Understanding Weber

Weber before Weberian sociology, revisited 19
kets represent objective factors, for Weber, the subjective, motivational or
psychological factors have to be given equal attention if one is to assess the
future direction of developments.
Weber’s report was immediately recognized as authoritative and insightful
as well as breaking new ground in research on the agrarian question.
Weber used his empirical study and analysis to great effect in the political
and policy debates which followed on the publication of the report at the
end of 1892. Weber’s own political position, which has been expounded in
detail elsewhere, 26 argued for maintaining a German agricultural workforce
on the grounds that the eastern borders would only be secure with a settled
German workforce and not a Polish migratory one. Given that the psychological
and motivational grounds for the joint community of ‘Instleute’ and
Junker were no longer viable, farmland should be made available by the
government for small German farmers. For a bourgeois academic, Weber’s
political position was somewhat eccentric and hardly progressive. In terms
of agrarian development, sounder arguments could have been made to allow
the inevitable migration to the west – both of German farmers to the towns
and of farmworkers from central Europe to Prussia. This would have optimized
the development of central Europe, which was then very backward,
and have been in the interests of both landowners and dissatisfied German
farmworkers.
The national-economist
It is still not generally understood just how immersed Weber was in national-economy.
Overall, there has been a tendency to regard the Weber of
the 1890s as an emergent sociologist who was informed about economics
rather than an economist in his own right who later developed sociological
interests. His professorial post was in national-economy, first at Freiburg and
then at Heidelberg, and that is what he principally lectured on. His work on
the agrarian conditions in the east of Germany was done as an economist,
even though we can see the signs of social researcher in those studies. In
addition, he became an expert on the stock exchanges, or bourses as they
were called. An impression has been formed that, because Weber trained as a
legal historian, his ‘switch’ into national-economy, when he took up a chair
in that subject at Freiburg in 1894 at the age of 30, was artificial. Also, his
immense reputation as a sociologist has provided the lazy assumption that he
was never properly an economist.
But even in his postdoctoral work at Berlin, prior to his appointment at
Freiburg, law, economy and capitalism in the ancient world had become
the focus of his interests. His habilitation thesis, published in 1891, was
entitled ‘Roman Agrarian History and its Significance for Public and Private
Law’. 27 Wolfgang Mommsen comments that, while the thesis was intended
as an analysis of the Roman legal system and its impact upon the agrarian
economy, it soon escaped this narrow framework. What Weber discovered