Table Of ContentEconomy 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.
