Understanding Weber

Understanding Weber 

Understanding Weber provides an accessible and comprehensive explanation 

of the central issues of Weber’s work. Using the most recent scholarship and 

editions of Weber’s writings, Sam Whimster explores the full range, depth 

and development of Max Weber’s approach to the social and cultural sciences. 

This path-breaking book: 

• locates the central issues in Weber’s writings and relates them to the 

golden era of social and cultural sciences at the beginning of the twentieth 

century; 

• argues that Weber remains the major exponent of the classical tradition 

still relevant today; 

• offers a new interpretation of the dynamic of Weber’s career as historian, 

social economist, methodologist and sociologist. 

Weber’s sociology stands as a successful and still valid underwriting of 

the substantive fields of power, law, rulership, culture, religion, civilizational 

configurations and economic sociology. At a time of turning away from grand 

theory to empirical policy studies, this book asserts the authority of Weber’s 

conception and calls for a critical engagement with his legacy in order to 

understand the dynamics of a globalizing modernity. 

Understanding Weber is an indispensable guide to Weber’s writings and 

will be an invaluable companion to The Essential Weber (2004). The book 

closely tracks the development of Weber’s thinking, an exploration that will 

make it an obligatory purchase for undergraduate and postgraduate students 

as well as researchers in the fields of sociological theory, economic sociology 

and cultural studies. 

Sam Whimster is Reader in Sociology at London Metropolitan University. 

He is also editor of the international journal, Max Weber Studies, and has 

published extensively on Max Weber. Publications include Max Weber and 

the Culture of Anarchy (1999) and The Essential Weber, Routledge (2004).

Understanding Weber 

Sam Whimster

First published 2007 

by Routledge 

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by Routledge 

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an informa business 

© 2007 Sam Whimster 

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. 

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data 

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ISBN 0–203–03056–7 Master e-book ISBN 

ISBN10: 0-415-37076-0 (pbk) 

ISBN10: 0-415-37075-2 (hbk) 

ISBN10: 0-203-03056-7 (ebk) 

ISBN13: 978-0-415-37076-9 (pbk) 

ISBN13: 978-0-415-37075-2 (hbk) 

ISBN13: 978-0-203-03056-1 (ebk)

[T]he rational world can be considered as a great, immortal individual which 

ceaselessly produces that which is necessary and thereby comes to control 

the accidental. 

Goethe (letter from Dornburg, July 1828) 

Isn’t that splendid, such a historical chain of arguments in which each part 

is remorselessly pieced together without any gaps, where, as in this case, 

‘the writer’ makes himself totally invisible but nevertheless everything that is 

there is involuntarily animated by the heartbeat of a grand personality. 

Mina Tobler on reading The Protestant Ethic 

(letter to her mother, October 1912)

Contents 

List of figures viii 

Acknowledgements ix 

Abbreviations x 

Introduction 1 

1 Weber before Weberian sociology, revisited 11 

2 Capitalism in contemporary debates: Sombart, Weber 

and Simmel 29 

3 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 48 

4 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 73 

5 The reluctant sociologist: from the Protestant ethic 

to the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik 116 

6 The Sociology of Religion 156 

7 Going beyond Weber 193 

8 Power, legitimacy and democracy 220 

9 Sociological categories and the types of economic 

activity: a final account 247 

Notes 271 

Index 291

Figures 

6.1 Publication plans 157 

6.2 Determination of economic ethics 186 

7.1 Classification of cultural religions 218 

8.1 Mann’s four sources and organization of power 231 

8.2 Simulation of the final version of Economy and Society 232 

9.1 Types of economic regulation 256 

9.2 Economic sociology of money 257

Acknowledgements 

As in the Essential Weber, much of the scholarship and debate in this book 

draws on the lively state of the international network of Weber studies. 

Earlier versions of Chapters 2 and 6 have appeared, respectively, in Max 

Webers ‘Grundbegriffe’, edited by Klaus Lichtblau, and Das Faszinosum Max 

Weber, edited by Karl-Ludwig Ay and Knut Borchardt; my thanks to the editors 

of these collections for inviting me to their conferences – in Bielefeld 

and Munich – and for permission to use the chapters in this book. A number 

of people have been especially helpful in reading and discussing parts of 

the manuscript, suggesting approaches, offering information and guiding me 

away from error. The failings that remain are, of course, of my own making. 

My thanks are due to Robert Bellah, John Breuilly, Hinnerk Bruhns, Hans 

Henrik Bruun, Brian Hall, Edith Hanke, Austin Harrington, Scott Lash, Raymond 

Lee, Hartmut Lehmann, Mohammad Nafissi, Kari Palonen, Guenther 

Roth, Yolanda Ruano, Keith Tribe and Stephen Turner. I must thank Gerhard 

Boomgaarden and his team at Routledge for their understanding and nudging 

me, and the book, towards successful completion.

Abbreviations 

Archiv Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. 

AS Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilisations, edited and translated 

by R.I. Franks, London, New Left Books, 1976. 

Cat ‘Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology’, translated by 

E. Graber, The Sociological Quarterly, 22, pp. 151–80, 1981. 

EEWR Economic Ethics of the World Religions. 

EOPS Economy and the Orders and Powers of Society. This was the 

title in the Outline Plan of 1914 for the first draft of what eventually 

was published as Part Two of Economy and Society. 

ES Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 

edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich, New York, Bedminster Press, 

1968. 

EW Essential Weber, edited by Sam Whimster, London, Routledge, 

2004. 

FMW From Max Weber, edited and translated by H.H. Gerth and 

C.W. Mills, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1947. 

GARS Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, 3 vols, Tübingen, 

J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1920–1. 

GAWL Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 4th edn, edited by 

J. Winckelmann, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1973. 

MWG Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, edited by H. Baier, M.R. Lepsius, 

W.J. Mommsen and J. Winckelmann, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 

(Paul Siebeck), 1984–. 

PE Debate The Protestant Ethic Debate, edited by D. Chalcraft and A. 

Harrington, translated by A. Harrington and M. Shields, Liverpool, 

Liverpool University Press, 2001. 

PESC The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by 

T. Parsons, London, Allen & Unwin, 1930. 

SocRel The Sociology of Religion, translated by E. Fischoff, London, 

Methuen, 1965.

Introduction 

In an article published in 1974, the scholar Benjamin Nelson asked some 

very direct and simple questions of Max Weber’s work. He called for an 

adequate appreciation of Weber’s central intentions and horizons over the 

years of his life. He noted that, as yet, there was no critical edition of the 

Protestant ethic essays that would allow us ‘to see how the horizons of Weber’s 

thinking shifted with the shifts of contexts demanded of him by his 

various sorts of critics’. There was no hope, he said, of a convincing and 

comprehensive interpretation of his life’s work ‘without a synoptical and 

synchronic reading of his Economy and Society, his Collected Essays in the 

Sociology of Religion and the stratum of discussions illustrated in the “Author’s 

Introduction” ’. Nelson correctly perceived that the last named article 

was a dense sedimentation of a lifetime’s knowledge and could provide ‘a 

master clue’ to Weber’s aims. 1 

What excited Nelson in such an inquiry was the uncovering of the full 

measure of what he called a ‘differential historical sociology of sociocultural 

process’ that would clarify civilizational configurations. Nelson observed 

that complex societies in the world were undergoing extraordinary change 

in respect of their central institutions, schemes of orientation and technologies 

and that Weber’s lead had to be followed. 

He called attention to ‘the different variable mixes of “religions” and 

“worlds”, organizational and regulative juridical structures, communal as 

well as associational living patterns, collective as well as individual identifications 

and identities’. This was the agenda of a future sociology and one that 

would ‘contribute to the necessary progress towards our common goals’. 2 

He speculated that there ‘is strong reason to believe that if Weber had 

lived beyond 1920, he would very probably have gone forward to recast 

the argument and emphasis of The Protestant Ethic’. He would have given 

greater prominence ‘to the distinctive origins and features of the modern 

“rational” Occidental science and technology’. There could be no understanding 

of ‘the most fateful force of our Western modern life, capitalism, 

without seeing it against the background of the historical rationalizations of 

science and sensibility in all the spheres of thought and action’.

2 Introduction 

Culture, religion, capitalism and power are the grand themes of Weber’s 

writings. Nelson flags their importance yet registers the need for a more 

exact location of these themes within the overall body of his work. Writing 

in 2006 and commenting on the renewed interest in Weberian sociology in 

France, Catherine Colliot-Thélène notes ‘the gap left in the theoretical field 

by the retreat of Marxism and evaporation (“essoufflement”) of the structuralist 

paradigm’ and, accompanying this, a turn to policy expertise in place of 

critical reflection. This vacuum has occurred, she writes, at a time when the 

social and political effects of religion are meeting a renewed interest. 3 This 

reinforces Benjamin Nelson’s earlier demand for a sociology that can analyse 

the civilizational dynamics of modernity in their interrelated complexity. 

This book argues that the confidence in Weber is well placed but can only 

be justified by a far closer engagement in the full dimensionality of Weber’s 

disciplinary range and how his ideas and interests developed over time. Nelson 

was correct in his speculation that the ‘Author’s Introduction’ of 1920 

placed a different emphasis – on science and technology in the west – as a 

wider basis for explaining the emergence of modern capitalism, compared 

with the more restricted arguments put forward in The Protestant Ethic and 

the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism (PESC). The stark importance of this issue can 

easily be demonstrated. The ‘Author’s Introduction’ highlighted the pervasive 

importance of rationalism throughout occidental history. The Protestant 

ethic studies of 1904–5 laid great stress on a form of rationalism (ascetic life 

conduct) that was part of and followed on from the European Reformation 

of western Christianity. How do we weigh the larger narrative in relation 

to the ‘case study’ of Puritanism? A great deal turns on the kinds of answer 

that are given to the question. Puritanism is fairly restricted in its scope as a 

form of rationalism, for it is built on a blinkered view of the world in search 

of divine assurance. Western rationalism, and especially the emphasis Nelson 

placed on science, can with greater justification claim wider validity. 

There is not much evidence that Weber would have recast his argument in 

relation to the Protestant ethic study, although equally there is considerable 

scholarly evidence that the original thesis had drifted far from its original 

moorings – even if Weber was not prepared to admit this. This indicates that 

a close engagement with Weber’s writings will have to be a critical one: one 

that does not accept his own estimates and defences, and one prepared to 

advance the issues beyond where he left them. 

Looking at modern scholarship, do we have the synoptic and synchronic 

account of Weber’s writings that Nelson called for? Not quite. The Max 

Weber Gesamtausgabe have published two-thirds of Weber’s writings in a 

critical historical edition. Under its rules, the dating, origins and contextual 

background of each of the texts has to be made known. But some important 

texts have no clear origination or dating. For example, the so-called ‘older 

part’ of Economy and Society consists of texts found in unmarked brown 

envelopes after Weber died. He probably had no intention of publishing 

them in the state they were left. Do we have a synoptic, that is an overall,


view of the texts? My own view is that we do not, and this relates only in 

part to the difficulty in dating the texts. Commentators on Max Weber have 

usually tried to come up with an overall interpretation of Weber’s many 

and varied writings; rationalization has often been chosen as the integrating 

theme. Wolfgang Schluchter has done more than anyone to show how Weber’s 

ideas developed, how they reoccur in more than one project and how 

they form a more or less systematic unity. 4 In The Essential Weber, I argued 

that my selection had a degree of coherence, not least because Weber can 

be seen to cross-reference the various departments of his work. Economy 

and Society and the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ (which forms 

the major part of the Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion) pursue 

different but complementary paths. 

But a selection of the most important academic texts is not the same as 

a synoptic and synchronic account, of Nelson’s bidding. PESC had always 

struck me as a work of eruptive genius, difficult entirely to coordinate within 

the rest of Weber’s writings. In The Essential Weber, I selected only part of its 

final chapter, and I preferred to rely in my commentary on a later formulation 

(from 1915) in which Weber integrates the Protestant ethic thesis into 

a comparison with Confucianism. My selection also avoided the problem 

of what Lawrence Scaff has termed ‘Weber before Weberian sociology’, by 

which he meant the writings of the 1890s prior to PESC. 5 Weber wrote a 

small mountain of studies in the 1890s, and mainstream social science has 

more or less ignored it. This situation has been partly rectified by recent 

scholarship, not least the publication of most of his works from the 1890s 

by the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe. But in many ways, the output of the 

1890s, mostly in national-economy, raises the question of why he switched 

to studying Protestantism. Contrary to some commentators, Weber did not 

move into this field in order to develop the sociology of religion. He disliked 

sociology in its then current form, and he only developed his own version 

of it around 1910 to handle issues in comparative studies of religion and 

economy. Nor is it wholly convincing to argue that PESC was a response 

to the Marxist, materialist philosophy of history. The situation in nationaleconomy, 

a broad-ranging discipline at the time, was more complex than 

this. 

We now know far more about Max Weber’s life. A number of scholars 

have gained access to the archives and read large chunks of his correspondence, 

and the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe have published his letters for the 

period 1906–14. 6 The picture that is emerging is of a very complex and 

contradictory personality. He had some sort of affectual disorder in which 

periods of high productivity were followed by actual depression or exhaustion. 

He tried to compensate for these affectual disorders through medication, 

using quite large amounts of opiate-based drugs to calm his excitability. 

He developed a pattern of working hard through the autumn and winter 

and then convalescing at Easter and during the summer months. He was 

a strongly reactive person, easily provoked by a keen sense of competition


as to what fellow academics were producing. He was part of a golden era 

in the social, cultural and historical sciences, feeding off and closely connected 

with major figures such as Werner Sombart, Ernst Troeltsch, Georg 

Simmel, Alfred Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, the Austrian economists, as well 

as the leading historians in ancient, medieval and modern history. He had a 

large and sensitive ego, and this impacted upon his work in ways that have 

proved quite tricky for subsequent interpreters of his work. Although he was 

hugely original, he tended not to indicate how his work related to previous 

work in the field, and it is only by paying close attention to his footnotes 

and sources that a picture of the ongoing debates can be reached. He never 

admitted to weaknesses in what were, after all, very bold hypotheses and 

theory construction, and he would often accuse his critics, somewhat pettily, 

of misunderstanding what he had written. How works originated in his 

mind, and what he thought might be their potential weak points, can only 

be surmised. 

We know from the memoirs of contemporaries that Weber had a terrifying 

ability to talk ex tempore on seemingly any subject with great authority 

and knowledge. 7 He was not a superman. He did take notes, and he was 

dependent, like any student, on libraries and interlibrary loan. But the first 

drafts of Economy and Society were written straight out at high speed, so 

fired was Weber at the time by his new ideas and project. It is not unreasonable 

to see him as a virtuoso who could devise an original theme and then 

play with it at will. PESC appeared in journal form in 1904–5. It reappeared 

threaded into his comparative sociology of religion sometime around 1912. 

Also at that time, it was merged into a more conventional account of religious 

and political history in a large chapter on political and hierocratic rule. 

It resurfaced again in an almost symmetrical comparison (of differences) 

with Confucianism in 1915. And, as Nelson notes, it was overlaid in the 

‘Author’s Introduction’ of 1920 by the larger theme of rationalism. 

We have to consider the possibility that the sort of careful synoptic and 

synchronic picture that Nelson was calling for is ruled out by the nature of 

Weber’s intellectual personality. Ernst Troeltsch, who knew Weber as well as 

anybody, was asked in October 1917 to provide a report on Weber for the 

University of Bonn – with a view to a possible appointment there. He said 

Weber was presently concentrating on sociology but could with great ease 

pick up again as a professor in national-economy. He also said that Weber 

had two minds: one absolutist that always stood up for justice and fairness 

on an almost instinctual basis; the other was relativist, able to reduce any 

action, thought or decision to its sociological reality and underlying interest. 

The latter aspect was highly sharp and cynical. ‘To me, by the way,’ Troeltsch 

wrote, ‘he is in many ways deeply problematic and hard to fathom. I don’t 

know what his ultimate intellectual motives are.’ 8 Hence, Weber cannot be 

pinned down with complete precision. He could pursue two projects at the 

same time, and he was not beyond telling his publisher that his latest interest 

would not be a distraction from some other previously agreed contract


and deadline. At the least, we need a certain wariness in forming our view 

of Weber’s output and should not impose on it a too schoolmasterly order. 

He was a virtuoso with his materials and ideas: he could state a theme, invert 

it, introduce another tune alongside it and perhaps even become bored 

with it. Rainer Lepsius has noted that, in the last months of his life (before 

he was struck down by pneumonia), Weber was going to write on culture, 

Tolstoy and music – a switch of mind and of focus – after he had completed 

Economy and Society and the studies of the economic ethics of the world 

religions. 9 

I have taken some care in this book to register the particular characteristics 

of the format in which Weber wrote. He used a variety of formats 

– the essay, the research survey and research report, encyclopaedia entries, 

scholarly dissertation, the journal article and the academic public lecture. 

Weber rarely used the book form – only his doctoral and habilitation theses 

and one agrarian survey appeared as books. He preferred the long essay to 

the book form, and it needs to be noted that many of Weber’s ‘books’ are 

in fact collections of his essays. Some of the essays were intended by Weber 

to form a collective entity, for example ‘The Economic Ethics of the World 

Religions’; other collections of his writings were put together after his death 

by Marianne Weber. Just to emphasize this point: only one English translation 

of a Weber text can be taken to be the equivalent of a book published 

by Weber in his lifetime – his doctoral thesis. 10 The Protestant Ethic and 

the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism is an essay; Economy and Society is a collection of 

manuscripts and corrected proofs brought together after his death. 

