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Max weber's manifesto in economic sociology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Richard Swedberg
Richard Swedberg
Affiliation:
Stockholms universitet(Stockholm).
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Abstract

While references are often made to Weber's economic sociology, it is not commonly known that Weber himself only applied the term economic sociology (Wirtscftssoziologie) to one of his writings, namely to Chapter 2 in Part 1 of Economy and Society, “Sociological Categories of Economic Action”. This text, as I show, has basically been ignored in the huge secondary literature that exists on Weber's work as well as by economic sociologists. It represents, however, a very important contribution to Weber's work in economic sociology; indeed, it can be said to constitute Weber's manifesto in economic sociology. “Sociological Categories of Economic Action” is presented and discussed, and an effort is made to make this difficult text accessible as well as to show that it contains some extremely interesting material in economic sociology.

Ou fait souvent référence à la ‘sociologie économique’ de Max Weber mais on remarque peu qu'l n'a employé cette expression que pour un de ses textes, le chapitre 2 de la première parrie de Économic et société 〈Catégories sociologiques de l'agir économique〉, lequel semble avoir fort peu attiré l'attention, tant des commentateurs de Weber que des spécialistes de sociologie economiquc. II représente pourtant une contribution essentielle de Weber au domaine et on peut dire qu'il est son manifeste pour la sociologie économiquc Le comméntaire présenté entend édairer ce texte difficile et montrer qu'il constitue un apport du plus haut intérêt à la sociologie économique.

Häufig wird auf Webers Begriff der 〈Wirtschaftssoziologie〉 Bezug genommen, ohne zu berücksichtigen, daΒ Weber diesen Begriff nur im ersten Teil des zweiten Kapitels 〈Soziologische Kategorien des wirtschaftlichen Handelns〉 seines Buches 〈Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft〉 verwandt hat. Dieses Kapitel ist bisher weder in der Sekundärliteratur über Webers Werk noch von den Wirtschaftssoziologen analysiert worden. Und dies obwohl diese Schrift einen bedeutenden Beitrag im Gesamtwerk Webers zur Wirtschaftssoziologic darstellt; man kann hier durchaus von Webers Manifest zur Wirtschaftssoziologie sprechen. 〈Soziale Kategorien des wirtschaftlichen Handelns〉 wird im folgenden vorgestellt und diskutiert, um diesen schwierigen Text verständlich zu machen und seine besondere Bedeutung fur die Wirtschaftssoziologie aufzuzeigen.

Type
Note Critique
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , November 1998 , pp. 379 - 398
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1998

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References

(1) For comments I thank Cecilia Swedberg, Lars Udehn and participants at a seminar at the Department of Sociology at Stockholm University in the fall of 1997, where a preliminary version of this article was presented. Some material is cited by courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.

(2) Weber, Max, Die Lage der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland. 1892. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/3. Ed. Riesebrodt, Martin (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1984)Google Scholar. For a discussion of Weber's writings on the East Elban question, see e.g. Tribe, Keith (ed.), Reading Weber (London: Routledge, 1989).Google Scholar

(3) Weber's first version of Economy and Society is to be found on pages 311–1372 in the current English translation. These pages, it should be added, may also contain some material which Weber had not intended for inclusion.

(4) Weber only had time to complete the rewriting of Part I of Economy and Society, which consísts of four chapters: ‘Basic Sociological Terms’, ‘Sociological Categories of Economic Action’, ‘The Types of Legitimate Domination’ and ‘Status Groups and Classes’. For the history of how Economy and Society was written, see especially Winkelmann, Johannes, Max Webers hinterlassenes Hauptwerk (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1986)Google Scholar and Schluchter, Wolfgang, Economy and Society: The End of A Myth, in Rationalism, Religion, and Domination: A Weberian Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 433–463Google Scholar. For some additional information, see Mommsen, Wolfgang, Die Siebecks und Max Weber, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22(1996), 19–30.Google Scholar

(5) This is Guenther Roth, who has also noted that ‘economists and sociologists [with minor exceptions] have ignored it [that is, ‘Sociological Categories of Economic Action’]’. See Roth, Guenther, Weber's Political Failure, Telos (Winter 1988–1989), p. 149.Google Scholar Alan Sica has decried the ‘almost unreadable accretion of definition piled upon definition’ in Chapter 2. See Sica, Alan, Weber, Irrationality, and Social Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 146, 208.Google Scholar

