Understanding Weber

Introduction 7
scholarship; he used literary techniques, rhetoric and – above all – hermeneutics
to make the essay such a success. It is against these last standards that
it needs to be assessed.
Chapter 4 notes what is effectively his retreat to methodology in the
face of his own creativity. The scholasticism of Rickert’s methodology is
favoured over the expansiveness of Dilthey’s project for the human sciences.
I argue that PESC is more compatible with Dilthey’s ambitions than with
Rickert’s prescriptive methodology. Nevertheless, Weber fashions his own
methodological solutions for the cultural and human sciences in his 1904 essay
on ‘Objectivity’. This essay served as a way forward in the methodological
battles of the day for the relaunched Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und
Sozialpolitik. It also acted as a methodological supplement to PESC, but in a
number of respects that work had outstripped all methodological protocols.
It attracted criticism from the outset, as it has done throughout the twentieth
century. In his replies to his critics, the issue of multiple causation proved
especially difficult, with Weber being heavily reliant on the ‘elective affinity’
between ideal and material causes.
Chapters 5 and 6 examine the huge expansion of Weber’s writings into
comparative and systematic work on the economy in relation to the special
sociologies of religion, law, power, the formation of communal groups and
the formation of associative groups. Weber took on the editorial responsibility
for the encyclopaedic and multivolume Outline of Social Economics
(Grundriss der Sozialökonomik). And in the same period, broadly dated
1910 to August 1914, Weber completed the first drafts of economic ethics
influenced by Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism. To
date, nine separate volumes of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe cover this
period and, in addition, the letter volumes (Briefe) chart Weber’s voluminous
and intricate correspondence with his publisher and fellow academics.
The painstaking and detailed scholarship of the Gesamtausgabe editors has
revealed the precise contours of Weber’s manifold studies. Chapters 5 and
6 undertake a mapping of those contours and suggest that more than one
map is required. Multiple causation in relation to developmental history is a
continuous concern, addressed by more than one strategy. Weber’s own interpretative
sociology makes its first appearance in this period, and its terminology
feeds into the substantive studies and provides Weber with a reliable
method when working with such a broad range of materials. The move into
sociology was not wholly successful, and its role is a topic of a significant
scholarly dispute. Weber’s sociology of religion stands at the centre of this
period. Hans Kippenberg’s scholarship and editing of the relevant MWG
volume (Religiöse Gemeinschaften) demonstrates just how immersed Weber
was in the scientific study of religion, including the latest ethnographic field
studies. I express the view that Weber’s sociology of religion is both brilliant
and hesitant. Even now, the problems Weber was addressing remain
unresolved.
Chapter 7 goes outside Weber in order to revisit the issues of multiple