Unities, complementarities and sequencing can be drawn, but I have not 

tried to force these upon his writings. To take the largest of his questions: 

what were the causal origins of modern occidental capitalism? His career can 

be seen as continuously developing the question and creating new methodologies 

and new studies to answer it. We may have to accept that the question 

is unanswerable in a way that would meet agreed academic criteria of causal 

proof. At this point, the question becomes how does modernity develop in 

the west and how have similar religious-based trajectories of life conduct 

developed in other civilizations. The ‘how’ question is just as significant and 

valid as the exact specification of causal origins. My sense of Weber’s career 

is that he started out with a unique explanation (in Puritan asceticism) for the 

origins of modern capitalism, but this modulated into how occidental modernity 

was distinctive from other civilizations. Weber found this as intensely 

interesting and absorbing as his original starting point. This sense provides 

a trajectory to this book, but one that is not adhered to strictly. It is not assumed 

that Weber planned his scholarly career according to such a trajectory 

– quite the contrary. It is always a puzzle to figure out how Weber proceeded 

from one project to another. But now that there is sufficient information 

available about the dating and origins of these projects, it is possible to chart 

his movements along, around and across the line of this trajectory. 

Chapter 1 examines Weber’s career in national-economy in the 1890s.


Weber cannot be termed a sociologist in this period, but he was undertaking 

social survey research on contemporary agrarian conditions, which had a 

sociological dimension. There is a debate as to whether in this period Weber 

was more structuralist in his account of the determination of market forces 

and political power over the lives of individuals and social groups. Weber is 

shown to express quite forcibly the role of ideas and psychological motivation 

in the behaviour of people in the face of determining forces of social 

and economic structure. Even though Weber has yet to develop an explicit 

sociology, the distinctive Weberian approach to structure and action is already 

evident. Weber’s lecture course in theoretical national-economy from 

1898 is outlined. It can be established that he had both a good grasp of the 

historical development of capitalism as well as a theoretical understanding 

of capitalist exchange economies in terms of marginal utility. Also evident 

is a predilection to insert a cultural interface into the analysis of economic 

activity. 

Chapter 2 locates some of the major debates over capitalism that were being 

conducted in national-economy. Particular attention is given to Werner 

Sombart’s and Georg Simmel’s analysis of the origins of modern capitalism 

as the antecedents to Weber’s own Protestant ethic studies. Weber provided 

a culturally specific explanation of one section of the historical argument 

on the origins of modern capitalism. The wider argument was laid out in 

Sombart’s very large book Der moderne Kapitalismus. This in its turn was, 

in part, a response to Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, which treated the 

question of origins in a philosophical mode. First Sombart and then Weber 

supplied causal explanations for a phenomenon that remained speculative in 

Simmel’s treatment. Weber’s Protestant ethic ‘essay’ was a limited intervention 

in a wider debate but, ever since its publication, it has been regarded as 

constitutive of the debate on the origins of modern capitalism. PESC provided 

an inspired interpretation of psychological motivation of an economically 

significant religious group. How economically significant that group 

was is not exactly specified by Weber, but the success of the essay made it a 

continuous topic of debate, for both Weber and his critics. Simmel’s contributions 

to a psychological theory of action are discussed, as is Sombart’s use 

of something very similar in his theorization of economic activity. Weber’s 

PESC remains within the same psychological framework. It would be some 

years before a version of social action was put forward by Weber (in 1913) 

– and then as a solution to issues raised by his comparative studies in religion 

and economic action. 

Chapter 3 offers a commentary on PESC, which concentrates on what 

Weber was actually doing in that study rather than what Weber says he was 

doing. Although it was a study that is formulated with regard to debates in 

national-economy over the origins of modern capitalism, it is written in a 

literary mode. It is not only a work of original scholarship and genius, but 

it also has imaginative and literary properties that lift it entirely out of the 

mode of social science. Weber employed not only historical and philological


scholarship; he used literary techniques, rhetoric and – above all – hermeneutics 

to make the essay such a success. It is against these last standards that 

it needs to be assessed. 

Chapter 4 notes what is effectively his retreat to methodology in the 

face of his own creativity. The scholasticism of Rickert’s methodology is 

favoured over the expansiveness of Dilthey’s project for the human sciences. 

I argue that PESC is more compatible with Dilthey’s ambitions than with 

Rickert’s prescriptive methodology. Nevertheless, Weber fashions his own 

methodological solutions for the cultural and human sciences in his 1904 essay 

on ‘Objectivity’. This essay served as a way forward in the methodological 

battles of the day for the relaunched Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und 

Sozialpolitik. It also acted as a methodological supplement to PESC, but in a 

number of respects that work had outstripped all methodological protocols. 

It attracted criticism from the outset, as it has done throughout the twentieth 

century. In his replies to his critics, the issue of multiple causation proved 

especially difficult, with Weber being heavily reliant on the ‘elective affinity’ 

between ideal and material causes. 

Chapters 5 and 6 examine the huge expansion of Weber’s writings into 

comparative and systematic work on the economy in relation to the special 

sociologies of religion, law, power, the formation of communal groups and 

the formation of associative groups. Weber took on the editorial responsibility 

for the encyclopaedic and multivolume Outline of Social Economics 

(Grundriss der Sozialökonomik). And in the same period, broadly dated 

1910 to August 1914, Weber completed the first drafts of economic ethics 

influenced by Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism. To 

date, nine separate volumes of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe cover this 

period and, in addition, the letter volumes (Briefe) chart Weber’s voluminous 

and intricate correspondence with his publisher and fellow academics. 

The painstaking and detailed scholarship of the Gesamtausgabe editors has 

revealed the precise contours of Weber’s manifold studies. Chapters 5 and 

6 undertake a mapping of those contours and suggest that more than one 

map is required. Multiple causation in relation to developmental history is a 

continuous concern, addressed by more than one strategy. Weber’s own interpretative 

sociology makes its first appearance in this period, and its terminology 

feeds into the substantive studies and provides Weber with a reliable 

method when working with such a broad range of materials. The move into 

sociology was not wholly successful, and its role is a topic of a significant 

scholarly dispute. Weber’s sociology of religion stands at the centre of this 

period. Hans Kippenberg’s scholarship and editing of the relevant MWG 

volume (Religiöse Gemeinschaften) demonstrates just how immersed Weber 

was in the scientific study of religion, including the latest ethnographic field 

studies. I express the view that Weber’s sociology of religion is both brilliant 

and hesitant. Even now, the problems Weber was addressing remain 

unresolved. 

Chapter 7 goes outside Weber in order to revisit the issues of multiple


causation that are inherent in any account that seeks to explain developmental 

sequences at the level of society and civilization. I reformulate the 

Protestant ethic thesis in terms of Harold Innis’ work on the modalities of 

communication and their impact on rulership and control. I also consider 

recent work by S.N. Eisenstadt and others on multiple modernities. I contrast 

this with Weber’s work as construed as an argument of the singularity 

of modernity. The sobering conclusion to be drawn from this is that, even 

though Weber had widened the terms of his argument on the origins of 

western (or as he called it, occidental) modernity, the research framework 

can be further enlarged. The hopes for a complete multifactorial analysis of 

the rise of the west appear unlikely to succeed. 

Chapter 8 takes up Weber’s special sociology of power and rulership. 

Weber’s general theory of power is three-dimensional (economic, political 

and social status), and I compare this with recent treatments by Gianfranco 

Poggi and Michael Mann. Using the informative scholarship provided by Edith 

Hanke in the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe volume (Herrschaftssoziologie), 

I track the changes from the first draft of Weber’s political sociology to its 

final formulation in Economy and Society. This allows the emergent pattern 

of Weber’s sociology to be followed, and his choking back of developmental 

history in favour of classificatory types. In the final section, I ask whether 

political scientists should be taking more note of Weber’s analysis of leadership 

democracy (‘Führer-Demokratie’) in a contemporary world where 

presidents and prime ministers use the skills of rhetoric and demagoguery, 

aided by press offices and the media, to extend their power over the thick 

structures of democratic culture. Weber had already noted this tendency, and 

he took power and its control to be a constant in all rulerships, including 

constitutional democracies. 

Chapter 9 examines Weber’s long second chapter of Economy and Society, 

‘The Basic Sociological Types of Economising’. This represents the turning 

of the full circle of Weber’s ambitions, first as a national-economist in 

the 1890s and, finally, as a sociologist driving forwards the project of social 

economics. Significantly, in 1920, his contract at the University in Munich 

made mention of him as a sociologist as well as a national-economist. 11 The 

function of sociology, whose operation is laid out in great clarity in Chapter 

1 of Economy and Society, is to underwrite all the special fields of interest 

that had occupied his intellectual career: the economy, culture and religion, 

power and rulership, law, the orders of society, the formation of communal 

groups and associative groups and, alongside these, the developmental dynamics 

of societies and civilizations. 

A coda to Chapter 9 asks whether there is a Weber paradigm. As a sociologist, 

probably not, because Weber’s overall approach sought a multidisciplinarity 

in trying to formulate the grand themes of historical development. 

In terms of his approach to academic knowledge in the social sciences, there 

is something very distinctive to Weber. He insisted, with the suitable humility 

of a genius, on the transience of social scientific knowledge, where fifty


years counts as a long time. There was, for Weber, no march of history, only 

the endless flux and flow of social reality that could never be comprehended 

in its entirety. Time and viewpoints move on; knowledge immediately starts 

to date and its relevance fades. Weber, as Leo Strauss observed, 12 thought 

harder and deeper about modernity than anyone ever had before. Nobody in 

the future is likely to achieve such stature, for modernity is now practically 

taken for granted despite its manifest conflicts and problems. The Weber 

paradigm obligates us to intervene in the flux of social reality. By making a 

value connection of relevance, social scientists may effect that flux of which 

they are a part, even though they should work under the pitiless demands 

of ‘objectivity’. 

Is Weber still relevant, then, after a hundred years, as we pass the centenary 

of the publication of PESC? Are his concerns still our concerns? Modernity, 

sometimes referred to as progress, is on the way to becoming a global 

destiny. Its grand themes of rationalization, disenchantment, fragmentation 

of value spheres, life conduct, bureaucracy, power and legitimacy, stratification, 

charisma and the interplay of value and instrumental rationality still remain 

central stage – and in ways Weber would probably not have imagined. 

Benjamin Nelson was prescient in calling for a Weberian sociology capable 

of analysing the different mixes of ‘worlds’ and ‘religion’, changing forms of 

power and organisation, and new patterns of living and identity formation. 

My approach in this book is not so much to pursue the grand themes, 

which have been well handled by other distinguished and eloquent interpretators 

– Karl Löwith, Reinhard Bendix, Guenther Roth, Julien Freund, Wolfgang 

Schluchter, Wilhelm Hennis, and Wolfgang J. Mommsen – as rather a 

close examination of the texts and their interrelation. In this, I sometimes 

fail to provide the synoptic, or characterizing, account, and I also resist the 

temptation to finish or round off Weber’s theories for him. Imposing a systematic 

account on Weber’s writings misses I think the very real difficulties 

he faced, difficulties inherent in his understanding of the project of social 

science. Likewise it can be a mistake to assume that Weber solved all the 

theoretical and methodological issues he posed in the pursuit of his grand, 

as well as his smaller scale, research problems. Weber was very proficient 

in analysing the claims of warring schools – of historicism, marginalism, 

materialism, monism, psychologism, the place of free will – and this is where 

we take our cues from him as a classic thinker. But he rarely saw the need 

to spell out his treatments of complex problems as a set of explicit methods. 

This applies both to his survey work and his ‘Verstehende’ work. Weber 

drew no great distinction between those two modes of doing social research, 

and he certainly would not have designated one as quantitative and the other 

as qualitative – each with their own battery of methods and issues. 

Hence I am prepared to accept that Weber came up with brilliant solutions 

to research problems but without any fanfare of methodological reflection; 

likewise that there were difficulties he did not solve, or which he moved 

around trying different solutions. Also a close examination underlines the


sheer diversity and range of social science problems and issues he engaged 

with. Interpretators quite rightly gloss the grand Weberian themes that are 

common to his various research issues, but Weber’s involvement in the specifics 

of evidence, sources, theories, presentation of findings, and their implications 

should also be accorded its very large due. The world is complex and 

we aspire to conceptual order – these are two sides of the Weberian coin.

1 Weber before Weberian 

sociology, revisited 

Lawrence Scaff, in a path-breaking article some twenty years ago, asked how 

Weber’s works prior to the Protestant ethic studies of 1904–5 were to be 

classified. 1 The Protestant ethic studies belonged to an interpretative sociological 

approach; the works before that, from the 1890s, had the character 

of a marxisant political economy, dealing as they did with issues of class, 

power, and societal and economic change. I revisit this argument, bringing 

in more information about the decade of the 1890s, about which we now 

know far more. I shall also alter the terms of the argument. Weber was a 

national-economist in the 1890s, and this has to be investigated in some 

detail to find out what was distinctively Weberian in his approach, which 

was not a form of Marxist sociology by another name. I do not follow the 

usual consensus of opinion that the Protestant ethic studies belonged to sociology. 

The best description of them is descriptive psychology being applied 

to national-economy. And, finally, Weber did not become a sociologist until 

around 1910. Prior to that, he regarded sociology as suspect, whose overall 

approach was either positivist or organicist – both completely untenable positions 

for Weber. He fashioned a sociology to his own needs in pursuit of his 

universal historical comparative studies. Across all these phases of activity, 

there is a constant concern with the meanings, values and culture, an area 

that is one of the hardest parts of the social, historical and cultural sciences 

to handle proficiently. 

At the start of the article, Scaff broaches a subject that goes to the heart of 

sociological theory, especially today. There appear to be two sociologies in 

Weber’s work. One is structuralist and determinist and is often referred to as 

belonging to Weber’s ‘substantive’ work: ‘one in which status groups, social 

classes, patterns of domination, and material interests define the analytic 

core’. 2 Bryan Turner has portrayed this side of Weber’s sociology as Marxist: 

. . . that Weber’s sociology anticipates much that has been central to 

the empirical and theoretical focus of modern Marxism. The analysis 

of the state, legal fetishism, the separation of ownership and control,

12 Weber before Weberian sociology, revisited 

bureaucratic management, de-skilling, ethnic identity, professions and 

secularisations as crucial concerns of neo-Marxism are all pre-figured in 

Weber’s analysis of rational capitalism. 3 

One initial comment on this is that these were straightforwardly Weberian 

themes rather than neo-Marxist ones. But Turner also makes for him 

the central point that Weber’s sociology is deterministic in the sense that the 

individual’s fate or destiny is decided irrespective of his or her intentions 

and ambitions. ‘The social contexts which Weber studies have a logic or fate 

undermining the meaningful actions of individuals.’ 4 

The ‘other’ sociology in Weber is the methodology of ‘Verstehen’, that 

sociologists have to understand the motivations and values and the context 

of meaning in which the individual is placed. Bryan Turner was writing at 

a time when a younger generation of sociologists interpreted social action 

theory as the theoretical underpinning of the emancipatory attempt to gain 

control of the world and one’s own destiny. The cue to this was Alan Dawe’s 

essay ‘The Two Sociologies’, which argued that the theme of control in sociology 

should not be seen as a thing external to the individual, belonging to an 

ideology of order and pertaining to the structures of economic and political 

power. Instead, control should belong to the autonomous, acting individual 

who was the real ‘unit’ around which sociology should be framed. 5 The high 

point of this movement was that part of Anthony Giddens’ sociology which 

framed the semi-autonomous individual within the social world as a reflexive 

subject capable of understanding the world and contributing to the social 

world and, accordingly, being empowered. 6 Neo-Marxism registered the 

solidity of structures of power and saw Giddens’ insistence on the plasticity 

of the social world as naïve. In respect of Weber, Turner objected to what he 

took to be the contradiction of a ‘verstehende’ sociology that privileged the 

social actor as autonomous and the doom-laden stress Weber also placed on 

the giganticism of modern, high capitalism (which was reaching its zenith 

in Weber’s day). In France, as Catherine Colliot-Thélène notes, Raymond 

Aron and Julien Freund advanced Weber as a theorist of social action in 

opposition to the Marxist sociology of structures. 7 This was, and still is, a 

classic debate. Something of the same tensions, we will shortly see, entered 

into the young Weber, who belonged to an academic generation who pushed 

hard against the authoritarian political and social order imposed by an older 

generation of nation builders. 