(6) See Bader, Veith Michael, Berger, Johannes, Gassmann, Heiner and Knesebeck, Jost v.d., Weber, Max: Soziologische Grundbegriffe des Wirtschaftens, Einführung in die Gesellschaftstheorie. Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft und Staat bei Marx und Weber (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, [1976] 1987), 193–320Google Scholar; Freund, Julien, The Sociology of Economics, The Sociology of Max Weber (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, [1966] 1972), 149–175Google Scholar; Jones, Bryn, Economic Action and Rational Organization in the Sociology of Weber, in Hindess, Barry (ed.), Sociological Theories of the Economy (London: Macmillan, 1977), 28–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kalberg, Stephen, Max Weber's Universal-Historical Architectonic of Economically-Oriented Action: A Preliminary Reconstruction, Current Perspectives in Social Theory 4 (1983), 253–288Google Scholar; Parsons, Talcott III. Weber's ‘Economic Sociology’, in ‘Introduction’ to Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 30–55Google Scholar; Poggi, Gianfranco, The Conceptual Context, in Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber's Protestant Ethic (Amhearst: University of Amhearst Press, 1983), 13–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Winkelmann, Johannes, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Erläuterungsband (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1976), 35–43Google Scholar. Many of these interpretations do not look at Chapter 2 from the viewpoint of economic sociology, however. Kalberg, for example, is mainly interested in Chapter 2 so that he can develop a universal-historical typology for civilizational analysis; Poggi argues that Chapter 2 supplements the analysis in The Protestant Ethic through its focus on the way that capitalism operates; and so on. To what extent Chapter 2 in Economy and Society has been taught and lectured from is, of course, impossible to say. As to the United States, the following three cases may nonetheless be mentioned. The first case involves Frank Knight and Edward Shils, and is described by the latter in the following way: ‘In the middle 1930s, [Frank] Knight conducted a seminar [at the University of Chicago] on the first chapters of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, in which I participated, where we studied the text line by line’. According to Daniel Bell, Alexander von Schelting taught a course in 1939 at Columbia University which was exclusively devoted to the two first chapters of Economy and Society: ‘we spent the entire term… mostly on definitions of economic and rational actions’. Finally, Karl Polanyi discusses Chapter 2 in the mimeographed notes that he distributed to his students in 1947 at Columbia University (where he taught between 1947 and 1953). See Shils, Edward, Tradition, Ecology, and Institution in the History of Sociology, Daedalus 99 (Fall 1970), p. 823Google Scholar (note 21); Bell in Swedberg, Richard, Economics and Sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 217Google Scholar; Polanyi, Karl, ‘Appendix’, in Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 120–138Google Scholar. As far as I know, no economist has ever commented on Chapter 2, including the Austrian economists who were very interested in Weber's work.

(7) See ‘III. Weber’s ‘Economic Sociology’, in Talcott Parsons, ‘Introduction’ to Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 30–55.

(8) For an effort to add to Parsons' study, see Swedberg, Richard, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming in the fall of 1998)Google Scholar. In this work I essentially try to map out the following parts of Weber's economic sociology: (1) the economy; (2) the economy and politics; (3) the economy and law; and (4) the economy and religion. I also discuss in quite some detail Grundriss der Sozialökonomik and discuss how the Weberian approach to economic sociology relates to the current paradigm in this field.

(9) Weber, Economy and Society, p. 116.

(10) Wagner, Helmut, Alfred Schutz: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 15.Google Scholar

(11) The attentive reader will recall that sociology, as opposed to economics, also studies actions driven by habits and emotions (see e.g. Economy and Society, 24–6). While this must not be forgotten, it is not central to the argument just developed in the text.

(12) The German terms are ‘wirtschaftlich orientiertes Handeln’ and ‘Wirtschaften’.

(13) In particular, reader may want to consult pages 4 and 22–24 in Economy and Society as well as an earlier discussion of the same issue in: Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology (1913), Sociological Quarterly 22 (Spring 1988), 151–80. In Economy and Society Weber says that ‘sociology… is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby of its course and consequences’, and that ‘action is “social” insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course’ (p. 4). In his 1913 essay Weber similarly states: ‘Action specifically significant for interpretive sociology is, in particular, behavior that: (1) in terms of the subjectively intended meaning of the actor, is related to the behavior of others, (2) is codetermined in its course through this relatedness, and thus (3) can be intelligibly explained in terms of this (subjectively) intended meaning’ (p. 152).

(14) Weber also gives the term ‘Chance’ other meanings in Part I of Economy and Society, especially as probability. The German word ‘Chance’, it should be added, is mistranslated a number of times in Economy and Society as ‘advantage’, while the proper translation is usually ‘opportunity’.

