Economy and Society ECONOM Y A N D SOCIET Y A New Translation M a x W e b e r Edited and translated by K e i t h T r i b e Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2019 ECONOM Y A N D SOCIET Y A New Translation M a x W e b e r Edited and translated by K e i t h T r i b e Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2019 Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca First printing Photo: Max Weber/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Design: Jill Breitbarth 9780674240834 (EPUB) 9780674240841 (MOBI) 9780674240827 (PDF) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Weber, Max, 1864–1920, author. | Tribe, Keith, editor, translator. Title: Economy and society. I : a new translation / Max Weber ; edited and translated by Keith Tribe. Other titles: Soziologische Kategorienlehre. En glish Description: Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts : Harvard University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018030731 | ISBN 9780674916548 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Economics. | Sociology. | Economics— Sociological aspects. Classification: LCC HB175 .W36413 2019 | DDC 306.3— dc23 LC rec ord available at https:// lccn. loc. gov /2 018030731 Contents Preface vii Introduction to Max Weber’s Economy and Society 1 Overview of Chapter One 74 1 Basic So cio log i cal Concepts 77 Overview of Chapter Two 139 2 Basic So cio log i cal Categories of Economic Action 143 Overview of Chapter Three 335 3 Types of Rule 338 Overview of Chapter Four 448 4 Social Ranks and Social Classes 450 Appendix A: Translation Appendix 459 Appendix B: The Definitional Paragraphs of Chapter 1 489 Acknowledgements 497 Index 499 Preface Max Weber was working on Economy and Society when he suddenly fell ill and died in June 1920. He had drafted and proofed the first three chapters and begun the fourth, which remained a fragment. He had not drafted any related material since 1913; resuming in 1919, he was now working to a new plan, but he left b ehind no notes or correspondence indicating what this plan was. Weber was conscious of the delays that dogged the proj ect and had suggested to his publisher that Economy and Society should appear in instalments and then, once finished, be published as a complete book. In February 1921 the first instalment duly appeared, comprising the three completed chapters and a fragment of the fourth, that had been written in 1919–1920, typeset, the first three chapters having been proofed by Weber. It is the material in this February 1921 instalment, part I of the book we know today as Economy and Society, that is translated here.1 Max Weber’s widow sought, however, to reconstruct the book as it had been planned in 1914. She therefore added earlier drafts to this new material; this appeared in three further instalments, the entire work being published for the first time in 1922. It is a version of this 1922 book that was published in En­ glish in 1968 under the title Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology,2 a work widely regarded as Max Weber’s final contribution to the social sciences of the twentieth c entury, and which did much to shape his l ater reputation as a comparative sociologist. 1 All translations in the following are my own, unless other wise noted. 2 In three volumes, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968). viii Preface The first instalment had already been translated into En glish during the 1930s and was published in 1947 under the title The Theory of Social and Eco­ nomic Organ ization, edited by Talcott Parsons. During the l ater 1940s, two other influential se lections of Max Weber’s writings were published in En glish,3 positioning him as a so cio log i cal theorist whose work was a central point of reference for American sociology and po liti cal science during the 1950s and 1960s— and in this guise was reimported into West Germany. This reputation was consolidated in 1964 with the republication of The Theory of Social and Economic Organ ization as a paperback, and also, more negatively, by a con­ ference in Heidelberg marking the centenary of Weber’s birth at which both Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas criticized his con temporary standing in the postwar social sciences. During the 1970s, this critique of Weber’s work and its relationship to the American social sciences was reinforced by argu­ ments that compared his analys is of capitalism, unfavourably, with that of Karl Marx. Not u ntil the 1980s did more thorough scholarship begin to f ree Max Weber’s work of t hese tangled prejudices, so that t oday he is widely acknowl­ edged once more as the leading theorist of modernity— whether this is con­ ceived as a social, economic, po liti cal, or cultural phenomenon. Economy and Society runs to over 1,500 pages in the En glish edition; the first instalment, referred to as “part I” in the 1968 edition, accounts for the first 300 pages. Given its mixed structure—w ith 80  percent of its content made up of material from older manuscripts, many of which bear no direct relationship to these first 300 pages— attention has tended to focus on the first and third chapters of part I: a pres en ta tion of basic so cio log i cal concepts and the use of these concepts in presenting a typology of po liti cal forms. As the subtitle of the 1968 En glish translation makes clear, Weber was then thought not only to be primarily a sociologist but to have in this book laid the foundations of an “interpretive sociology.” Both ideas can be shown to be misconceived, but today there is also greater interest in the analy sis of po liti cal organisation presented in the third chapter. The second chapter, on social categories of eco­ nomic action, in which Weber builds an analys is of economic institutions from social pro cesses, has never attracted very much attention, in part b ecause 3 Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946); E. Shils and H. Finch, eds., The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: F ree Press, 1949). Preface ix its style of economic argument was quickly displaced during the 1930s by the more formalised approach familiar t oday. Nonetheless, given the growing criticism of the kind of economics taught in colleges and universities today, this chapter provides a valuable perspective through which our understanding of economic activity might be re imagined. Hence, the idea of publishing the first instalment as a separate volume has a great deal to be said for it, this being the only section of a book that Max Weber prepared for publication. In addition, this separate publication only ex­ isted in an En glish edition until the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe devoted Band (Bd.) I / 23 to it, with all the further manuscript material divided among the five separate parts of Band I / 22— replicating in the volume order the actual chronological order of composition.4 Separate publication has much to be said for it as a way of clarifying Weber’s intentions. But the existing En glish trans­ lation also has many flaws that combine to obscure what exactly Max Weber was trying to do in 1919 and 1920. In presenting this new translation of that work, I hope to make Max Weber’s real intellectual achievements more accessible. Nevertheless, this cannot be done by simplifying what is a densely argued text. Weber was a very fluent and compelling public speaker, but the rigour and consistency of his scholarly writing demand close attention. This new translation does not artificially smooth the path for a reader but is organised in a way that provides the reader with appropriate assistance. First, each chapter is prefaced with an overview of its structure and argument, so that the reader is able to make sense of how it develops. Chapter 1 is the most well structured of the three main chapters because the material had been delivered in lecture courses during 1918 and 1919. Much of Chapter 2 relates to Weber’s lectures on economic history during the winter semester of 1919–1920, while he also draws on lecture courses he had delivered in the 1890s. Chapter 3 is in fact a revision of one of the older manuscripts incorporated into Economy and So­ ciety, but, especially in its closing pages, h ere Weber keeps referring the reader forwards to l ater material that he never wrote. This roughness in the text is not concealed here; nor where the text degenerates into lists is an effort made to smooth these into something more like a continuous narrative. Instead, the 4 The separate parts are referred to below, following the convention adopted by the editors of the Gesamtausgabe, as MWG I / 22­1 to MWG I / 22­5.