Turner’s objections can also be framed in purely Weberian terminology 

without drawing on the language of neo-Marxism. In his book, Max Weber 

and the Sociology of Culture, Ralph Schroeder places the analysis of culture 

at the centre of Weber’s concerns. Culture belongs to a macro level of analysis, 

and the individual faces culture as ‘an inescapable fate’, as the expression 

of ideas in religious beliefs or in western rationalism. Weber’s analysis of 

culture is built around the concept of worldviews that have an inner logic 

and consistency of their own. Belief systems have a logic of change through 

differentiation, from the relative simplicity of magic to the complexity of

Weber before Weberian sociology, revisited 13 

religion. At the religious stage, the individual is subdivided into autonomous 

life orders (politics, religion, economy, art), and this differentiation into orders 

and value spheres continues into modernity where science, knowledge 

and technology form another autonomous realm. Each of these life orders, 

having their own system of values, contributes to the fragmentary nature 

of modernity. Ideas can change the course of history, but only as a force as 

a collective entity. Human beings may be cultural beings, but culture exists 

as a force beyond and outside the individual. Hence, what is required in its 

analysis is not Weber’s methodological advice on interpretative sociology, 

but the use of his substantive high-level concepts such as worldviews, life 

spheres, ideas as switchmen, routinization, rationalization. Schroeder writes, 

‘although is has been suggested that Weber should be seen as a theorist of 

social action (Kalberg, 1985a: 895), Weber rarely uses these concepts or an 

action-oriented approach in his substantive writings’. 8 

There is an obvious problem here. It is not sociologists who might have 

‘suggested’ the theory of social action, it was Weber who insisted upon it. He 

developed it as a methodology as he moved away from case study historically 

specific subjects into universal history. I see the chronology of the development 

of sociology by Weber somewhat differently from Scaff, but agree with 

his statement affirming the integral role of sociology with the ‘substantive’ 

studies. ‘Far from establishing the “autonomy” of sociology, Weber’s approach 

seems to be self-consciously embedded within a set of assumptions 

about the nature of history, society, and human understanding.’ 9 Turning to 

Weber’s writings in the 1890s, we encounter a national-economist dealing 

with issues of economic transformation (the industrialization of German society, 

the flight from the land into the cities and the decline of artisanal craft 

enterprises in favour of the large factory and mass production), of a changing 

distribution of power and social stratification, and Germany’s claim to be 

a great power within the international order. These were real and pressing 

issues, and they could be treated through a ‘realist’ analysis of power and 

interests. Weber did not shy away from these issues; indeed, he had a rather 

uncontrolled tendency to spell out the issues, vociferously and uncompromisingly, 

to his readers and audiences. But at the same time, he stressed the 

role of values and ideas in the mighty processes under way, and it is in the 

writings of the 1890s that we see him grappling with causation as capable of 

handling both material and ideal causes. I provide methodological detail of 

these studies, because Weber’s views on causation are still very much open to 

debate, as indeed is the issue itself. His activities as an academic researcher 

and as engaged social policy activist form an important strand in the prehistory 

of the Protestant ethic studies of 1904–5. 

The agrarian question 

The agrarian question was a massive social policy and political issue in Germany 

in the 1890s. German unification had been achieved in 1871, and 

it kick-started a process of rapid industrialization and urbanization – at a


rate of change not dissimilar to that being experienced by China today. The 

young Weber (he was 28 at the time) was commissioned to conduct a study 

of a facet of this enormous transformation. In many provinces of the German 

Reich, 10 farm labourers were deserting the farms and their villages either 

to look for work in the new factories and towns or to emigrate to North 

America. The profitability of domestic farming had declined with the rise 

of Germany as an industrial, trading nation able to afford the import of 

cheaper foreign food, in particular wheat and cereals. Production of those 

staples had become far more economic in North America and Russia, and 

grain could be bought more cheaply on world markets than domestically. 

With the sharp drop in the price of grain (in Prussia, a ton of wheat priced at 

232 marks and had fallen to 174 marks in 1890), farmers experienced a loss 

of profitability, and farmworkers saw a reduction in their living standards 

and wages. 11 

Weber was approached by Germany’s leading social policy organization, 

the Verein für Sozialpolitik, to conduct a study of farming in the regions east 

of the Elbe (which have now become the territory of Poland and Russia). 

The Verein für Sozialpolitik was set up by Gustav Schmoller in the 1870s 

in order to monitor and investigate the social consequences of rapid industrialization 

and urbanization. German business, as well as the political 

class, was pretty much indifferent to the forces of dislocation unleashed by 

Germany’s economic transformation. But early in the 1880s, the political 

class signalled their concerns, not least in face of the growth of a radical 

working-class political party, the Social Democrats. Schmoller was a leading 

national-economist and economic historian at the University of Berlin, and 

he was successful in forming links between policy scientists and economists 

and government on questions of social and economic policy. His policy association 

– he was its founder and leader – stood out against classical British 

political economy and its belief in the free market. The Verein was very much 

a ‘third way’ organization. It was against unregulated competition in the 

domestic and world economy, and it was against working-class movements 

that sought a socialist transformation in the conditions of their existence. 

Government in the German Reich was strong, conservative and not unafraid 

of regulating many aspects of society and its development from above. 12 

Schmoller positioned the Verein as a source of evidence-based policy advice 

but with a bias towards paternalism. A conservative state would legislate for 

small improvements in living, social and legal conditions for the mass of the 

population. 

The Verein itself was something of a top-down organization. In September 

1890, its working committee under Schmoller had decided that three issues 

would be investigated: the condition of the agricultural worker in the 

German Empire; the question of migration from the countryside; and trade 

policy. Weber was allocated the provinces east of the Elbe for study – East 

and West Prussia, Pomerania, Posnia, Silesia, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg 

and the duchy of Lauenburg. A subcommittee of the Verein had designed


two questionnaires. The aims of the survey (‘Enquete’) were to gather exact 

data on the forms of payment relationships and the developments in the 

social and cultural conditions of the agricultural worker. Over and beyond 

these goals there was a concern about the consequences of the loss of profitability 

of farming, debt and the shortage of farmworkers. The first questionnaire, 

which gathered quantitative data on prices, wages, crop areas, etc., 

was sent out in December 1891 to 3,180 landowners/farmers. The second, 

which asked for more descriptive reports, was sent out in February 1892 to 

562 ‘key informants’ (‘Generalberichterstatter’). Weber started work on the 

analysis of the questionnaires in the middle of February 1892, and he was 

given six months to complete his report, ready in time for a debate at the 

general meeting of the Verein für Sozialpolitik that was to take place that 

same autumn. 13 

This was a massive empirical undertaking on Weber’s part, and it resulted 

in an 800-page report. Weber received back 650 completed questionnaires 

from the farmowners in his regions. From these, he tabulated the data for 

each area within each region. More specifically, to give an idea just how 

detailed the research was, he carried out the following cross-tabulations: 

length of the working day for each season for male workers, their wives, 

the children and servants tabulated against each county (‘Kreis’) in a region; 

wages and payment in kind for each type of farm work (and the extent of 

each sort of farm work, e.g. wheat, root crops, cows, etc.) tabulated against 

county; income and yield for each sort of farm work against county; the 

proportionality of wages to payment in kind for each type of farmworker; 

annualized wages for farmworkers and their wives against county. Weber 

then had to collect data on seasonal migratory labour. Here, he tabulated 

the duration of seasonal work, its purpose on the farm, place of origin of the 

seasonal workers, their wages and costs, the daily wages of domestic workers 

and their destination as migrants off the land – all this tabulated against 

county. Finally, he provided a table of the annual costs of the independent 

farmworker (the ‘Instmann’) – cost of seed, housing, fuel, rent, consumption, 

payments to farmworkers, fodder for livestock, wages for domestic maids. 

Weber repeated the same tabulations for each of the eight provinces and 

their dozen or so counties, providing descriptive material for each category 

of data. Summaries were given for each province, and an overall summary 

was provided in the final chapter. 

The Verein für Sozialpolitik would collect the reports from the other German 

provinces. The reports would be debated at the Verein’s annual meeting, 

and a series of conclusions and recommendations would be made and 

publicized, not least to the government. 14 From the standpoint of nationaleconomy 

as a policy science, the Verein tended towards an inductive empiricism 

whereby the data would speak for itself. 15 Wages, prices, migration and 

emigration, types of agricultural production – all of this would tell its own 

story. But as any competent methods student will point out, data have to be 

interpreted, and it is through the process of interpretation that the policy


recommendations are arrived at. What was happening to Prussia farming 

was the same fraught transformation that affects so much of agriculture in 

the developing world today. And it becomes a highly political question: what 

to do about the ‘facts’ when they become known. Should governments put 

in place measures to support the small farmer in order to keep him, his 

family and village community on the land, should governments place import 

duties on cheap food imported from the world market, should governments 

allow the ‘natural and inevitable’ forces of global markets to work their way 

through their society? These are not either/or choices, for different social 

groups will take opposed positions on the question. 

Germany was an industrializing country, and cheap imported food materials 

were clearly to the benefit of the industrial sector. Industry also benefited 

greatly from the flow of migrants into the towns from the land as a source 

of cheap labour. 16 The landowners agitated successfully for import duties on 

foreign grain and cereal, in order to prop up the failing profitability of their 

farms (that agriculturally were no match for the grain from the prairies of 

North America and the Ukraine). In Weber’s areas, the landowners (the socalled 

‘Junkers’) formed the bedrock of the Prussian kingdom and, because 

of peculiarities in the German imperial constitution (of 1871), they were the 

predominant elite in the political system. The German Chancellor at that 

time, Caprivi, maintained import duties, although he did reduce them somewhat 

from the level at which his more conservative predecessor, Bismarck, 

had fixed them. 

Leaving aside the linkage between the local and the national, which greatly 

interested him, Weber’s interpretation and description of his data shows 

him to be an intuitive sociologist. There are a number of oppositions he 

draws in making the data ‘come alive’, sociologically speaking. Conditions 

and behaviour, objective and subjective factors, the situation of individuals 

and groups and their psychology together form two axes of what could be 

termed his ‘immanent’ sociology. These axes may be labelled ‘exterior’ and 

‘interior’ factors or causes. 

In his opening remarks to the report (‘The position of the farm worker in 

Germany East of the Elbe’), Weber states that nothing less than a revolution 

in social structure is involved in transformations which have been going on 

for decades and that his report will shed light on the ‘stage of development’ 

reached so far. What has to be grasped, says Weber, is the direction these 

changes are moving towards. 17 The old traditional ways of farming and the 

organization of labour are being replaced by a new ‘employment regime’ 

based on capitalistic wage labour. While the material, or objective, circumstances 

of the farmworker can be represented by the survey data, Weber also 

argues that it is crucial to include the subjective factors at work – how the 

various categories of farmworkers view their prospects. Data on fluctuations 

in the price of corn or cattle are insufficient to explain the interests of the 

workforce.


It is impermissible to leave out of consideration the subjective dimension 

and this is very much the case when one attempts to investigate the 

consequences which follow or are produced by the visible transformation 

of the social class structure, the reciprocal relationship between the 

landowner and workforce and for the position of the latter in the social 

body of the nation. It does not so much concern the actual level of the 

worker’s income as whether it is possible to pursue an ordered economic 

way of life (‘geordnete Wirtschaftsführung’), whether the worker 

and employer subjectively regard each other – justifiably or not – in a 

favourable light or not, and so which tendencies inhere in the subjective 

wishes or interests of both parties, since it is on these that the further 

line of development in the future depends. 18 

In the next section of his report, Weber demonstrates how subjective factors 

are implicated in the structural conditions of what he terms the employment 

regime (‘Arbeitsverfassung’). 19 Farm labour in the Prussian regions had 

yet to move over to unregulated ‘free’ wage labour, where the price of labour 

was dictated by market conditions. Peasant serfdom had only been abolished 

as late as 1807 in Germany, and there were still semi-servile survivals, 

especially in Prussia. The main categories of farmworkers were in fact, as 

well as in law, employed as servants. Weber’s report starts by describing the 

somewhat peculiar arrangements that landowners were using, even in the 

1890s. Unmarried workers, male as well as female, were placed on a fixed 

wage contract for the year and, in addition, they were given fixed shares in 

the cultivation of agricultural produce. Above them was another class of 

servants who were married, employed their family on the farms and hired 

casual labourers. They were also on a yearly contract, but both the money 

component and their right to share in the produce were variable not fixed. 

These servants were termed ‘Instleute’. They were given housing, land, livestock, 

grazing rights in addition to a share in the main crop (usually corn). 

Seen from the economic point of view, they were part of a cooperative venture, 

but one in which the landowner had the largest share. A good harvest, 

good weather, high prices for agricultural produce were in the joint interest 

of owner and ‘Instleute’. Effectively, the landowners had subcontracted a 

large part of the farming to the ‘Instleute’ on a cooperative basis. But on the 

legal, social and status level, the ‘Instleute’ were very much inferior to the 

Junker landowner. 

In his report, and in subsequent follow-up studies, Weber defended this 

paternalist set-up. Whether he should have defended the situation, as a good 

bourgeois, is another matter. But he goes out of his way, one might say 

sociologically, to underline what gave stability to an employment regime that 

was beginning to dissolve. ‘The estate owner (‘Gutsherr’) was not a normal 

employer, but a political autocrat who ruled over the worker.’ 20 The strong 

patriarchal leadership is tolerated because it corresponds to the economic


basis of relationships. 21 The old patriarchalism provided a form of security 

and limited independence for the settled farm tenant. ‘. . . the continuity of 

the patriarchal organisation and the greater flexibility of the opposed relations 

between employer and employee preserve quite effectively the living 

standards of the worker and the community of interest’. 22 

In order to explain his position, Weber reaches deep into the psychological 

underpinnings of what he sees as a shared community, where he gives 

an explanatory role to the motivation of the farmworker. Under the old 

patriarchal estate system, the estate owner could claim a conservative legitimacy 

by being seen ‘as a born representative of the interests of his people’. 23 

Paternalism worked as a managerial ideology and as a form of cooperative 

enterprise. The breakdown of this system came with the move to a fully 

capitalistic employment regime. The basic problem with year-long contractual 

labour was the unevenness of the need for labour power (‘Arbeitskraft’). 

The seasonal high points of demand were planting and harvesting but, prior 

to the introduction of steam threshing machines, the corn was threshed by 

hand over the long winter months. In addition, sugar beet and root crops 

were introduced on the best, most fertile land as a new cash crop, i.e. they 

were grown so that it could all be sold on the market by the landowning 

farmer alone. Root crops required intensive labour but only at two points in 

the year (planting and harvesting). 24 A capitalistic employment regime that 

used wages alone was far more favourable to the economic interests of the 

Junkers. If they ended their servant labour contracts with the ‘Instleute’, the 

Junker landowners could then concentrate on the more profitable root crops 

and employ seasonal casual labour at low prices. The casual workers came 

across the border from Poland and the Ukraine. 

But with the move to a fully waged system of labour, the tenants lost their 

security and the community of interest was broken. Weber comments that 

‘the patriarchal system is completely hopeless in terms of popular psychology’. 

There was no incentive, psychologically or economically, to remain 

on the old estates. Motivation also operated as a pull factor, drawing the 

farmworkers into the towns. Weber, in the conclusion of his study, observed 

that it was not the issue of wage levels alone that drove the farmworker off 

the land (although this was a factor as seasonal labour had undercut the 

previous standard of living of the German farmworker). In the town, the 

farm ‘servant’ would be free from the everyday paternal authority of the 

estate owner, he and she would have their own independence as a free wage 

labourer. Weber is quite expressive about this. He calls it ‘the pure psychological 

magic of “freedom” ’. 25 

Summarizing this section, then, Weber is receptive to different levels of 

explanation. As a national-economist, he analyses the movement in food 

prices and its effects on the income of farm labourers. His depiction of the 

situation of the labourer involves the sociological analysis of cooperative 

interest and patriarchal authority, and the dissolution of those social and 

economic bonds by new labour market practices. And, if prices and mar-


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


in his research was that ‘aided by the legal system there had emerged a fullfledged 

system of agrarian capitalism’. Mommsen describes Weber’s turn 

towards the analysis of capitalism as follows: 

Against the backcloth of a traditional economy, Weber described the 

emergence, the dominance and, eventually, the decline of what he described 

as a fully developed agrarian capitalism. The progressive spread 

of the principle of unconditional ‘freedom of disposal of land ownership 

and its total economic mobilisation’ 28 was, in Weber’s view, the key 

factor that more than anything had made possible the rise of a largescale 

agrarian capitalism. Indeed, by abolishing all restrictions on the 

acquisition and the marketing of land, there occurred, as Weber put 

it, ‘the most unlimited capitalism in land property that the world ever 

has seen’. 29 The gradual implementation of the principle of unrestricted 

ownership of land during the Roman Republic was the backbone of a 

market economy which had made possible the rise of Rome to a huge 

political and commercial empire. According to Weber, the traditional 

communal structures as well as the relatively independent position of the 

smaller farmers were totally destroyed in favour of an agrarian economy 

dominated by large-scale estates. 30 

It would be wrong to extend the concept of the market economy beyond 

the market for land. That market arose from the specific circumstances of a 

militarized empire, expanding its borders through conquest. With conquest 

came a large supply of slaves whose labour was used by the estate owners. 

This slave labour displaced the small independent farmer who had previously 

been the key social stratum in the rise of Rome as a Mediterranean great 

power. Changes in law not only permitted the rise of agrarian capitalism, 

they also dispossessed an economic class of farmers. This transformation 

was followed by slow decline as the supply of slaves ceased, as the empire 

reached the limits of its military capability. 

the system of agrarian capitalism gradually withered away and eventually 

the free market economy was supplanted by the ‘Kolonat’. This 

was a system of huge landed estates that became self-sufficient economic 

units and no longer produced for the market. This eventually led to the 

destruction of the essential preconditions for dynamic economic growth 

and free market exchange. In the end agrarian capitalism gave way to 

a stagnant economic order that foreshadowed the economic conditions 

during the early Middle Ages. 31 

While it is reasonable to see Weber’s expertise as lying in the field of legal 

history, it was an approach sensitive to the forms of capitalism. He asked the 

question, notes Mommsen: ‘what consequences do legal regulations have 

on the economy? In the background of this work we discover the contours


of a specific concept of world history, namely the recurrent rise and fall of 

world civilisations respectively caused by specific economic and/or cultural 

conditions.’ 

