Understanding Weber

1 Weber before Weberian
sociology, revisited
Lawrence Scaff, in a path-breaking article some twenty years ago, asked how
Weber’s works prior to the Protestant ethic studies of 1904–5 were to be
classified. 1 The Protestant ethic studies belonged to an interpretative sociological
approach; the works before that, from the 1890s, had the character
of a marxisant political economy, dealing as they did with issues of class,
power, and societal and economic change. I revisit this argument, bringing
in more information about the decade of the 1890s, about which we now
know far more. I shall also alter the terms of the argument. Weber was a
national-economist in the 1890s, and this has to be investigated in some
detail to find out what was distinctively Weberian in his approach, which
was not a form of Marxist sociology by another name. I do not follow the
usual consensus of opinion that the Protestant ethic studies belonged to sociology.
The best description of them is descriptive psychology being applied
to national-economy. And, finally, Weber did not become a sociologist until
around 1910. Prior to that, he regarded sociology as suspect, whose overall
approach was either positivist or organicist – both completely untenable positions
for Weber. He fashioned a sociology to his own needs in pursuit of his
universal historical comparative studies. Across all these phases of activity,
there is a constant concern with the meanings, values and culture, an area
that is one of the hardest parts of the social, historical and cultural sciences
to handle proficiently.
At the start of the article, Scaff broaches a subject that goes to the heart of
sociological theory, especially today. There appear to be two sociologies in
Weber’s work. One is structuralist and determinist and is often referred to as
belonging to Weber’s ‘substantive’ work: ‘one in which status groups, social
classes, patterns of domination, and material interests define the analytic
core’. 2 Bryan Turner has portrayed this side of Weber’s sociology as Marxist:
. . . that Weber’s sociology anticipates much that has been central to
the empirical and theoretical focus of modern Marxism. The analysis
of the state, legal fetishism, the separation of ownership and control,