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Max Weber's Economy and Society: A Critical Companion

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 Canadian Journal of Sociology Online September-October 2005
Charles Camic, Philip S. Gorski, and David M. Trubek, eds.
Max Weber's Economy and Society: A Critical Companion.
Stanford University Press, 2005, 416 pp.
$US 27.95 paper (0-8047-4717-2), $US 75.00 hardcover (0-8047-4716-4)

Max Weber’s revered Economy and Society was only posthumously transmitted as a mass of
unpublished notes, manuscripts, and printer’s proofs compiled over a ten year period and in various
states of completion. Thus it comes as no surprise that what many consider to be Weber’s most
magnificent and important work would be in need of ‘a critical companion’ consisting of critical,
interpretive and reconstructive essays. As the editors of Max Weber’s ‘Economy and Society’
acknowledge, this Companion is driven more by a monumentalizing and critical ambition than by
antiquarian curiosity, and on the whole proves to be an admirably helpful and user-friendly guide as
a consequence.
Richard Swedberg’s contribution to this collection is worth starting with since it highlights the
relevance of Weber’s concerns in this work both for the times in which he wrote and for us today.
Swedberg draws from his specialist interest in Weber as an ‘economic sociologist’ from two related
perspectives: first, in pointing out the significance of the fact that the work was originally
commissioned 1909 as one of several contributions to the ‘Outline of Social Economics,’ for which
Weber was the main editor (in fact, it was to replace Gustav Schönberg’s popular but outdated
Handbuch der politischen Oekonomie); and second, in demonstrating that the chapter on ‘Basic
Sociological Categories of Economic Action’ constitutes the centerpiece of Weber’s later work (in
fact, it is literally the middle of the three completed chapters of the unfinished version Weber was
working on when he died). Together these points provide crucial assistance to our understanding of
the text and its present-day importance by directing our attention to the general problem of ‘the
economy’ for sociology, especially the contrast between economic phenomena per se, such as banks
and firms, and economically conditioned or economically relevant phenomena, such as political
strata and religious doctrines. At the same time, attending to these issues also highlights the
particular historical-sociological problem of the different types of capitalism, especially the contrast
between political, commercial, and rational-industrial forms of capitalism, and more generally the
dynamics of status recognition and class exploitation that Eric Olin Wright also emphasizes in his
contribution to this volume).
These indispensable insights into the construction and intended use of this text are supported by the
inclusion of essays by several of the editors of Weber’s unfinished magnum opus: Guenther Roth
(the co-editor of the English volume) on the biographical sources of Weber’s interest in capitalism
with respect to the ‘cosmopolitian nationalism’ of his German and British relatives; Hans G.
Kippenberg (the editor of volume I/22.2 of the Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe on ‘Religious
Communities’) on how the sociology of religion manuscript from 1910-1914 provided a bridge
between Weber’s early essays on Protestantism and his later comparative project on ‘The Economic
Ethics of the World Religions’; and the late Wolfgang J. Mommsen (the co-editor-in-chief of the
whole Gesamtausgabe edition) on the genesis of the text from 1910-1920 and the subsequent history
of its editing and reconstruction (beginning with Marianne Weber’s decision to split the early and
later ‘drafts’ into two connected parts).
Canadian Journal of Sociology Online September-October 2005 Camic et al., Weber’s Economy & Society - 2