Weber’s move to Freiburg as a professor of national-economy should 

therefore be seen as justified by his expertise in agrarian economics, first 

those of the ancient world and, second, the contemporary crisis in agriculture 

east of the Elbe. It should also be added that Weber had expertise in 

the medieval economy, again approaching the subject from the discipline of 

legal history. His doctoral dissertation and research was published in 1891 

and entitled ‘The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages’. 

Its subject matter was the development of medieval trading partnerships in 

northern Italy. Weber’s research problem was to explain how investment 

for overseas trading expeditions could be mustered and how the risks and 

returns of these expeditions were to be shared. Modern company law, which 

was created in the nineteenth century, solved this problem through the legal 

device of the limited liability company. This separated the risk of bankruptcy 

from the individual investors who were no longer made personally liable, 

to the complete extent of their wealth, for the debts of a failed company. It 

then became more attractive for investors to risk their money by investing 

in such legally constituted companies. What Weber was seeking to explain 

was how, in the context of the medieval economy, investment funds could 

be assembled in the first place for an overseas venture when there were few 

laws to regulate such transactions. Using the records of trading partnerships 

and analysing the laws and regulations available and specially developed, 

Weber explained the rules according to which such partnerships operated. 

Lutz Kaelber, who has recently translated Weber’s dissertation publication 

into English, argues that this research fed into PESC, Economy and Society 

and the General Economic History. 32 

As a national-economist, Weber developed specialist expertise on the 

stock exchanges during the mid-1890s. He lectured publicly on the subject, 

he wrote pamphlets, he served on a government commission on the workings 

of the stock exchange, and he wrote several long academic treatises 

on the subject. It was a very technical and very controversial area. Public 

concern centred on the speculative opportunities of the exchanges. Knut 

Borchardt writes, ‘Particularly intensive was discussion relating to the casino-like 

qualities of the bourse (Börsenspiel). This was principally related 

to the question of whether obligations arising from trades which did not 

conclude with the delivery of and payment for securities or commodities, 

but simply balanced the difference between an agreed future price and the 

price actually prevailing in the exchange on the delivery date . . .’. This was 

seen as gambling on the difference in prices. Borchardt makes the point 

that Weber was relatively well equipped to write on the subject because of 

his legal training. The stock exchange had not yet become a topic within 

economics. Instead, it was lawyers who contributed to the growing literature 

‘concerning inadequate regulation of brokers (Makler), the numerous abuses


of business on account (Kommissionsgeschäft), and the problems relating to 

those investing in securities’. 33 

Reactionary agrarian interests objected to the development of futures in 

grains being traded on the stock exchanges. They thought this contributed 

to the lowering of cereal prices through opening the market to international 

trade. Their views were successful when the German parliament (‘Reichstag’) 

passed a new Bourse Law in June 1896 forbidding the trading in futures. The 

new law undermined the work of the Bourse Commission on which Weber 

was sitting. Weber was bitter about this result, for he had consistently argued 

that Germany could not afford to turn its back on world markets in favour 

of agricultural protectionism. ‘The representatives of the agrarian interest 

needed the decision for their masses of thickheaded votes, “ut aliquid factum 

videatur” (“in order to show something was being done”). A few of them 

even believed in the particularly detrimental character of futures trading 

itself . . .’. 34 

Borchardt queries whether Weber should be seen in this period exclusively 

as an economist, which is a viewpoint he attributes to Wilhelm Hennis, 

Keith Tribe and Heino Nau. He observes that, while Weber’s appointment 

in Freiburg was Professor of Economics and Public Finance, he also offered 

classes in commercial law and lectures in the history of German law. Borchardt’s 

point is well made and needs to be retained. Today, we would say 

that Weber was interdisciplinary, but this is only because of the differentiation 

of the specialist academic knowledge into the separate disciplines of 

law, economics, philosophy, sociology, politics and so on. Weber’s appointment 

in Freiburg was in the Faculty of Philosophy, as was his appointment 

in Heidelberg in 1898. But it would not have seemed too strange – perhaps 

maybe energetic – to offer a course in the Faculty of Law. In the historical approach 

to both law and economics, which was then dominant, the interface 

of law and economy received considerable attention, not least by Weber’s 

own teacher in Berlin, Levin Goldschmidt. The ability to trade is dependent 

on laws and conventions. Who then decides on those laws and regulations? 

In The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages, Weber said, 

in respect of the trading societies, it was not clear ‘how in each case the law 

had been formed – whether it involved entirely new legal thinking springing 

from the burgeoning needs of the day, finding general acceptance through 

transformation onto mercantile usage, and from thence into mercantile customary 

law’. 35 Whether laws are created by merchants for their own use, or 

law and regulation are created autonomously of economic interest groups 

remains a central issue, both historically and today. The economic historian 

Hinnerk Bruhns has recently argued that this forms the basis of a theory of 

regulation in Weber’s writings and is to be found in Economy and Society. 36 

In addition, Weber gave a lecture course on national-economy from 1894 

to 1898, and his reading list and exposition of one section of the course have 

been published. The full course is to be published shortly by the Max Weber 

Gesamtausgabe, so what we can say about the bits published so far should


probably be placed in the provisional category awaiting fuller confirmation. 

37 Weber provided his students with a structured reading list. Removing 

the references from this produces the following syllabus outline. 

Title: Outline of lectures on general (‘theoretical’) economics 

Introduction 

§ 1. Problems and methods of theoretical national-economy. 

Book 1. The conceptual foundations of economic theory 

(‘Volkswirtschaftslehre’) 

§ 2. The economy (‘Wirtschaft’) and its elementary forms 

(‘Erscheinungen’). 

§ 3. The national-economy (‘Volkswirtschaft’) and its elementary forms. 

Book 2. The natural foundations of the economy 

§ 4. The natural determinants of the economy. 

§ 5. Population (‘Bevölkerung’). 

§ 6. The biological and anthropological foundations of society. 

§ 7. The economy in its relation to other cultural forms in particular law 

and state. 

Book 3. The historical foundations of the national-economy 

§ 8. The typical prestages of the national-economy. 

§ 9. The economic development of the coastal civilization of antiquity. 

§ 10. The agrarian foundations of the medieval inland civilization. 

§ 11. The urban economy and the origin of modern forms of enterprise. 

§ 12. The origination of the national-economy (‘Volkswirtschaft’) 

Book 4. The stages of development of economic theory 

§ 13. Economic science until the creation of liberal economic theory. 

§ 14. The economic theory of the so-called classical national-economy 

(‘Nationalökonomie’). 

§ 15. The theoretical bases of scientific socialism. 

Book 5. The theoretical analysis of the modern exchange economy 

§ 16. Production and its theoretical problems. 

§ 17. Exchange and its theoretical problems. 

§ 18. Distribution and consumption and their theoretical problems.


§ 19. The regulating principles and forms of organization of want satisfaction 

(‘Bedarfsdeckung’) in terms of trade and enterprise and their functions 

and developmental tendencies. 

Book 6. The development and analysis of economic and social 

ideals 

§ 20. (No rubric provided, only three references.) 

Going through Weber’s ‘Books’, we can allocate them – but only approximately 

– to today’s subject areas. Book 1 is about economic theory. Weber 

outlines the main tenets of Austrian marginalism and gives a detailed account 

of the rationale behind opposed economic actors conducting a market 

exchange. Each party will buy and sell a commodity only when its marginal 

utility is positive. Weber extends his treatment of marginalism into price 

theory and money. He also shows that the use of labour and capital by owners 

follows marginalist principles. Weber had read and understood the three 

leading Austrian economists – Carl Menger, Bohm-Bäwerk and von Wieser. 

Weber was practically the only German economist to accept and teach the 

new Austrian marginalist economics, which, it should be pointed out, underpins 

the whole of modern neo-classical theory. But, as we shall see, he does 

insert at the start his own distinctive set of definitions of economic action. 

Book 2 is a combination of economic geography, population studies and 

the ethnographic foundations of the economy. §7 outlined the relation of 

the economy to other cultural forms, including law and the state. Book 3 is 

economic history and presents a clear periodization of economic eras: the 

early or primitive stages, the coastal civilization of antiquity, the agrarian 

foundations of the Middle Ages, the city economy and the origins of modern 

entrepreneurship, and the arrival of the modern national-economy. 

Book 4 treats the development of economics as a science, and competing 

versions of economics as a science, and could stand as a miniature version 

of Schumpeter’s later book Economic Doctrine and Method. An Historical 

Sketch. 38 Book 5 concerns the operation and formation of markets and 

trade, money, credit and finance, the firm, industry and the rural economy, 

production and consumption and the distribution of income sources, and 

the regulation of the economy – all these in the modern era, i.e. it is a complete 

applied economics. Book 6 is concerned with policy and with reform 

and social ideals. 

I have given a somewhat schematic summary, whereas the great range and 

number of topics listed indicate that Weber was not following any programmatic 

syllabus (as in a modern economics textbook today) but felt free to follow 

his own intellectual interests. The lecture course does not allow Weber 

to be placed firmly within any one school or tradition. For this reason, it is 

quite hard to translate what he lectured in, which was then called ‘Nationalökonomie’. 

His exposition of marginalism in Section Three (see more on


this in my footnote) shows he had read Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics, 

which was published in 1871, and then elaborated by von Wieser and 

Bohm-Bäwerk. 39 All these three economists were Viennese, hence the name 

‘the Austrian School’. To the extent that Weber had embraced marginalism, 

he could be called simply an economist. His pronounced interest in history, 

politics and culture make him more than an economic historian. His concern 

with the interaction of economic interests and politics and issues of income 

distribution (rent, interest and wages) point to the English tradition of classical 

political economy. Against this, though, he knew that Bohm-Bäwerk had 

destroyed the economic theoretical grounds for attributing the distribution 

of income to the three main classes of modern society (landowners, capitalists 

and wage labourers). 40 In the modern era, Weber’s point of reference is 

the economy of a country or nation (‘Volkswirtschaft’). These considerations 

give no firm guidance, so it is probably best to keep with the term then current: 

a national-economist. This is a ‘satisficing’ solution and by no means 

perfect. It contains an important ambiguity. Weber, in his personal political 

views, was highly national in his economic policy recommendations, yet the 

study of national-economy was rather the study of the economy as it had 

developed within the boundaries of the modern nation state, i.e. the national-economy 

could be studied in a value-free way. 41 

Weber prepared and printed lecture notes of §2 and §3 of his lectures, 

and I will outline the first four subsections of §2 to show the basis of how 

he thought about the economy in relation to history, society and culture. 

(These passages are not yet translated and my own translation here is slightly 

paraphrased.) 

§2 The conceptual foundations of modern economic 

doctrine (‘Volkswirtschaftslehre’) 

1 Concept of the ‘Wirtschaft’. This is a specific form of striving for an 

external goal, that is consciously planned behaviour in relation to nature 

and to man (‘Mensch’) that is occasioned through those needs that require 

external means for their satisfaction, whether they are of a ‘material’ 

or ‘ideal’ nature, and includes provision for the future. ‘Wirtschaft’ is 

the complex of measures that is occasioned by the economic activity 

of the individual (‘Wirtschaften eines Individuums’) or of the human 

community. 

2 Presuppositions of the abstract theory of the economy. Economic activity 

(‘Das Wirtschaften’) is instilled into man through a thousand-year process 

of adaptation. The bulk of the planned economic activity in the modern 

sense was and is very differently developed (and then not completely) 

according to race and (within the modern occidental culture) according 

to occupation (‘Beruf ’), education, intellect and character of individuals; 

correspondingly, the scope that is given for purely economic motives 

within the determining drives of the action of individuals is historically


and individually extremely changeable. Abstract theory originates 

in the modern occidental type of person and his economic activity. It 

seeks first of all to investigate the most elementary living phenomena 

(‘Lebensphänomene’) of the fully educated (‘erzogenen’) human being. 

To this end, economics establishes a constructed ‘economic subject’ in 

relation to the contrasting state of empirical human beings. 

a All not specifically economic motives, which do exert pressure on 

empirical persons, are ignored. 

b It defines (i) perfect insight into the actual situation – economic 

omniscience, (ii) full commitment of most appropriate means to 

the actual goal without exception – absolute ‘Wirtschaftlichkeit’, 

(iii) complete application of own forces in the service of economic 

meeting of needs – ‘weightless acquisitive drive’ (‘trägheitslosen 

Erwerbstrieb’). 

Therefore, economics uses in its argument an unrealistic human being 

analogous to a mathematical ideal figure. 

3 Economic needs. The only needs that come into consideration are 

economic needs. Insofar as they are satisfied, this necessitates disposal 

over the forces of nature and human beings. 

3.1 Decisive for the theory are the facts of the actual subjective perception 

by the economic subject. Economic theory is ethically indifferent 

to the subjective feelings and perceptions (‘Empfundenwerden’) of 

the economic subject. These subjective states of what counts as an 

economic need are highly variable over history. The whole economic 

history of the west is the history of the qualitative expansion of the 

state of need. 

3.2 The perception of need will vary with how pressing the need 

remains in relation to its fulfilment/satiation and the fulfilment of 

other economic needs. The reduction in the urgency of one need 

is accompanied by an increase in the sense of urgency of other 

needs. Future needs are perceived as less pressing than present ones; 

their urgency increases with the satiation of present needs and with 

a rising level of awareness of economic need, i.e. raised cultural 

expectations. 

4 Goods (‘Güter’) 

4.1 ‘Goods’ in the sense of theory are the utility satisfactions 

(‘Nutzleistungen’) performed by human beings and material objects, 

as follows: 

a the usable output (‘Leistung’) of mental and physical labour 

power (‘Arbeitskraft’) for human purposes; 

b the usable power of nature (living or dead) for human purposes, 

either as found in nature as ‘natural goods’ or as fabricated by 

man as ‘products’. 

4.2 What is decisive for the quality of goods is their usefulness 

(‘Brauchbarkeit’). This is not objective but simply means the actual


or intended means of satisfaction of perceived human needs. These 

therefore are subjective and vary and (i) the need has to be perceived, 

and (ii) the usefulness has to be recognized and believed in. 

What is decisive is the standpoint of human beings. ‘Nationaleconomy 

is a science not of nature and its properties but of human 

beings (‘Menschen’) and their needs’. 

Weber’s opening definition reflects the emphasis placed on subjective 

utility by the science of economics at the time. Economics is an activity 

of purposeful activity directed to the satisfaction of subjectively perceived 

needs. But Weber immediately flags up that those needs can be material, 

as in commodities, or they can be ideal. In his own lecture notes, Weber 

indicates just what can count as ideal needs. The building of pyramids is a 

spectacular example of an economy organized around the politico-religious 

significance of the preservation of corpses. ‘The organisation of the satisfaction 

of human needs is influenced by the totality of cultural phenomena and 

conditions, by climate, race, law, other material needs, religious needs, too: 

pyramids. Here religious creeds are more important than anything else it 

breeds entirely different human beings, money economy, capitalism, slave 

labour.’ 42 In his commentary on this, Wolfgang Mommsen notes: ‘This passage 

indicates that Weber saw economics as part of a cultural science, or, as 

he puts it occasionally, a science about the living-together of human beings 

– social science (eine “W[issenschaft] vom Zusammenleben der Menschen 

– Sozialwissenschaft”) . . .’. 43 

The subjectively perceived needs are bracketed by the type of society in 

which an individual or community lives. People make economic choices and 

plans, and estimate their own advantage, but they do this within a framework 

of cultural values, which to a large extent are pregiven – individuals are 

born into a particular society and culture. While economic activity is mostly 

concerned with the meeting of present and future material needs, these 

needs turn out to be qualitatively limitless, depending on what a culture can 

conceive of consuming. Economics, says Weber, is not a science of nature 

but of the needs of human beings, although as a science it has as its object a 

constructed ‘ideal figure’ – an entity not to be confused with actual human 

beings (‘Menschen’) with culturally determined material needs. 

Weber’s thinking as a national-economist, therefore, can be seen as forming 

a framework for a religion-based explanation of the rise of modern capitalism, 

of most of whose aspects – in theory and in history – he already had 

a sophisticated knowledge. As §2 shows, he was also already thinking about 

the role of modern occidental culture in the determination of economic 

needs. In addition, as the layout of §2 demonstrates, Weber was quite able 

to deal with the subject of economics (not yet a discipline) in a systematic 

manner. His lecture notes are set out like a legal treatise with main headings, 

main sections and with three or more descending subsections. 

This is the basis for asserting a continuity between Weber’s work as a


national-economist in the 1890s and the Protestant ethic studies of 1904–5. 

The latter did not come out of thin air, even though its highly original arguments 

and format might suggest that. In particular, it would be wrong to suggest, 

as many commentators do, that, because Weber had a nervous collapse 

and gave up his chair in national-economy at Heidelberg (in 1903), he had 

in some way turned his back on his former studies and knowledge. Weber’s 

prodigious output during the 1890s may well have contributed to his collapse 

in 1899, but I would propose that his work on national-economy forms 

the platform for his later work in what he was to call social economics; also 

that his lecture programme of 1898 reveals his academic footprint that provided 

the conceptual breadth and depth for his later studies in comparative 

historical sociology. For these reasons, I will in later chapters refer back to 

the lecture outline presented in this chapter. 

My conclusion on sociology is that national-economy could accommodate 

without much difficulty the sociological themes that Weber raised, especially 

in his empirical and policy studies on agriculture in eastern Germany. 

