Understanding Weber

Introduction
In an article published in 1974, the scholar Benjamin Nelson asked some
very direct and simple questions of Max Weber’s work. He called for an
adequate appreciation of Weber’s central intentions and horizons over the
years of his life. He noted that, as yet, there was no critical edition of the
Protestant ethic essays that would allow us ‘to see how the horizons of Weber’s
thinking shifted with the shifts of contexts demanded of him by his
various sorts of critics’. There was no hope, he said, of a convincing and
comprehensive interpretation of his life’s work ‘without a synoptical and
synchronic reading of his Economy and Society, his Collected Essays in the
Sociology of Religion and the stratum of discussions illustrated in the “Author’s
Introduction” ’. Nelson correctly perceived that the last named article
was a dense sedimentation of a lifetime’s knowledge and could provide ‘a
master clue’ to Weber’s aims. 1
What excited Nelson in such an inquiry was the uncovering of the full
measure of what he called a ‘differential historical sociology of sociocultural
process’ that would clarify civilizational configurations. Nelson observed
that complex societies in the world were undergoing extraordinary change
in respect of their central institutions, schemes of orientation and technologies
and that Weber’s lead had to be followed.
He called attention to ‘the different variable mixes of “religions” and
“worlds”, organizational and regulative juridical structures, communal as
well as associational living patterns, collective as well as individual identifications
and identities’. This was the agenda of a future sociology and one that
would ‘contribute to the necessary progress towards our common goals’. 2
He speculated that there ‘is strong reason to believe that if Weber had
lived beyond 1920, he would very probably have gone forward to recast
the argument and emphasis of The Protestant Ethic’. He would have given
greater prominence ‘to the distinctive origins and features of the modern
“rational” Occidental science and technology’. There could be no understanding
of ‘the most fateful force of our Western modern life, capitalism,
without seeing it against the background of the historical rationalizations of
science and sensibility in all the spheres of thought and action’.