious difficulties of Weber’s German, they have offered us a lucid,
but accurate translation. At the time of the publication of their selections
little of Weber’s sociology had appeared in English translation, apart from
Parsons’s translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(Weber, 1930). In 1944, J.P. Mayer published a valuable study of Weber’s
political sociology in his Max Weber and German Politics (Mayer, 1944). Of
course, almost half a century after From Max Weber appeared, we have
access to a far greater range of Weber’s sociological publications, including
the monumental Economy and Society (Weber, 1978a). There have also been
re-translations of major parts of Weber’s opus, such as the ‘science as a