He was able and prepared to think in terms of economic classes, interest 

groups and social strata, and to counterpose to this a descriptive psychology 

of attitudes. At the same time, there is no evidence that Weber identified 

himself with sociology, or a sociological theory that provided a framework 

of integrating structure and action. Section 7 of his lecture outline (‘The 

economy in its relation to other cultural forms in particular law and state’) 

did contain a list of sociologists, but mostly of the ‘wrong’ sort. If one takes 

out the evolutionary theorists, the positivists and the organicists, who most 

probably would have been critiqued in his lectures, practically only Simmel 

(Über soziale Differenzierung, 1890) and Tönnies (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 

1887) remain.

2 Capitalism in contemporary 

debates 

Sombart, Weber and Simmel 

This chapter argues that capitalism was an object of wide-ranging debate in 

Weber’s generation of national-economists, and that The Protestant Ethic 

and the Spirit of Capitalism was an intervention in those debates. It was 

an intervention at once highly specific – the cultural aetiology and cultural 

significance of modern capitalism – but also a more general contribution to 

the wider debates in national-economy. PESC’s part in the general debates 

on national-economy remain virtually unseen when the essay is read today. 

The chapter starts by outlining some of the main contours of the debate 

over capitalism. It expounds the major stances towards it taken by Werner 

Sombart and Georg Simmel, into which Weber’s own PESC fits. The chapter 

highlights the role given to the psychology of motives, by Weber in particular. 

Hartmut Lehmann has recently published an exchange of letters between 

Max Weber with Lujo Brentano. 1 Lehmann argues that Weber was keen to 

commission an intelligent and judicious review of Sombart’s newly published 

book, Der moderne Kapitalismus (1902) and, for this, he turned to one of 

the foremost economic historians of the day, Lujo Brentano, professor at the 

Karl Maximilian University in Munich. Weber wrote to Brentano in October 

1903, ‘. . . I consider it absolutely essential that one of the leading scholars 

in our field should write this review’. 2 Weber added that he himself would 

address the methodological issues in the book. Brentano only partly committed 

to the commission, and Weber in reply sent him some references on 

English Puritanism, which Brentano might well have asked for, or Weber 

thought relevant. 3 Weber, in his second letter, says that he would himself 

look again at the source material on English Puritanism because, as Lehmann 

paraphrases, he intended ‘to write an essay on the matter for the Archiv’. 4 

Lehmann concludes, ‘What we have in front of us, therefore, looks like a 

division of labour: While Brentano was supposed to look at the relevance 

of Calvinism and Puritanism for the genesis of modern capitalism, it was, 

supposedly, Weber’s task to discuss the methodological implications.’ 5 ‘Concludes’ 

probably puts it too strongly, but it is a very interesting inference: 

PESC started life as a book review, which grew into a freestanding essay. In a

30 Capitalism in contemporary debates 

third letter to Brentano (9 March 1904), Weber again pressed Brentano for a 

proper scholarly review, which, unlike some other ‘limited minds’, Brentano 

could deliver. Brentano wrote back to say he ‘most certainly’ 6 would try to 

point out the positive aspects in Sombart’s book. No review was written by 

Brentano, but Weber, like a good journal editor, kept on pushing. In May, 

Weber wrote to Brentano that he hoped he would address the ‘considerable 

issue of the genesis of the modern economic spirit’. By this time, Weber had 

already started writing PESC, and it seems reasonable to suppose that one 

early stimulus for this was the appearance of Sombart’s moderne Kapitalismus. 

It is quite clear from the above exchanges that Weber was well disposed 

to Sombart’s enterprise. Weber’s goodwill extended beyond the book itself, 

as Sombart was a fellow editor (along with Edgar Jaffé) of the Archiv für 

Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, and Weber and Sombart were leading 

figures in Germany’s premier policy research association, the Verein für 

Sozialpolitik. Weber’s relationship with Sombart could not be described as 

one of close personal friendship – actually more of sibling rivalry – but, in 

many ways, Sombart had an academic and political profile closely resembling 

that of Weber’s. They were born within a year of each other, both brought 

up in Prussia, both studied at the University of Berlin and were connected to 

Gustav Schmoller who was the senior and controlling academic influence in 

their field of study. And in Germany, Weber and Sombart were marked out 

as the rising stars within national-economy. 

Their joint editorship of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 

(hereafter abbreviated to Archiv) points to their substantive academic 

links and association. Edgar Jaffé, the third editor, who received his doctorate 

at Heidelberg in 1902, was previously a banker and financial expert. It 

was his money that founded and helped to run the Archiv. Jaffé bought the 

Archiv für soziale Gestezgebung und Statistik from its previous editor Heinrich 

Braun, and it was relaunched under its new title in 1904. The old title 

concerned social legislation and statistics and was a very fact-based journal 

reporting on new social legislation and collecting evidence on the social and 

health conditions of working people in the new industrial capitalism. The 

old journal followed a revisionist social agenda, i.e. non-Marxist, and Sombart 

was one of its leading writers and supporters – providing financial help. 

The relaunched new journal undertook to maintain the reform agenda, as 

the ‘Sozialpolitik’ in its title indicates, but it moved its emphasis away from 

factual reporting and descriptive statistics to a more theoretically oriented 

investigation of social and policy issues. 

Under the new editors, the labour question was to be widened and deepened 

to consider the origins and consequences of the revolutionary process 

of capitalism on economic life and to consider this in the interaction of the 

social with the economic. The journal would be international and non-partisan, 

and value judgements about social reform would be derived not from 

personal opinion and political affiliation but would be informed by insights

Capitalism in contemporary debates 31 

into the historical and sociopolitical situation. The editors accept that capitalism 

was now irreversible – there can be no anti-modernity movement, 

which many in Germany did espouse. The existence of a proletariat was a 

fact of political life, and the working classes had a consciousness of their own 

history and condition. A reform agenda should be adopted, backed by social 

scientific knowledge, and the politics of social reform had to be treated in a 

realistic way, i.e. neither revolutionary Marxism nor authoritarian and patriarchal 

government. The editors wrote as economists (‘Nationalökonomen’) 

but, in the pursuit of the study of the ‘general cultural significance of capitalist 

development’, the journal would include work from political science 

(‘Staatslehre’), legal philosophy, social ethics, social psychology and what 

went under the name of sociology. 7 

Capitalism was a new word and, for Sombart and Weber, is a carefully 

formulated concept. Other academics and commentators simply did not have 

the word in their vocabulary, and they thought about the transformational 

process in Germany (and Europe) from an agricultural and artisanal society 

to factory production and urbanization in more descriptive terms. This 

was in part a generational divide and can be seen in the highly influential 

reform group, the Verein für Sozialpolitik. This was founded in 1872 by the 

national-economists Gustav Schmoller, Lujo Brentano and Adolf Wagner. 

Gustav Schmoller remained the leading force in the association for the next 

three decades. He and his co-founders belonged to the ‘founder generation’ 

of the German Empire. This generation was active in the political, legislative, 

educational and cultural construction of a new united Germany (1871). 

Germany’s economic development would be a continuation of a previous 

north German free trade area and would be liberal in character: removal 

of restrictions on trade and a move away from state mercantilist policies 

of steering the economy according to the interests of the government. By 

the late 1870s, Schmoller had become alarmed at the unrestricted growth 

of industries and their social consequences and the alarming cyclical turns 

from boom to depression in the economy. In his mind, what was needed 

was some return to state intervention in the economy to protect it from its 

worse excesses and to place the interests of society as a whole as the goal of 

state policy. For him, the founding of the Reich was always a political and 

constitutional exercise, and the more dynamic features of the new society 

had to be guided by judicious state policies. 

The sons of the founding generation, who came to maturity in the 1890s, 

men such as Werner Sombart, Max Weber, Alfred Weber, Schulze-Gaevernitz 

and Ferdinand Tönnies, argued for a more radical programme of reforms 

based on a more radical analysis of social and economic problems. They 

argued that a new type of society had come into being. This was modern 

capitalism. It was simply inadequate for Schmoller and his colleagues, such 

as Adolf Wagner, to argue that the contemporary conditions were a continuation 

of the old. Above all, the new generation was acquainted with the 

writings of Marx and Engels, which held that capitalism was a revolutionary


development in the course of world history. Schmoller dismissed Marx’s 

economics as ‘speculative conclusions drawn from the writings of Ricardo 

and previous socialists, and modified by German philosophy and the ideas of 

political radicalism of the 1830s and 40s’. 8 

The younger generation paid attention to the Marxist analysis and realized 

its disruptive if not revolutionary potential. The younger generation 

belonged to the academic middle class (‘Bildungsbürgertum’) and were committed 

to social and political reform – what today would be called the establishment 

of a viable civil society in the face of Prussian authoritarianism. The 

context of their reading and understanding of Marxism was edgily informed 

by the possibility of a mass revolutionary uprising led by the German Social 

Democratic Party (SPD). In 1891, the SPD had committed to Marx’s analysis 

of the need for revolution as the only way to improve the position of the 

working class. In this analysis, propagated by the SPD leader Karl Kautsky, 

the economics of capitalism pointed to the growing immiseration of the 

working class, as wages were driven down by capitalist competition and capitalist 

exploitation. This would lead to a crisis of profitability as consumption 

was depressed in the name of profit. The only way out of this pathological 

dynamic was for the organized working class to seize control of the means 

of production and institute social production for the needs of the people. 

The SPD also adhered to the tenets of world revolution (rather than local or 

national class struggle), as laid down by Marx himself in 1864 at the First 

International of Working Men’s Associations. Kautsky’s line became the orthodox 

position of the SPD in Weber’s lifetime, although Eduard Bernstein 

led a revisionist position within the party that argued that wages were in fact 

rising and that crisis was by no means inevitable. Bernstein recommended 

a political route for the democratization of politics and the amelioration 

of the position of the working class through radical reform. Both options 

were very much on the table during this period. The early 1890s had seen 

an economic depression with 30% either unemployed or earning less than 

subsistence, and price deflation. In Berlin, there were 400,000 homeless. 

Weber’s bride, Marianne, was amazed to see so many people sleeping rough 

in the ‘Tiergarten’ when she first came to Berlin in 1892. 

For the younger generation of national-economists, the dynamics of capitalism 

had to be understood as a series of causal relationships. These would 

define the possibilities of profit, growth, economic strength and ‘national 

destiny’ (to use Friedrich Naumann’s phrase); they would also define politics, 

either in the direction of revolution or in a reform direction. Naumann 

was himself a leading politician in the camp of those who wanted to see 

far-ranging social reform. He wrote an article in 1911 saying that, while the 

big question in France was the great revolution, in Germany, national destiny 

was concerned with ‘what is capitalism?’. 9 He looked back to the analysis 

of capitalism by the younger generation, naming in particular the work of 

Sombart, Max Weber, Troeltsch, Schulze-Gaevernitz, Tönnies and Simmel 

among others (and he pointedly excluded the work of the older generation


– Schmoller, Adolf Wagner and Lujo Brentano). The overall thrust of this 

generation ‘was to reveal the nature of that huge general change which 

has emerged from the middle ages up to the present day’. He continued 

that the work of Sombart and Max Weber had taken up anew the Marxist 

problematic (‘Fragestellung’) ‘with new means on the basis of a new half 

century’. Marxism provided the ‘explanatory principle of the present’, as 

Dieter Lindenlaub comments. 10 

Hence, the historical question of how the capitalist process had started 

and what were the exact dynamics of its development was not a mere academic 

question – it went to the heart of contemporary debates and fears. It 

was Karl Marx who had dated the start of modern capitalism at the transition 

point of the late Middle Ages, as the towns developed independently 

and unfettered by the old feudal lordship. Marx periodized this transition as 

the dialectical move from a class society based on peasant serfs and feudal 

rulers to one based on the rising bourgeoisie who were constituting the new 

capitalist society and were becoming the new ruling class, exploiting the 

landless peasant as wage labourers. 

The younger generation accepted Marx’s terminology but rejected his 

dialectical account of historical change. They accepted there were classes; 

there were those who owned property and those who owned nothing but 

the ability to sell their labour; also the accumulation process, the means 

of production and social and political structures of inequality; above all, 

the idea that there were causal linkages between these various terms. While 

they did not adopt the crude determination of a material base controlling 

political, economic and cultural actions, they did accept that capitalism was 

an entity with interlinked parts and that it had its own historical dynamic 

of development. So facts, trends and developments had in some way to be 

causally modelled and thought about; they had to be fitted into some sort of 

pattern – but not into a schematic pattern as Marx and Engels had argued. 

Werner Sombart and the origins of modern capitalism 

Of the younger generation, Sombart had by far the closest engagement with 

Marxism. He had written critical expositions of Marxism, he himself belonged 

to the SPD, and he was a political activist in Breslau where he was assistant 

professor. (He remained stuck at assistant professor level, despite his 

outstanding academic reputation, because no ministry of education would 

accept a member of the SPD as a full professor.) 

My argument in this section is that Sombart’s moderne Kapitalismus represents 

a theoretical reorientation around the issue of capitalism within the 

field of German national-economy and, in this sense, Sombart became the 

leading intellectual influence among the younger generation of the Verein. 

Der moderne Kapitalismus (1902) offered, in its opening chapters, a methodological 

way of integrating the motives of people and groups in pursuit of 

economic goals with resultant economic organization and institutions created


for those purposes. 11 In this respect, it went further than the very suggestive 

ideas in Weber’s own lecture outline in national-economy. Sombart provided 

some key concepts for the analysis of the emergence of modern capitalism: 

economic rationalism, acquisitive behaviour and the profit motive, and ‘high 

capitalism’ – a very far-reaching concept whose subsequent influence can 

be seen, for example, in Habermas’ theory of the colonization of the life 

world. He also demanded that history had to be investigated through the 

aid of clearly defined concepts and theories, and he stood out against the assumption 

that the historical facts alone would provide their own explanation 

of events. In my view, Sombart’s subsequent publications, which were extremely 

numerous and not least a much enlarged second edition of moderne 

Kapitalismus (1916 onwards), detract from and disguise the originality and 

sheer achievement of the first edition of the book. (I make this point because 

Sombart is often portrayed retrospectively through his later publications, 

many of which command little or negative credibility today. 12 ) 

If we confine our attention just to titles for a moment, we can see the 

sequencing of ideas and their standpoints as so many stepping stones. Marx 

wrote Das Kapital, Sombart Der moderne Kapitalismus and Weber Die protestantische 

Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus. The semantic shift from 

‘Das Kapital’ to ‘der Kapitalismus’ is enormous. Marx’s capital is neuter in 

gender – impersonal, brutish – and it outlines the laws of accumulation of 

an object whose dynamics demand the crude servitude of all social classes 

caught in its embrace. Sombart made the accumulation of capital the result 

of individuals behaving according to an array of economic motives. While 

these motives, psychological in origin, could be crudely acquisitive, Sombart 

had humanized capital accumulation to the extent that he made it the 

outcome of individuals and groups and their self-organization, and not the 

impenetrable dialectic of impersonal forces. Capitalism was a matter of the 

motives of individuals and social and economic relationships. For Sombart, 

the outcomes of high capitalism were unacceptable and unwanted, and he 

still remained the socialist critic of certain forms of capitalism. But he argued 

that there were individual and institutional factors in play that produced a 

particular outcome and, equally, the socialization of the means of production 

was still possible in terms of the logic of capitalistic development and 

the reinsertion of cooperative ideas and institutions. Weber’s title signals his 

acceptance of the shift to capitalism as the object of study, and ‘Geist’ – as 

is probably not realized by most Anglophone readers – was Sombart’s term. 

To see this, Der moderne Kapitalismus (hereafter mK) has to be looked at in 

closer detail and, in particular, Weber’s somewhat devious way of relating 

to Sombart’s mK. 

In the second and revised edition of PESC, Weber dropped the quotation 

marks around ‘spirit’ (‘Geist’) in the title. No doubt he felt he had made the 

term his own, not least through a sixteen-year intellectual tussle played out 

by both men, Sombart and Weber. 13 But in 1904, ‘Geist’ appeared in quotation 

marks, partly as an acknowledgement of Sombart’s prior use of the term


and that he, Weber, was going to use it in another way. (And both men had to 

be definitionally careful in using ‘Geist’ because, for most readers, it would 

have signalled Hegel’s big idea of Reason as the progressive supra-individual 

force within the dialectic of history. ‘Geist’ in German and, to a lesser extent, 

‘spirit’ in English also have plainer and far more everyday meanings. There 

is also a suggestion by both men that they chose, or at least did not dislike, 

the term because it was a play on the word ‘Geist’ at Hegel’s expense. Both 

Weber and Sombart were resolutely against Hegel, and Sombart saw part of 

his role as taking Hegel out of Marx – and this meant removing a dialectical 

philosophy of history.) 

There is a series of corrective passages and footnotes in Weber’s PESC to 

Sombart’s mK. They refer to Sombart’s dismissal of religion as a factor in 

western economic development and to Weber’s highlighting of the role of 

religious ethics in economic behaviour. Weber’s references to Sombart, while 

aiming to be corrective are also slightly belittling, and they give the effect 

that Sombart’s thesis can be disregarded. The relationship of book to essay 

surfaces here. Weber’s PESC could adopt an essayistic form as a critique 

of what was a very large and quite systematic book. mK appeared in two 

volumes, it had an elaborate set of divisions into books, sections and chapters, 

and totalled 28 chapters and 656 pages. mK is now virtually unread, 

whereas in its day, it was a considerable academic publishing sensation. It 

needs, therefore, to be seen as a situating reference point in the debate on 

capitalism. Weber’s PESC is of course freestanding in its own right; indeed, 

its self-containedness is one of its remarkable features. But some part of its 

ability to assume the form of an essay was the opportunity to offer a critical 

perspective on one aspect of a larger thesis and enterprise. 

mK outlined a whole programme for national-economy that offered a 

way of integrating economic history with economic and sociological theory. 