On the basis of the drafts and outlines emerging from Weber’s correspondence with his publisher,
Mommsen (in collaboration with the other German editors of the Gesamtausgabe over the past two
decades) arrived at the following arrangement of the text, corresponding respectively to the still
incomplete Volumes 22 and 23 of the Gesamtausgabe (and to Parts II and I of the English edition,
which roughly follows Marianne Weber’s third and Johannes F. Winckelmann’s fifth editions) :1
Economy and Society (1910-1914) Economy and Society (1918-1920)
1. Communities 1. Basic Sociological Concepts
2. Religious Communities 2. Basic Sociological Categories of Econ. Action
3. Law 3. Types of Domination
4. Domination [4. Status Groups and Classes -- outlined]
5. The City [5. Communities (Forms of Association) -- planned]
Through the archival and interpretive efforts of Mommsen and others, readers are invited to move
beyond the casual cataloguing of sources by well-meaning bibliophiles to consider the significance
of Weber’s intensive engagement with his predecessors and contemporaries. The most important of
these influences include Ferdinand Toennies, whose Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft left a lasting
mark on Weber’s preoccupation with concepts of ‘community’ and ‘communalization/
Vergemeinschaftung,’ and Georg Simmel, whose concepts of ‘individualization’ and ‘societalization/
sociation /Vergesellschaftung’ are central to Weber’s understanding of ‘Soziologie’ (the title of
Simmel’s 1908 collection and the eventual subtitle of Economy and Society). As these close textual
readings show, tracking Weber’s starting points, revisions, and departures is not simply an edifying
antiquarian exercise, but rather a way of critically unlocking the core of the text through its ‘key
concepts’ in at attempt to correct its abuses and to render its insights useful for further redeployment.
Unfortunately, two of the weakest essays in this collection deal directly with the foundational
introductory chapter of the later version of Economy and Society on ‘Basic Sociological Terms.’ By
overlooking the significance of Weber’s pedantically-formatted paragraphs for the formulation of
‘ideal types’, Mustafa Emirbayer misleadingly concludes that the underdeveloped concepts of
‘traditional’ and ‘affectual’ action reveal Weber’s ‘bias’ or are somehow denigrated by him as ‘only
second-best’ in opposition to ‘value-rational’ and ‘goal-rational’ action. Likewise, Donald N. Levine
finds a way to misconstrue Weber’s canonical definition of ‘sociology’ as concerned solely with
‘individual action’, despite having just quoted Weber both in German and English: ‘¶1. Sociology …
will be defined here as a discipline that seeks to understand social action interpretively and thereby
to explain its course and its consequences causally’.2 Since Weber’s development of the
hermeneutic task of sociology in the passage that immediately follows may be the source of Levine’s
confusion, and since its importance is also ignored by the editors of this collection, it is worth
quoting at length:
I. Methodological foundations
1. Meaning [Sinn] is here subjectively intended meaning which is either:
a) actually existing [tatsächlich]
i) in an historically given case of an actor or
ii) on average or approximately in a given number [Masse] of cases of
actors, or it is
b) conceived as a pure, conceptual type of such an actor or actors thought of as a
Canadian Journal of Sociology Online September-October 2005 Camic et al., Weber’s Economy & Society - 3

type.
It is not somehow or other the objectively ‘correct’ or metaphysically established ‘true’
meaning. Therein lies the difference between the empirical sciences of action:
sociology and history – vis a vis the dogmatic sciences: jurisprudence, logic, ethics,
aesthetics, whose objective is to investigate the ‘correct’ ‘valid’ meaning. 3
Although the editors of this volume – Camic, Gorski, and Trubek – do not underscore the
significance of these distinctions, in their introduction they describe how Weber’s ‘methodological
individualism’ can assume ‘subjective meaning’ as its point of departure while at the same time
taking inter-subjective, collective, or institutional phenomena as its primary focus. Weber’s concern
in this opening statement is primarily to demarcate the ‘dogmatic sciences of action’ (which search
for objective ‘validity’ and metaphysical ‘truth’) from the ‘empirical sciences of action’. The more
humble aim of the latter is to determine degrees of both ‘adequacy’ at the level of meaning and
‘certainty’ with respect to hypothesized patterns. In Weber’s view, sociology in particular must also
find a middle way between those empirical disciplines which formulate explanatory laws (such as
economics and political science) and those which construct descriptive interpretations (such as
history and ethnography) (pp. 2-3). In an important earlier essay on the problem of ‘rationalization
and freedom’, Levine himself had stressed that, in contrast to Simmel, Weber successfully sustained
the distinction between the subjective interpretation and objective analysis of social action.4 As
Camic, Gorski, and Trubek point out, these crucial passages do not simply rehash Weber’s position
in the Methodenstreit (methodological controversy) of the late nineteenth century in favour of a self-
contradictory individualist sociology. Rather, the method outlined in Economy and Society involves
interpreting processes of meaning-making that extend from the simplest human actions to the most
sophisticated cultural achievements (including the scientific texts of sociology itself). In fact, the
perspective and emphasis developed throughout this chapter constitutes ‘the culmination of nearly
twenty years of systematic reflection and, as Weber’s final statement on the subject, an effective
encapsulation of the position at which he ultimately arrived’ (p. 6).
To be sure, the majority of essays in this collection deal not with the theoretical and methodological
issues highlighted in the 1918-1920 version of Economy and Society, but rather with the rich
empirical studies and historical narratives that make up the preliminary 1910-1914 manuscript. Julia
Adams takes issue with Weber’s assumption that the normal relationship between the sexes within
patrimonially organized communities (Gemeinschaften), particularly the family-state compacts in
early modern Europe, necessarily entailed superiority in men and dependence in women. Harvey
Goldman (along with Kippenberg, as mentioned above) discusses Weber’s broader political and
ethical interest in the comparative study of religious communities on a global scale, with particular
attention to how Weber’s views were influenced by the military and cultural conflicts of his day.
Hans Joas shows how the concept of natural law provides a bridge between Weber’s sociology of
religion and his sociology of law (Recht) by focussing on the connection between early Protestant
and enlightenment notions of individual rights. Duncan Kennedy elaborates on this theme with a
comprehensive examination of how Weber negotiated the paradigm-conflict between classical legal
thought, which posited the will as the basis of law, and logically formal rationality, which put values
at the centre of legal reasoning. Gorski’s more focussed discussion of the ‘bureaucratic revolution’
which led to the rise of rational-legal domination (Herrschaft) in the seventeenth century offers an
alternative account to Weber’s by arguing that the traditional person-office relationship had already
 Canadian Journal of Sociology Online September-October 2005 Camic et al., Weber’s Economy & Society - 4