(15) ‘The central trouble with discussions of rationality is that we are taught by economists and decision theorists to treat rationality as an assumption… but in the real world rationality is a variable to be explained’, Arthur Stinchcombe, ‘Rationality and Social Structure’, p. 5 in Stratification and Organization.

(16) Weber, Economy and Society, p. 108.

(17) Ibid.

(18) Weber argues to this effect in an important letter to Robert Liefmann, dated March 9, 1920. How this link between marginal utility theory and economic sociology is to be worked out in more detail is, however, not discussed anywhere in Weber's work.

(19) Weber, Economy and Society, p. 205.

(20) It was originally Friedrich List who in the 1840s suggested that work was not only divided but also combined (‘Teilung der Arbeit’ versus ‘Vereinigung der Arbeit’). See List, Friedrich, The National System of Political Economy (New York: Longmans, Green and Co, 1916), p. 121Google Scholar. List's idea was later popularized through Karl Bücher's influential Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft (1893 and further editions). See Bücher, Karl, Industrial Evolution (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, [1901] 1968), 244–281.Google Scholar

(21) Weber, Economy and Society, p. 44.

(22) Ibid.

(23) Weber, Economy and Society, p. 162.

(24) Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930), 17–27. The text entitled ‘Author's Introduction’ was originally published as the introduction to the first volume of Weber's Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion and was added to the English translation of The Protestant Ethic by Talcott Parsons.

(25) Weber, Economy and Society, p. 205.

(26) Ibid.

(27) There is also a Chapter 4 in Part 1 of Economy and Society—‘Status Groups and Classes’—but it is only five pages long. In the mid-1930s Frank Knight and Talcott Parsons were discussing the possibility of translating Economy and Society, and Knight even commissioned one of his students to translate the section on the sociology of law. Another of Knight's students, Edward Shils, translated parts of Chapter 1, together with Alexander von Schelting. In a letter to Knight, dated June 5, 1936, Parsons wrote, ‘The first part [of Economy and Society] seems to me almost too terribly abstract to attempt to translate. If it is done at all, it seems to me as I said above it ought to be with very copious commentary by a highly competent person. For that purpose it ought to be in three different volumes, one the general ideal type syste[m], one the economic material and the other the « authority » materia’ (Harvard University Archives HUG [FP] 42.8.2, Box 2; this material is cited with permission of the Harvard University Archives).

(28) The role of Hayek in translating Economy and Society is recounted by Parsons in an article from the late 1970s. See Parsons, Talcott, The Circumstances of My Encounter with Max Weber, in Merton, Robert K. and White Riley, Matilda (eds), Sociological Traditions from generation to Generation (Norwood: Ablex, 1980), p. 42Google Scholar. The correspondance between Hayek and Parsons, which Parsons refers to, is not to be located, either in the Parsons Collection at Harvard University or at the Hayek Collection at Stanford University. Parsons gave a slightly different version of the coming into being of the translation in the 1947 preface to The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947).Google Scholar

(29) Letter from Parsons to Edwin F. Gay, dated August 17, 1939 (Harvard University Archives, HUG[FP] 42.8.2, Box 3).

(30) Letters from Talcott Parsons to Edwin F Gay, dated August 17, August 28, and November 13, 1939 (Harvard University Archives HUG[FP] 42.8.4, Box 3); personal communication from Robert K. Merton on July 11, 1996 in East Hampton. On August 17, 1939. Parsons wrote to Gay: ‘You probably remember the very long and difficult second chapter, Soziologische Grundkategorien des Wirtschaftens. As you know, this chapter is full of classifications of forms of organization in the economic sphere, with examples drawn from virtually all periods of history. Weber's own use of terms is naturally best, with some modifications of his own on the literature of economic history to the writings of the historical school in Germany. Naturally these terms raise many difficult problems of translation; and since I am only moderately familiar with the underlying literature and with the subject matter, at many points I am by no means certion tain that I have been able to find the best available way of rendering these things in English’. In 1947, the year when the translation was finally published, A.M. Henderson wrote to Parsons, ‘Frankly, I embarked on it [the translation of Chapters 1–2 in Economy and Society] in the belief that a knowledge of German and economics was sufficient, and I am quite sure it was not’—letter from A.M. Henderson to Talcott Parsons, dated June 23, 1947 (Harvard University Archives, HUG[FP] 42.8.4, Box 14).