It opens with several methodological chapters that assert the need to distinguish 

between phenomenal facts presented by historians and the mediation 

of those facts by the concepts of national-economy. Historians tend to miss 

the economic significance of facts because they lack a theory of economic 

activity. The major distinction Sombart wanted to introduce was between 

an enterprise (‘Betrieb’) and the wider economy (‘Wirtschaft’). Sombart 

argued that one could find similar enterprises, such as the industrial workshop, 

throughout history. The point, however, was to situate the enterprise 

within the dominant principles of an economy. The industrial workshop 

could be found in ancient Greece, in the medieval guilds and in modern 

capitalism. The economic principles of the ancient economy excluded any 

predominantly competitive and market economy; likewise, the guilds were 

committed to a restrictive economy and, in the capitalist era, one could find 

workshop enterprises operating on cooperative lines. 

Sombart, therefore, looked for the economic principles at work in an 

economy rather than their particular organizational forms such as the enterprise, 

the household, the manor or the factory. His major idea was that


two principles need to be distinguished in explaining the rise of western 

capitalism. One was the principle of the satisfaction of need (‘Bedarfsbefriedigung’), 

the other was the acquisition of wealth as an end in itself (‘Erwerbswirtschaft’). 

Each of these principles came to define their respective 

economies. ‘The purpose of a capitalist factory producing boots is not the 

making of boots but rather the raising of profit; the purpose of a peasant’s 

own economy is equally not to produce boots but to protect the feet from 

the wet and the cold.’ 14 This is the difference between a traditional economy 

and a modern capitalist economy. The traditional economy, in its various 

forms, is based on the motivation of fulfilling immediate needs, and it is 

characterized by a limited division of labour. The modern capitalist economy 

is psychologically driven by a desire for profit as an end in itself, irrespective 

of what good or service is provided. 

Sombart’s main question is what causes the changeover from the principle 

of the satisfaction of need to that of the acquisitive principle, which, 

as Parsons pointed out in an early paper, is the Kapitalismus problematic. 15 

The crossover was triggered in the late Middle Ages by a heightened sense of 

consumption and wealth, after Europe had made contact with the Near East 

and the depredations of the Crusades and the later expeditions to find new 

sources of wealth in the colonies. In place of an economy regulated by tradition, 

there arose, says Sombart, a new lust for wealth – ‘auri sacra fames’. 16 

The motivation of greed, followed by a new ‘economic rationalism’ centred 

on double-entry book-keeping (introduced by Luca Paciola in 1494), opens 

the door to the calculation of profit. Modern capitalism therefore originated 

in the Italian towns that had grown rich on trade, had adopted the technicalities 

of profit calculation and were freed from traditional restraints in 

their search for wealth. 

‘Geist’ plays a major conceptual role in Sombart’s explanation, especially 

with regard to the move from one economic principle to another. Part Three 

of his exposition is entitled ‘Die Genesis des kapitalistischen Geistes’. It comprises 

two chapters: one on the awakening of ‘Erwerbstriebes’, the other on 

the formation of economic rationalism. Sombart frames the problem of the 

emergence of modern capitalism in terms of psychological motives, economic 

principles and the resultant organization of economic forms in terms of 

norms and regimes. (Indeed, it is not a little Parsonian in method.) Sombart 

uses the phrase ‘psychogenesis’ to conceive the sea-change in psychological 

motivation that was taking place by the end of the Middle Ages. 17 

Weber disputed a particular aetiology in Sombart’s account. As we have 

seen, Sombart’s aetiology turned on the new ‘auri sacra fames’ – the accursed 

lust for gold. Chapter 14 of mK raises alternative possible causes and 

dismisses them. Sombart dismisses religion as a possible cause. 

It also seems insufficient to me to locate the nature of modern capitalism 

through the belonging to specific religious communities. That Protestantism, 

particularly in its variants of Calvinism and Quakerism, has 

significantly supported the development of capitalism is a well-known


fact but one that also needs to be further established . . . the Protestant 

system of religion is the consequence rather than the cause of the modern-capitalist 

spirit. 

Sombart, like Weber, quotes (in a footnote) Eberhard Gothein’s contribution 

to the debate. 

Whoever will trace the origins of capitalist development, in whatever 

country of Europe that may be, is always impressed by the same fact: 

the Calvinist diaspora is at the same time the breeding ground (‘Pflanzschule’) 

of the capitalist economy. The Spanish expressed this with bitter 

resignation: heresy supports the spirit of trade (‘Handelsgeist’). 18 

What, however, is required to avoid such an error, says Sombart, is a 

closer examination of the actual historical constellation in order to draw a 

satisfactory answer for the rise of modern capitalism. 

The scientific significance of what Sombart and Weber were attempting 

turns on getting the causation correct. An unbridled acquisitive urge 

(Sombart) or inner-worldly asceticism (Weber) was the decisive motivational 

principle that moved the economic development of western Europe into a 

new phase and new dynamic. The new capitalist spirit (however described) 

is part of the cultural genealogy of modernity. Both Sombart and Weber were 

conducting a historical exercise to isolate this cultural ‘gene’ in the make-up 

of modern capitalism. 19 If, as they argued, it were decisive and distinctive, 

then it would also shape the behavioural patterns of contemporary economic 

behaviour. 

Weber’s dialogue with Sombart’s Der moderne Kapitalismus 

A close reading of Weber’s Chapter Two, ‘The “Spirit” of Capitalism’, in 

relation to Sombart’s mK reveals it to be a critical dialogue with Sombart’s 

position on the motive forces of economic behaviour. Weber’s chapter heading 

deliberately echoes Sombart’s own title for Part 3 of mK, ‘The Genesis of 

the Capitalist Spirit’. Weber apologizes for the pretentiousness of the term 

‘spirit’ but curiously fails to acknowledge that Sombart had already coined 

the term two years previously. 20 Weber uses the case study of Benjamin Franklin 

to illustrate what he means by the new spirit of capitalism. It is a systematic 

work ethic driven by an ethical attitude to the world. 

the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, 

combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, 

is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, 

admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from 

the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, 

it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. 

(PESC, p. 53)


Weber disputes the significance of one of Sombart’s prime examples of the 

new acquisitive spirit. Sombart placed on the frontispiece to Book 2 (‘The 

Genesis of Modern Capitalism’) a quote from the memoirs of Anton Fugger: 

‘but Herr Jacob Fugger had always given him the same answer: . . . that he 

was of a different mind, that he wished to turn a profit as long as he lived’. 21 

The questioner was a business colleague who had already retired and had 

asked Jacob Fugger why he did not do likewise as he had already made a tremendous 

fortune. (Jacob Fugger [1459–1525] belonged to one of Europe’s 

greatest business dynasties, making money as merchants, bankers, tax farmers 

and money lenders to kings and emperors.) The high-profile argument 

between Sombart and Weber concerned the motivation of Jacob Fugger. For 

Sombart, it was a spectacular example of the new acquisitive spirit and the 

new business mentality spreading north to Catholic Bavaria from the Italian 

cities. Jacob Fugger’s comment could serve as a motto for the capitalist 

entrepreneur, notes Sombart, where calculation, speculation and business 

become a way of life in itself. 22 For Weber, while Fugger embodied mercantile 

daring and risk-taking, 23 he lacked the sober and systematic attitude to 

business exemplified by Benjamin Franklin. The latter embodied the modern 

attitude, while the Fuggers stood for premodern merchant aristocracy. 

On the matter of work ‘as an end in itself ’, Weber is saying the same 

thing as Sombart. But of course, what Weber has to establish is that this is 

religiously driven and not a lust for profit in its own right. Weber demands 

the specific historical origins of this religiously derived spirit be confirmed, 

because the later development of capitalism through its inevitable secularization 

of religious discipline into capitalist discipline obscures the specific 

historical origin. This leads to the mistake, made by ‘naïve historical materialism’, 

of reversing the causal relation, i.e. a type of religion produced the 

capitalist spirit, and not capitalism a religious attitude. What Weber spells 

out as a mistake was the very position articulated by Sombart, who, as we 

have seen, dismisses the influence of Protestantism and Calvinism as a causal 

factor. 

Weber next takes up Sombart’s key description of the emergence of the 

lust for gold, which distinctively stands out in both men’s text as a Latin tag: 

‘auri sacra fames’. Sombart locates this in the late Middle Ages, whereas Weber 

notes that ‘it is as old as the history of man’ (PESC, p. 57). This means, 

for Weber, that there is nothing new about it, so it has to be discounted as 

a new factor. Sombart’s acquisitive spirit can be found all over the world 

– in an Italian as well as a Chinese cab-driver, craftsmen in southern Europe 

and Asia, etc. ‘At all periods of history, wherever it was possible, there had 

been ruthless acquisition, bound to no ethical norms’ (PESC, p. 57). Weber 

then takes on Sombart’s argument that an adventurer capitalism developed 

from the European experience of the Crusades. Against this, Weber asserts, 

‘Capitalist[ic] acquisition as an adventure has been at home in all types of 

economic society which have known trade with the use of money . . .’ (PESC, 

p. 58). ‘Absolute and conscious ruthlessness in acquisition has often stood


in the closest connection with the strictest conformity to tradition’ (PESC, 

p. 58). Sombart sought to contrast traditionalism with the new acquisitive 

spirit. For Weber. the traditionalism of unscrupulous adventurer capitalism 

has to be combated with a new ethical style of life. So what Sombart takes 

to be novel (acquisitiveness). Weber takes to be age-old; also he insists that 

what was age-old – a traditional attitude to acquisition – had to be converted 

by the emergence of a new ethical style of life. At this point, Sombart has 

made no formal appearance in the main text, although Sombart is clearly the 

critical object of Weber’s own exposition. 

A few pages further on, Weber formally disputes Sombart’s division of 

economic motivation into satisfaction of need and the ‘new’ acquisitive 

spirit. Sombart, as we have seen, had put considerable effort into a dual 

articulation of enterprise, both within the framework of craft mentality (production 

for need) and within the capitalist spirit (the struggle for profit freed 

from needs). Weber appears to bend towards Sombart’s position, equating 

production for need with what he (Weber) terms economic traditionalism. 

This, for Sombart, is the precapitalist world that is to be transformed. Weber 

likewise is focused on the transformation, but he brings in the concept of 

traditional capitalism. This introduces a new axis of articulation: capitalism 

can exist in traditional form either side of the historical line (or watershed) 

of the transformation into modernity. One can adduce historical examples of 

capitalism in the medieval and ancient world that are traditional in orientation. 

‘Enterprises, namely, which are carried on by private entrepreneurs 

by utilizing capital (money or goods with a money value) to make a profit, 

purchasing the means of production and selling the product, i.e. undoubted 

capitalistic enterprises, may at the same time have a traditionalistic character.’ 

24 Sombart is right to note what Weber terms an ‘adequate relationship’ 

between capitalist spirit and the capitalist enterprise – they do go together 

in the modern era. But this is not a ‘necessary relationship’, says Weber. 

One can have a capitalist workshop in the ancient world run on traditional 

grounds. Conversely, within the period of modern European history, it is 

common to find capitalist enterprises run on traditional principles. 

Weber uses the example of the textile industry in the nineteenth century, 

in order to ram home the argument that capitalist businesses are frequently 

traditional and lack the dynamic impulse to ever-expanding growth. The 

linen business was a cottage industry and used middle men to process the 

raw material. ‘The form of organization was in every respect capitalistic; the 

entrepreneur’s activity was of a purely business character; the use of capital 

turned over in the business was indispensable; and finally, the objective 

aspect of the economic process, the book-keeping, was rational’ (PESC, p. 

67). Book-keeping was a central feature of Sombart’s account of economic 

rationalism. But, despite these features, the linen business remained locked 

into a traditionalist phase. Weber continues to labour the point over the next 

few pages and is, in effect, trying to bury Sombart’s distinctions. 

Weber next takes a point already established by Sombart: that it is not


the availability of money that is the vital prerequisite for the development of 

modern capitalism, but rather the attitude towards business. ‘The question 

of the motive forces in the expansion of modern capitalism is not in the 

first instance a question of the origin of the capital sums which were available 

for capitalistic uses, but, above all, of the development of the spirit of 

capitalism.’ This is exactly Sombart’s argument but, of course, Weber wishes 

to denote a different spirit. Weber seeks to establish that it is the ethical 

qualities informing the spirit that are crucial (PESC, p. 69). The capitalist 

system ‘needs devotion to the calling of making money’ (PESC, p. 72) that 

the previous era with its ‘auri sacra fames’ would have found ‘perverse’. 

Weber, again without mentioning Sombart, turns to the Church’s attitude 

to money-making in relation to the Italian cities in the late Middle Ages. For 

Sombart, as we have noted, the Italian cities were the location of the new 

capitalist spirit. Weber asserts, on the contrary, that the Church’s influence 

was decisive in making the unrestrained search for profit an object of deep 

shame and unworthiness. 25 

Chapter 2 finally ends with another reference to Sombart. ‘The attempt 

has been made, particularly by Sombart, in what are often judicious and 

effective observations, to depict economic rationalism as the salient feature 

of economic life as a whole’ (PESC, p. 75). Weber admits economic rationalism 

to be a central component of ‘modern bourgeois society’ (PESC, p. 75). 

Weber even offers that it might seem that ‘the development of the spirit of 

capitalism is best understood as part of the development of rationalism as a 

whole, and could be deduced from the fundamental position of rationalism 

on the basic problems of life. In the process Protestantism would only have 

to be considered in so far as it has formed a stage prior to the development 

of a purely rationalistic philosophy’ (PESC, p. 76). As can now be expected, 

Weber dismisses this train of thought on the grounds that rationalism is not 

a uniform movement in European history. Roman law attained a high degree 

of rationalism but, in the modern era, it had little impact on capitalist 

development. 

At almost every stage of Weber’s exposition in Chapter 2, Sombart is 

the mostly hidden object of his argument, and so the structure of Weber’s 

argumentation derives from Sombart. Weber alters, quite crucially, the terms 

of the argument: from adventurer capitalism to ethical lifestyle, and from 

modern acquisitiveness to universal acquisitiveness. Weber redistinguishes 

Sombart’s conceptual categories, and he is also more incisive in his definition 

of capitalism (but not in his definition of ‘Geist’). But we should not lose 

sight of the fact that motive (‘Geist’) is established as a new way of thinking 

in national-economy by Sombart. Weber may differ in terms of the contents 

of the argument, but the (hidden) underlying structure of thinking about 

the relation of economy to economic subjects in comparative perspective is 

Sombart’s.

Simmel’s Philosophy of Money 


We have seen that Sombart’s moderne Kapitalismus sought to establish ‘spirit’ 

as the decisive force in releasing the dynamic of modern capitalism, and 

we have seen that Weber directly confronted Sombart’s attribution of greed 

as the driver of the acquisitive economic principle (‘Erwerbsleben’). In both 

Sombart and Weber, there was an acceptance that psychological motives 

were the key to any understanding of the rise of modern economic life and, 

in both men, there was an acceptance that the ends of economic behaviour 

– in the fulfilment of needs – had been decisively altered by an economic 

system that placed the emphasis on penultimate ends, the search for profit 

regardless of economic use and need. Greed linked to economic rationalism, 

for Sombart, drove the search for profit and, for Weber, Puritan asceticism 

led to the concentration on work as an end in itself. Final purposes such as 

consumption, want satisfaction, expenditure to demonstrate status distinction 

or waging wars became displaced by the economic mechanism itself. 

Sombart’s merchant and Weber’s Puritan had, through their disregard of 

the ends of economic activity, entered a wholly new disposition in western 

civilization. 

Both authors, especially Sombart, acknowledged their indebtedness to 

Georg Simmel for the insight that final ends could be thought of as being 

displaced by mechanisms that take possession of the mind and behaviour 

of economic actors. 26 The work to which they referred was Simmel’s Philosophy 

of Money, a 550-page treatise that was first published as a book in 

1900. This project had first surfaced in 1889 as an essay, ‘Zur Psychologie 

des Geldes’, published in a journal edited by Schmoller. 27 During the 1890s, 

Simmel had developed many of the themes of the book as separately published 

essays, and it is reasonable to infer that both Sombart and Weber were 

aware of Simmel’s project during the 1890s. 28 Indeed, we know that Weber 

read the book on its appearance in 1900, for Marianne Weber tells us that, 

during his convalescence in Rome in 1902, it was one of the first books he 

read at the start of his recovery. 29 Further, if we pair Simmel’s book with the 

‘English texts’ also being read by Weber in Rome, one begins to sense the 

immense straddling operation that he was putting into place. One very large 

foothold is the German debate over capitalism, the other not yet significant 

foothold is the revolutionary (and inwardly heroic) potential of the Puritan 

achievement that made modern capitalism a possibility. Both Sombart and 

Weber acknowledge Die Philosophie des Geldes. 30 

Simply stated, the argument that Simmel delivered was to show how 

money developed into a powerful mechanism enabling a huge range of 

economic transactions and that, as an instrument for economic process, it 

inserted itself as a determinative force into the quality and structure of the 

social relationships of people. If greed was a prime psychological driver for 

Sombart, then money was its object, and it was Simmel who pointed out how 

intimate this link was. And if the Puritan in his economic behaviour could


change the texture of economic activity from the mundane to the inner consolation 

of salvation anxiety, then it was Simmel who had shown how such 

psychological displacements were possible. Through his analysis of money, 

Simmel is the first social theorist to place the stress on the centrality of mediating 

mechanisms, that the medium becomes determinative of the ends of action 

and that a means under certain circumstances becomes an end in itself. 