been challenged by both the pre-Reformation papal sale of public offices and the post-Reformation
disciplinary culture of the northern European monarchs. Finally, Regina F. Titunik and Randall
Collins address the problem raised in Weber’s unfinished monograph on the city (die Stadt)
concerning the possibility of non-legitimate domination and the process of revolutionary de-
legitimation. Each lays particular stress on Weber’s discussion of the medieval communal
associations of urban citizens (the coniuratio, or Einverbrüderung) as an implicit model for
understanding the political mobilization of radical ideas, interest groups, and alliances in past and
present revolutionary movements.
In the light of these critical assessments, it is interesting to note that Marianne Weber initially
presented the five thematically distinct (but textually overlapping) sections of her husband’s early
manuscript under the title ‘Typen der Vergemeinschaftung und Vergesellschaftung’, which may be
translated either as either ‘types of communal and associative relationship’, or ‘types of
communalization and societalization’. Clearly, Weber’s concern throughout Economy and Society is
as much with classifying persistent patterns of interaction as with accounting for processes of
change. For this reason, the interpretive assistance and reconstructive efforts undertaken by the
contributors to this Critical Companion aim at more than simply the preservation of a precious relic;
above all they are engaged in an exemplary exercise in the emulation (and adulation) of a
monumental achievement.
Thomas M. Kemple
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
University of British Columbia
[email protected]

Thomas M. Kemple teaches social and cultural theory and is currently working on a companion volume to
his book Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the Market and the ‘Grundrisse’ (Stanford University Press,
1995) on the literary, aesthetic and rhetorical construction of Max Weber’s later speeches and essays.

http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/mweconsoc.html
October 2005
© Canadian Journal of Sociology Online
1 Baier, Horst, M. Rainer Lepsius, Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter, ‘Overview of the Text of Economy
and Society by the Editors of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe,’ translated by Austin Harrington, Max Weber Studies 1 (1):
104-115. In a letter to his publisher dated October 27, 1919, Weber indicates that these texts indeed constitute two
distinct ‘versions’ separated by several years, rather than two continuous ‘parts’: ‘Das dicke alte Manuscript muss ganz
gründlich umgestaltet werden [The thick old manuscript must be thoroughly revised]’ (cited by Mommsen, note 3, p.
93). In placing the earlier rough draft after the more abstract version written in the last few years of Weber’s life,
Marianne Weber and later editors (including Winkelmann and Roth) left the misleading impression that what they
designated as ‘Part II’ (though drafted earlier) was meant to illustrate and apply the general concepts defined in ‘Part I’
(composed later).
2 Max Weber, ‘Basic Sociological Concepts’ [1920], translated by Keith Tribe, in The Essential Weber, edited by Sam

Whimster (London: Routledge, 2004), 311-331, at 312; translation modified, emphasis added). Compare Levine, note 5,
p. 101.
3 Max Weber, op. cit., 312; translation modified.

4 Donald L. Levine, ‘Rationality and Freedom: Inveterate Multivocals’, in his book, The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays

in Social and Cultural Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 142-178.

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