Understanding Weber

Introduction 5
and deadline. At the least, we need a certain wariness in forming our view
of Weber’s output and should not impose on it a too schoolmasterly order.
He was a virtuoso with his materials and ideas: he could state a theme, invert
it, introduce another tune alongside it and perhaps even become bored
with it. Rainer Lepsius has noted that, in the last months of his life (before
he was struck down by pneumonia), Weber was going to write on culture,
Tolstoy and music – a switch of mind and of focus – after he had completed
Economy and Society and the studies of the economic ethics of the world
religions. 9
I have taken some care in this book to register the particular characteristics
of the format in which Weber wrote. He used a variety of formats
– the essay, the research survey and research report, encyclopaedia entries,
scholarly dissertation, the journal article and the academic public lecture.
Weber rarely used the book form – only his doctoral and habilitation theses
and one agrarian survey appeared as books. He preferred the long essay to
the book form, and it needs to be noted that many of Weber’s ‘books’ are
in fact collections of his essays. Some of the essays were intended by Weber
to form a collective entity, for example ‘The Economic Ethics of the World
Religions’; other collections of his writings were put together after his death
by Marianne Weber. Just to emphasize this point: only one English translation
of a Weber text can be taken to be the equivalent of a book published
by Weber in his lifetime – his doctoral thesis. 10 The Protestant Ethic and
the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism is an essay; Economy and Society is a collection of
manuscripts and corrected proofs brought together after his death.
Unities, complementarities and sequencing can be drawn, but I have not
tried to force these upon his writings. To take the largest of his questions:
what were the causal origins of modern occidental capitalism? His career can
be seen as continuously developing the question and creating new methodologies
and new studies to answer it. We may have to accept that the question
is unanswerable in a way that would meet agreed academic criteria of causal
proof. At this point, the question becomes how does modernity develop in
the west and how have similar religious-based trajectories of life conduct
developed in other civilizations. The ‘how’ question is just as significant and
valid as the exact specification of causal origins. My sense of Weber’s career
is that he started out with a unique explanation (in Puritan asceticism) for the
origins of modern capitalism, but this modulated into how occidental modernity
was distinctive from other civilizations. Weber found this as intensely
interesting and absorbing as his original starting point. This sense provides
a trajectory to this book, but one that is not adhered to strictly. It is not assumed
that Weber planned his scholarly career according to such a trajectory
– quite the contrary. It is always a puzzle to figure out how Weber proceeded
from one project to another. But now that there is sufficient information
available about the dating and origins of these projects, it is possible to chart
his movements along, around and across the line of this trajectory.
Chapter 1 examines Weber’s career in national-economy in the 1890s.