It was also Simmel who established the usage of the word ‘Geist’ as a set of 

psychological attributes that had to be analysed in relation to the nature of 

money. 31 There is more than a hint of the magical and Faustian in the choice 

of the term ‘Geist’. Money is a type of alchemy that transforms the normal 

social and economic relationships between people into something slightly 

beyond their own control; in enabling so much, it enables too much. 

Chapter 3 of the Philosophy of Money, ‘Money in the sequence of purposes’ 

(‘Das Geld in den Zweckreihen’), is a crucial reference point for both 

Sombart and Weber. It provided the pretext for thinking about modern capitalism 

as the pursuit of money as an end in itself. It also provided a theory 

of social action, as it is now termed. Sombart had already built some of its 

features into his own schematic account of economic principles, motivation 

and organizational norms. Weber, in favouring a psychologistic account of 

inner-worldly asceticism, had not built a theory of social action into PESC, 

although, as the comparative sociology of religion project got under way, his 

own theory of social action appeared in his 1913 essay for Logos. Weber is 

generally regarded as the initiator of the theory of social action, but Simmel 

produced the first clear outline in his Philosophy of Money. Weber acknowledged 

Simmel’s importance at the start of his Logos essay. 32 

The language of ‘causality’ with regard to human action is highly varied in 

the philosophy of social science and, to make comparisons across philosophical 

positions, we need to be alert as much to underlying models of action as 

to terminology. Simmel realizes this at the outset. ‘The great antinomy in the 

history of thought – whether the contents of reality are to be conceived and 

interpreted in terms of their causes or their consequences (‘Folgen’) (i.e. the 

opposition between a causal and a teleological approach) – finds its original 

expression in a distinction within our practical motivations’ (p. 204). Do we, 

asks Simmel, adopt an approach that sees human action ‘caused’ by factors 

outside our control, or are we conscious beings, intentional and in control 

through the pursuit of our own aims? 33 

Simmel distinguishes instinctual from planned or intentional action. For 

example, eating wild strawberries is an instinctual response to hunger. Planting 

strawberries in spring is a purposive activity. 

In both these cases (instinctual and intentional actions), Simmel stipulates 

that energy is expended. Instincts cause the release of pent-up energy, and 

intentions that are realized also involve the expenditure of energy. An intent 

could remain an ‘ideal representation of action and events’ – ‘it . . . can 

become real only to the extent that it is endowed with real energy, in the


same way as justice and morality, as ideas, have no historical influence until 

they are adopted as determinants of action by real powers’. The results of 

action, says Simmel, here exist in a psychologically effective form before 

they acquire an objective existence. In both cases, the real status of action 

is confirmed by the expenditure of energy. All human action, therefore, will 

leave an energy trace, and it is up to the social scientist to attribute that 

energy to motive in pursuit of an objective or as instinctually caused. In this 

way, the expenditure of energy as common to both action complexes, the 

debate between causality and teleology, is reconciled, asserts Simmel. 34 The 

energy component of action needs to be linked up to Simmel’s discussion of 

desire as value realized against resistance. Desire implies that work (the expenditure 

of energy) needs to be accomplished before satisfaction is reached; 

so seduction, cuisine, cultivation are all forms of energy expenditure in the 

pursuit of objects in the world, whose instant gratification – as sex, fast food, 

prettiness – would devalue desire. 

This is an extraordinarily neat and compact theory of action. It is not 

particularly sociological. It asserts some psychological cause (intentional or 

instinctual), which is worked out in the world, producing specific results. 

Weber omitted the energy component when he developed a similar theory 

of action (in 1913). In the PESC, it was sufficient for his thesis to treat psychological 

motivations and compulsions as causally effective. 

Simmel becomes sociological in his argument when he acknowledges that 

realizing an aim or purpose in the world involves the mediation of the subject 

who makes that aim happen in the world. ‘Our actions are the bridge that 

makes it possible for the content of the purpose to pass from its psychological 

form to a real form. Purpose is necessarily bound up with its means’ (p. 

206). We have to engage with the objective world to attain our aims, and this 

involves complex means–end complexes. In order to achieve D, ‘a chain of 

mechanical processes A, B, C has to be produced so that B is caused by A, C 

by B and D only by C . . .’. In other words, if I wanted to go to the Football 

Cup Final, I have to actualize my desire by ringing the box office, buying a 

ticket and then getting across London to Wembley. In doing this. I will use 

tools or instruments – the telephone, a credit card and a transport system. 

A tool for Simmel is an intensified form of means, and money for Simmel 

is the purest example of a tool. ‘Here, finally, we reach the point at which 

money finds its place in the interweaving of purposes’. Money ‘is an institution 

through which the individual concentrates his activity and possessions 

in order to attain goals that he could not attain directly’ (p. 210). 

The nature of money as a tool for the attainment of aims leads Simmel into 

an interesting digression on the congruence of strangers and money – with 

Puritans as a particular example. ‘The importance of money as a means, 

independent of all specific ends, results in the fact that money becomes the 

centre of interest and the proper domain of individuals and classes who, 

because of their social position, are excluded from many kinds of personal


and specific goals’ (p. 221). There are, then, social groups who are excluded 

from full rights and benefits of citizenship. The Quakers in England are an 

interesting case because they voluntarily renounced political participation. 

After the Quakers had already attained full political equality, they themselves 

rejected the interests of others: they did not take an oath and 

therefore could not accept a public office; they refused everything that 

was associated with the adornment of life, even sport; they even had to 

give up their farming because they did not want to pay tithe. Thus, in 

order to retain an external interest, they were directed towards money 

as the sole interest in life to which they had access. 

(p. 222) 

Simmel makes the same point with regard to the German Pietists and 

Herrenhuter, whose ‘naked acquisitiveness’ stands out as their only practical 

impulse when these communities denied themselves an ‘interest in the sciences, 

the arts and cheerful sociability’. 

Simmel, then, provides more than hints (about Puritans) for the Protestant 

ethic thesis; he provides a philosophy of social action. This is rooted in 

a theory of desire, resistance, realization and value and, overall, it can be said 

to be psychological. Perhaps it is in this connection that Weber raises his objection 

in 1913 that Simmel does not differentiate sufficiently the subjective 

from the objective (see note 25). But in 1904–5, Weber himself is operating 

with psychological motivations in the absence of his own theory and model 

of social action. 

Some interim conclusions 

Two main points can be drawn from the above analysis and exposition. First, 

Simmel, Sombart and Weber all use the concept ‘Geist’ as a form of explanation, 

and all three have in common its use in a predominantly psychological 

manner. Simmel stands out through his intensive discussion of the psychology 

of motivation and how it may be developed as a philosophy of social 

action. This has methodological consequences for Weber that will be discussed 

in the next chapter. At this point, however, it is premature to speak 

of a sociological theory of action in either Simmel or Weber (although if one 

chooses to read more of Sombart, a credible basis for an economic sociology 

will be found at the start of mK). 

Second, Simmel’s discussion of the role, function and philosophy of 

money enters into a diffuse account of historical development. There is an 

implicit assumption in The Philosophy of Money that barter and the absence 

of money characterize prehistory and simpler societies and that fully developed 

money characterizes modern society. But Simmel himself provides no 

clear periodization in the way proffered by authors such as Marx, Rodbertus, 

Bücher, Sombart and Weber. 35 My argument throughout this chapter


has been that, although we have a precise grasp of the nature of Weber’s 

explanation, the same specification does not apply to what is to be explained. 

I have outlined the contours of the capitalism problematic (‘Fragestellung’) in 

Weber’s lectures as a national-economist, as the central topic in the younger 

generation of the Verein and as the advertised object of study in the Archiv. 

PESC is an essay that contributes to the much wider capitalism debate, and 

this becomes particularly clear when its relation to Sombart’s mK is fully 

articulated – something Weber was less than forward about. There is therefore 

a lack of symmetry in the PESC between Weber’s care in expounding 

his explanation and the assumed and imprecisely indicated nature of what 

exactly was being explained – and, as noted by Nipperdey, Weber used a 

postgraduate dissertation on late nineteenth-century occupational divides by 

way of an explanandum. 36 As we will see, Weber had to rectify this asymmetry 

outside the original text of PESC. He took up the methodological 

problems in his ‘Objectivity’ essay of 1904, which, following the suggestion 

by Lehmann, can be seen as the followthrough of a suggested division of 

labour with Brentano. He attempted to answer his critics in a series of anticritiques, 

after which he redefined his research orientation in terms of a 

comparative sociology. 

A final point remains to be considered. Weber and Sombart were reliant 

on Simmel’s exposition of means and ends and how money is able to 

reconfigure the actions of individuals and groups. But The Philosophy of 

Money did not conform to the capitalism debate in the way I have surveyed 

it above. Simmel was quite explicit about this at the outset and, in an often 

quoted section of his Preface, he wrote, ‘The attempt is made methodologically 

to construct a new storey beneath historical materialism such that 

the explanatory value of the incorporation of economic life into the causes 

of intellectual culture is preserved, while these economic forms themselves 

are recognized as the result of more profound valuations and currents of 

psychological or even metaphysical pre-conditions.’ 37 Historical materialism 

or Marxism famously developed the divide between a material base (the 

economic relations of class society) and the superstructure (state, politics, 

culture, religion), and either directly or indirectly the base determined the 

superstructure. For example, for Marx, the state was nothing but the executive 

committee of the ruling class. What Simmel proposes is to insert a new 

level of analysis beneath the base and its superstructure. It is a statement of 

some verve in taking on the central tenets of Marxism, and it is somewhat 

cheeky as this is about the only direct reference to historical materialism in 

his book. 38 Moreover, he also states in the Preface that, ‘Not a single line of 

these investigations is meant to be a statement about economics.’ 39 So we 

have an engagement with Marxism, but of what sort? Overtly, it is not that 

of a national-economist. 

Simmel’s reply is to refer to ‘psychological or even metaphysical pre-conditions’. 

40 While we have examined the psychological preconditions, what 

are those metaphysical preconditions? It is here that ‘Geist’ comes to be


more than psychology. Money, by being the measure of all things, combining 

form, function and substance (latterly symbolic), becomes a universal means. 

It combines in itself the extension of mind as abstraction, as ‘Geist’, and the 

value standard of things. There is in Simmel’s exposition a dualism (derivable 

from Spinoza): the world of mind and the world of things can never be 

reconciled because of their radically different ontologies. But money is an 

instrument that can equilibrate between the valuations placed on objects and 

things when they are exchanged by people. Money has no substantive value 

itself but acts as a universal measure of value where value is only objectified 

through the process of exchange, so realizing the subjective values of the 

desires and preferences of individuals. Money, here, can be thought of as a 

new plane of existence – the point at which the plane of mind has conjoined 

with the plane of things. Although Simmel did not go in for reflections about 

the distinctiveness of the west, the development of money by modern man 

would count as a singular event in comparative perspective. This, I think, 

is the attractiveness of Simmel’s analysis for Sombart and Weber. Where 

they could not follow Simmel was into the area of philosophy and his assertions 

of ontological planes – of mind and things – for these are metaphysical 

speculations off-limits to national-economy. 

Weber and Sombart instead tried to provide a historical aetiology for the 

rise of the means–end mentality. They moved national-economy towards 

thinking about what sociological and historical conditions would satisfy the 

problematic of modern capitalism. The explanandum that required an explanation 

was the emergence of an extended division of labour, production 

for profit and means–end calculations in which both people and things are 

treated as means to a further end. Both Sombart and Weber drive their analysis 

(of greed and of asceticism) to fit the Simmelian means–end schema. But, 

in being drawn to Simmel’s philosophy, Weber and Sombart were attempting 

to confront a question of origins that, as one reads Simmel more intensively, 

lay beyond historical representation. For money could be conceived as a new 

‘media res’, a new plane of existence, determining but not itself historically 

determinable. 

A recent essay by the sociologist and theologian Martin Riesebrodt succinctly 

states the position developed in this chapter. ‘. . . Simmel, Sombart, 

and Weber all understood themselves as further developing Marx from a 

critical perspective, not as refuting him’. ‘Weber’s generation of scholars 

identified the weakness of the Marxian approach most in need of further 

development to be historical materialism understood as a doctrine, . . . instead 

of as a method of inquiry.’ 41 Weber, Riesebrodt continues, sought to 

widen the materialist perspective through the consideration of ideal factors 

(i.e. inner-worldly asceticism). In this, he followed Simmel, who argued that, 

in history, ‘material and ideal factors engage in a dialectical relationship in 

which neither one is first or last’. 

However, Riesebrodt goes on to conclude of Simmel, ‘The difference 

between materialism and idealism is not an ontological one, but a meth-


odological one.’ 42 This is true of Weber and Sombart, but not of Simmel. 

His book was titled The Philosophy of Money precisely because he wanted 

to go beyond the layer of positivist economic science into a consideration 

of ontology. Moreover, there is not a methodological solution to the issues 

raised by Simmel, only philosophical ones. Weber’s methodology, as it developed 

from 1904 onwards, wanted to treat ideal factors as causes, not as 

philosophical inquiry.

3 The Protestant Ethic and the 

‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 

Max Weber published The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism in 

two instalments in November 1904 and June 1905. He called it an essay. 

Most readers assume that it is a book they are reading. It has the structure 

of a research thesis. Its opening chapter outlines what is to be explained: 

the much-noted link between economic progress and populations that are 

Protestant in orientation. Chapter 2 exemplifies but does not define what 

Weber means by the spirit of capitalism. Chapter 3 develops the argument 

that the idea of occupation is religious in origin, as indicated by the concept 

of vocation or calling (‘Beruf ’). Chapter 4 deepens the argument through an 

exploration of Christian calling as practised by four different Puritan sects, 

and this practice is defined by Weber as inner worldly asceticism. Chapter 5 

concludes the study by arguing that a religiously derived asceticism constitutes 

the mentality of modern capitalism. The study is supported throughout 

by highly detailed and scholarly footnotes, which sometimes reduces the 

main text to a few lines in the original German edition. So, is it a book or 

an essay? 

This is a slightly unfair question, because what Weber meant by an essay 

was not the relatively brief exposition of ideas that we take an essay to be. 

He meant an exploratory investigation rather than a systematic treatise, and 

the investigation would not be limited in length or in penetrative depth. 

Most commentators agree that it is unrivalled as a penetrating study of the 

roots and significance of the western capitalistic work ethic and, indeed, as a 

study of just what it is that characterizes the uniqueness of modern western 

civilization or ‘Kultur’ as Weber termed it. 1 In these senses, it is taken to be 

‘a classic’, i.e. widely acknowledged to be outstanding in value and to possess 

additional qualities of proportioned and harmonious structure befitting 

one of the foundational texts of sociology and, more widely, the social and 

cultural sciences. 

The critical reaction to the study, both positive and negative, bears out 

the proposition of its classic status. Within six years of its first appearance, 

it had attracted a body of critical literature to which Weber replied in a 

series of anti-critiques. Some of the major figures in economic history (Lujo

The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 49 

Brentano and Werner Sombart) as well as some of the more minor figures 

(Karl Fischer and Felix Rachfahl) ignited a debate that made Weber’s study 

one of the more controversial issues of the day in the German-speaking academic 

world. A later German editor of Protestant ethic studies, Johannes 

Winckelmann, gathered some of these critiques and the anti-critiques together 

2 as a supplementary volume, and it came out longer in length than the 

original studies. 3 Throughout the twentieth century, there have been waves 

of international debate – some of these collected together in a reader by 

Green 4 – and in the centenary years (2004–5) of the first appearance of the 

essay, there have been at least three publications devoted to it. 5 As recently 

as 1992, Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth published a major scholarly 

reconsideration of the Protestant ethic. Interest in the subject is likely to be 

rekindled by the imminent publication of Die protestantische Ethik und der 

‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus in the German complete works of Max Weber (Max 

Weber Gesamtausgabe), complete with introduction and scholarly apparatus. 

And a fourth English translation of the work is soon to appear. 6 

In the academic world, most debates move on, through scientific resolution, 

through paradigm change or through exhaustion of the subject. The 

Protestant ethic debate is one of those few that refuse to lie down and die. I 

will argue in this chapter that this is in part related to the question already 

posed: is it an essay or a more systematic academic book? In particular, I 

will examine the claims that Weber makes for his study, which are somewhat 

contradictory, and I will argue that these contradictions derive from the origins 

and construction of the study. And in these respects, while it is a work 

of outstanding value, its structure is less than classical, and what is taken by 

sociology to be one of its founding texts in fact has a number of pronounced 

oddities. 

