Understanding Weber

Introduction 3
view of the texts? My own view is that we do not, and this relates only in
part to the difficulty in dating the texts. Commentators on Max Weber have
usually tried to come up with an overall interpretation of Weber’s many
and varied writings; rationalization has often been chosen as the integrating
theme. Wolfgang Schluchter has done more than anyone to show how Weber’s
ideas developed, how they reoccur in more than one project and how
they form a more or less systematic unity. 4 In The Essential Weber, I argued
that my selection had a degree of coherence, not least because Weber can
be seen to cross-reference the various departments of his work. Economy
and Society and the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ (which forms
the major part of the Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion) pursue
different but complementary paths.
But a selection of the most important academic texts is not the same as
a synoptic and synchronic account, of Nelson’s bidding. PESC had always
struck me as a work of eruptive genius, difficult entirely to coordinate within
the rest of Weber’s writings. In The Essential Weber, I selected only part of its
final chapter, and I preferred to rely in my commentary on a later formulation
(from 1915) in which Weber integrates the Protestant ethic thesis into
a comparison with Confucianism. My selection also avoided the problem
of what Lawrence Scaff has termed ‘Weber before Weberian sociology’, by
which he meant the writings of the 1890s prior to PESC. 5 Weber wrote a
small mountain of studies in the 1890s, and mainstream social science has
more or less ignored it. This situation has been partly rectified by recent
scholarship, not least the publication of most of his works from the 1890s
by the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe. But in many ways, the output of the
1890s, mostly in national-economy, raises the question of why he switched
to studying Protestantism. Contrary to some commentators, Weber did not
move into this field in order to develop the sociology of religion. He disliked
sociology in its then current form, and he only developed his own version
of it around 1910 to handle issues in comparative studies of religion and
economy. Nor is it wholly convincing to argue that PESC was a response
to the Marxist, materialist philosophy of history. The situation in nationaleconomy,
a broad-ranging discipline at the time, was more complex than
this.
We now know far more about Max Weber’s life. A number of scholars
have gained access to the archives and read large chunks of his correspondence,
and the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe have published his letters for the
period 1906–14. 6 The picture that is emerging is of a very complex and
contradictory personality. He had some sort of affectual disorder in which
periods of high productivity were followed by actual depression or exhaustion.
He tried to compensate for these affectual disorders through medication,
using quite large amounts of opiate-based drugs to calm his excitability.
He developed a pattern of working hard through the autumn and winter
and then convalescing at Easter and during the summer months. He was
a strongly reactive person, easily provoked by a keen sense of competition