In my original draft for this chapter, I attempted to survey the methods 

employed by Weber in PESC as a way of teasing out these oddities. It proved 

to be an almost impossible task. In contemplating my failure, I came to fathom 

just why Weber’s PESC has a perennial ability to weather criticisms. My 

plan was to reread PESC, and extract and list what seemed to be the principal 

methods used by Weber. Then, I would compare these methods with what he 

had to say about them in his methodological writings. I wanted to create a 

situation similar to Durkheim’s where there is a systematic linkage between 

methodological rules and substantive work. With Durkheim, he wrote his 

Rules of Sociological Method and, then two years later, he produced Suicide, 

which was a near perfect exemplification and vindication of his new scientific 

method. I knew I would never obtain as perfect a match between method 

and substantive study in the case of Weber, but assumed this was because 

Weber did not, or could not, operate in the same planned and integrated way 

as Durkheim did. Nevertheless, I reckoned that there would be enough of a 

match to reveal how PESC exemplified Weber’s own innovative thinking in 

methodology. Like any teacher of social research methods, I was aiming to 

make transparent the combination of methods and practice.

50 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 

But Weber’s PESC resists any such treatment. Methods cannot be separated 

out from the substantive arguments because Weber had fused them 

together, and this fusion was a condition of the work’s own creation. My 

argument now is that Weber went beyond methods and created something 

much more than cultural science – his own designation of what he was doing. 

To an extent, he had created a work of art, and it is to those methods 

and skills we have to turn if we are to understand what sort of work of art 

it was – and still is. 

‘Theory and method’ in PESC 

My survey of PESC produced the following list: 

1 causal links and causal mechanism; 

2 the historical individual and genetic ideal types; 

3 hermeneutics; 

4 ‘Verstehen’. 

This was drawn up from the following brief audit of Weber’s methods. 

Chapter 1 of PESC, ‘Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification’, uses 

survey data on occupational statistics to establish the argument that 

Protestant populations are more strongly associated with economic development 

than Catholic ones. Survey data and the establishment of 

non-random variability between factors or variables is the dominant 

style of today’s social research. Weber, however, wants to go beyond 

the results of survey data. He asks: ‘why were the districts of highest 

economic development at the same time particularly favourable to a 

revolution in the Church? The answer is by no means so simple as 

one might think’. Weber raises an issue that still bedevils much survey-based 

research. How do we know what is cause and what is effect? 

Statistical data can be tabulated and reformatted in all sorts of 

ways in order to reveal a non-random relationship between variables. 

Statistically significant correlations between variables, such as religion 

and occupation, can be found. But the question still remains as to the 

nature of the relationship and causal priority. Weber will argue that, in 

initial outline, the causal linkage goes from reformed church to higher 

economic development in comparison with the unreformed church 

and the economic character of its population(s). But he immediately 

acknowledges the counterhypothesis: that higher economic development 

could attract Protestant populations as more adapted than their


Catholic counterparts. The causal sequence then becomes: the causes 

of economic development lie outside factors of religion, i.e. they could 

be endogamous to the economic sphere concerned with trade routes, 

financial innovation, technological progress, etc. And once economic 

development is under way in its recognizably modern capitalistic form, 

then the outlook and habits of Protestants are drawn to the new centres 

of commerce. 

Actually, in a reworked version, this argument is far more potent 

than Weber allows. But the point is that Weber has flagged up the crucial 

importance of some kind of underlying model that provides an explanation 

of how the causal linkages operate – the links or mediations 

in the argument as well as the directionality of causality. Swedberg and 

Hedstrom have recently given a very cogent summary of why causal 

models are required to make sense of statistical data. 7 They call for the 

explication of the causal mechanism. This is what Weber proposes to 

do in PESC. He intends to spell out the causal mechanism. This will 

establish the direction of cause and effect, not beyond scientific doubt, 

but beyond any uncertainty in his own argument. And he will articulate 

a chain of causes and effects – a recognition that the causal mechanism 

will be complex and subtle. 

Right at the start of Chapter 2, ‘The Spirit of Capitalism’, Weber 

presents the reader with a fairly tricky proposition. The ‘spirit’ of capitalism 

– ‘a somewhat pretentious phrase’, says Weber – can only be 

understood as ‘an historical individual’. It is the novelty of this suggestion 

that trips the reader up, because not a person, nor a thing, but a 

‘spirit’ is to be thought of as a ‘historical individual’. Obviously, then, 

this is not individual as in a person – such as Fred Smith – but more in 

line with an individual event. But it is a complex of events that, taken 

together, would seem to be historically unique or ‘individual’. Weber 

could have referred the reader to his colleague Heinrich Rickert, who 

originated the concept. But he doesn’t and instead provides his own 

parenthetical definition: ‘i.e. a complex of elements associated in historical 

reality which we unite into a conceptual whole from the standpoint 

of their cultural significance’. The point about these ‘historical 

concepts’, says Weber, is from the methodological point of view ‘not 

to grasp historical reality in abstract general formulae, but in concrete 

genetic sets of relations which are inevitably of a specifically unique 

and individual character’ (p. 48; all page references are to the Parsons’ 

translation of PESC unless otherwise footnoted). Weber could have 

saved himself and his book much misunderstanding by going on to


explain this more fully, for it entails a central tenet of neo-Kantianism, 

which was the theory of knowledge that in part underwrote Weber’s 

new approach to the historical and cultural sciences. At the very least, 

Weber should have referred the reader across to his ‘Objectivity’ essay, 

which handled some of these novel methodological issues, including 

what he meant by ‘genetic’. 8 At this juncture, I only list ‘historical individual’, 

‘genetic’ and ‘cultural significance’ as requiring further explanation. 

Weber then immediately launches into his famous exposition and 

analysis of Benjamin Franklin. We have already seen why Franklin is 

central to his argument, for he represents the new spirit of commerce 

over the old ethos of capitalist traditionalism (and obviously I do need 

want to repeat Weber’s argumentation in this chapter). The methods 

deployed at this point by Weber concern the interpretation of historical 

texts. Weber wants to draw out the inference, which for him is crucial, 

of what Franklin wrote or what was said and reported about the 

merchant aristocrats, the Fuggers. On p. 71, Weber makes a glancing 

reference to Franklin, in embodying the new entrepreneurial spirit, as 

an ‘ideal type’. This is not explained, as surely it needed to be. The interpretation 

of meaning, and in textual expression, is normally known 

as hermeneutics. Chapter 3, ‘Luther’s Conception of Calling’, is a further, 

and brilliant, example of hermeneutics, and is a reminder that the 

technique called hermeneutics was developed within theology and the 

reading of sacred texts. 

Chapter 4, ‘The Religious Foundations of Worldly Asceticism’, contains 

the central part of his argument, specifically the sequencing of 

causes in their roots in Puritan theology to their realization in the conduct 

of everyday economic life, which as Weber notes is a move from 

dogmatic origins to non-dogmatic practice. Weber announces at the 

start of the chapter that: ‘In history there have been four principal 

forms of ascetic Protestantism . . .’ (p. 95), and these were Calvinism, 

Pietism, Methodism and, lastly, the sects growing out of the Baptist 

movement. Weber, briefly, warns the reader that he ‘can of course only 

proceed by presenting these religious ideas in the artificial simplicity 

of ideal types, as they could at best be seldom found in history’ (p. 

98). So, we should briefly follow through and see how Weber handles 

Calvinism. 

Its ‘most characteristic’ dogma is that of predestination. In the sixteenth 

and seventeenth centuries in the most highly developed countries 

of the day – the Netherlands, England and France, this doctrine


was subject to ‘great political and cultural struggles’. For example: 

‘The schism in the English Church became irrevocable under James 

I after the Crown and the Puritans came to differ dogmatically over 

just this doctrine’ (p. 99). Weber shields the reader at this point from 

the extraordinary political, theological and social complexity of the 

historical record. Today, as in Weber’s days, professional historians can 

devote a lifetime’s scholarship to this period, probably concentrating 

on just one country. Weber extracts what he takes to be predestination 

in about three pages, citing, or rather excerpting, the Westminster 

Confession of 1647 as his main source. 9 He then elaborates or interprets 

what this means for the religious person and, over the next dozen 

pages, he elaborates in some very fine writing the deeper significance 

of this for the persons concerned. This is the place where Bunyan’s dilemmas 

and terrors are outlined. The method being used here, broadly 

speaking, is an interpretative one, but it subdivides into hermeneutics 

and the ability to place oneself in the position of someone like Bunyan 

– the method otherwise known as ‘Verstehen’. Then, at the start 

of Chapter 5, ‘Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism’, Weber has to 

complete the transition from dogmatic to everyday ethics, and it is here 

that he expands on manuals of practical instruction, such as Bayley’s 

Praxis Pietatis and Baxter’s Christian Directory. In a sociological sense, 

he also has to ensure through some empirical verification that working 

men did, in large numbers, read and follow these instruction manuals. 

Weber places his own methodological emphasis, such as it is, on items 

1 and 2 – causality and genetic ideal types – and very little about items 3 

and 4. Some years later, in connection with his move towards sociology 

around about 1912, he would have more to say about ‘Verstehen’. And right 

across his oeuvre, he makes hardly any mention of hermeneutics. Not to be 

systematic and integrated ‘as in Durkheim’ is allowable, but for Weber to say 

practically nothing about his principal methods is very strange. What makes 

it stranger is that his whole intellectual formation came out of a golden age 

of hermeneutics and ‘Verstehen’. Marianne Weber, in her biography, tells us 

that ‘when Weber returned to academic writing around 1900’, he started 

with some methodological writings, 10 and that the leading figures and basis 

for discussion lay with Dilthey, Windelband, Simmel and Heinrich Rickert. 11 

Windelband and Rickert were philosophers who had developed the theory 

of knowledge, working out the rules and limits of science in the area of history 

and the cultural sciences. Simmel, as we have already encountered him 

in the company of Sombart, was a deeply gifted analyst of human behaviour 

and human motivation and the consequences of action. Wilhelm Dilthey


– and this is where the real surprise lies – not only formulated the grounds 

on which ‘Verstehen’ could claim to provide a scientific basis for what he 

called the human sciences, but was also the leading commentator and theoretician 

of hermeneutics. Yet, apart from some passing references in an early 

methodological essay, Weber never refers to him. I shall return to Dilthey in 

the next chapter but, in the field in which Weber was working, it is reasonable 

to argue that Dilthey was a massive presence. 

So why do items 3 and 4 not receive any explicit attention from Weber? 

My answer is that Weber had not only absorbed the ‘methodological’ lessons 

from Dilthey, but went beyond them as a practitioner of hermeneutics. One 

of the biographical challenges of Max Weber is to realize something akin to 

what Dilthey achieved with Schleiermacher. Dilthey had established hermeneutics 

as part of a long tradition in European thought, originally stemming 

from the interpretation of a sacred text – the Bible – where the explication 

and understanding of the meaning of a text had become an art of interpretation. 

This is the definition of hermeneutics: the art of interpretation. PESC is 

peopled with leading interpreters of texts – Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Wesley, 

Baxter; these are some of the leading religious figures of the Reformation 

which, just to point out an obvious and large fact, came about through and 

depended on the reading and interpretation of the Bible. Weber also engages 

critically with some of the leading academic theologians of the nineteenth 

century whose work concerned the historical interpretation of meaning. 

Weber is such an accomplished and powerful interpreter of meaning that he 

himself joins the ranks of the hermeneutical tradition. He himself becomes 

canonical in the interpretation of religious text and religious expression. He 

becomes the Luther of the secular age, in the John Lennon sense that more 

people read Weber today than they do Martin Luther. Weber determinedly 

held on to items 1 and 2 in the list, regarding himself as a proponent of a 

new causal method in the cultural sciences. He failed to recognize the sheer 

achievement of his own essay and just how much of his own heart and soul 

he had poured into the creative outburst that is PESC. Weber’s own insistence 

on the sober, objective and restrained habitus of the ‘Wissenschaftler’, 

his own favoured image, is continually belied by his eruptive genius that has 

left its mark on the European historical consciousness of modernity. 

‘Der geniale Hermeneutiker’ 

In this section, I shall give some examples of Weber’s interpretative genius, 

and then I will outline the methodological tradition he was part of, yet went 

beyond as a practitioner of the art of interpretation. 

Weber’s treatment of Benjamin Franklin seizes the reader at the start of 

Chapter 2. Weber, quite dramatically, presents a series of excerpts of Franklin’s 

sayings. Initially, Weber does not tell the reader who the author is 

or the source. The reader is presented with a series of statements that will


produce various reactions in the reader, from strong recognition through to 

strong incredulity (depending on the reader’s exposure to Protestant work 

values). ‘Remember, that time is money.’ ‘Remember, that credit is money.’ 

‘Remember, that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can 

beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on.’ ‘Remember this 

saying, The good paymaster is lord of another man’s purse.’ Weber unleashes 

the full rhetorical and literary force of Franklin upon the reader. The starting 

injunction – ‘Remember’ – repeats like hammer blows. Franklin was also 

master of the aphorism and, of course, his sayings have entered popular 

language. What today’s readers may have heard their grandmother saying is 

re-presented by Weber in its pristine form. Franklin ties the getting of money 

to all other departments of life in a striking, even outrageous, way. The literal 

implication of Franklin’s injunctions is to reduce the waking consciousness 

of a person to one aim alone, thinking how to make more money. 

Weber does not modify his presentation in any way. ‘To understand the 

object of investigation [spirit of capitalism]’, he says, ‘we turn to a document 

of that spirit which contains what we are looking for in almost classical 

purity, and at the same time has the advantage of being free from all direct 

relationships to religion, being this, for our purposes, free of preconceptions’ 

(p. 48). Weber is being insouciant here. There is some debate about just what 

Franklin’s attitude was. To call it ‘classical purity’ is to misdirect the reader 

from Franklin’s artfulness. Franklin knew his English was mimicking the 

religious/Christian form of the Bible ‘thou shall do this & thou shall not do 

that’. Franklin was not a believer, as Weber notes, but his employment of this 

homiletic form has an air of the not quite serious. Weber takes Franklin to be 

what we would today perceive as the style of an earnest and evangelical business 

guru. Franklin, however, was too much of a man of the world (so the 

debate argues) 12 to take himself this seriously. Rather, a serious point, about 

how to save in difficult circumstances, is being made in a semi-humorous but 

memorable way. It has more to do with mnemonics than ‘classical purity’. 

Weber also does not situate Franklin in his historical setting – mid-eighteenth-century 

Boston – an economic environment of small traders, producers 

and shopkeepers. The linkage between Franklin’s spirit and any potential 

seeding of modern capitalism in North America is ignored. Instead, Franklin 

becomes the embodiment of the spirit of capitalism, period. The pattern of 

Weber’s argumentation, and one comes across this repeatedly in his oeuvre, 

is to contrast Franklin’s attitude with another person’s – first Ferdinand 

Kürnberger and then Jacob Fugger. Kürnberger gave a satirical account of 

America in his Picture of American Culture, which was published in 1855. 

Weber introduces him as going too far in portraying the American culture as 

completely materialist. And Fugger, as we have seen, is introduced to show 

a non-modern business ethos. These two references, historically hundreds of 

years apart, serve to throw the distinctiveness of Franklin’s ethos into relief: 

‘the earning of money within the modern economic is . . . the result and


expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling; and this virtue . . . is the real 

Alpha and Omega of Franklin’s ethic, as expressed in the passages we have 

quoted . . . ’ (pp. 53–4). Through a skilful use of figures who embody different 

ethoi – through Franklin, Kürnberger and Fugger – Weber establishes his 

central point with the reader: ‘. . . duty in one’s calling . . . is an idea which 

is characteristic of, and indeed in a certain sense of constitutive significance 

for, the “social ethic” of capitalistic culture’ (my translation, p. 54). 

Weber is keen to stress the historicity of vocational calling, which has 

been taken for granted in modern times. It is something he will trace back 

‘to a time previous to the advent of capitalism’. This (historical) exercise 

will show just how peculiar an idea vocational calling is. He draws out a 

powerful historical paradox. This constitutive and historical idea is now no 

longer required. 

Still less, naturally, do we maintain that a conscious acceptance of these 

ethical maxims on the part of the individuals, entrepreneurs or labourers, 

in modern capitalistic enterprise, is a condition of the further existence 

of present-day capitalism. The capitalistic economy of the present 

day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which 

presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order 

(Gehäuse) of things in which he must live (p. 54). 

This is the first appearance of the trope of the immutable shell/steel 

housing/iron cage of a giant capitalism dwarfing the individual. It is a trope 

of fear, of helplessness in the face of an impersonal order, of the loss of a 

personal ethic to an anethical machine. Weber legitimately wants to locate 

and exemplify what he takes to be the spirit of capitalism, but he does this 

by playing the reader backwards and forwards through time, pointing him 

squarely, through passing allusions, to the idea of duty in one’s occupational 

calling. This is not manipulation of the reader, but also it is not without 

art. Weber’s depiction in the rest of the chapter of medieval and Catholic 

attitudes and traditionalism of work is equally skilful in his use of illustrative 

examples. 

Chapter 3, ‘Luther’s Conception of Calling’, is almost exclusively concerned 

with hermeneutics. It is based purely on textual exegesis and interpretation. 

Weber’s argument is that it was Luther who first introduced 

the idea of work as possessing a religious connotation. Luther, through his 

translation of certain passages of the sacred texts (ben Sirach and Paul’s letter 

to the Corinthians), elided the idea of God’s calling of man to salvation 

(‘Ruf ’) with that of vocation (‘Beruf ’). Weber establishes this point through 

a comparison of the original Greek and Latin versions of the relevant sacred 

texts (and, in the 1920 version of PESC, the Hebrew version) and translations 

prior to Luther’s. The sense in all these languages of a passage, selected 

by Weber from ben Sirach (Chap 11, verse 20), advises the believer to stay 

in his job/task/work. Whether ‘ergon’, ‘opus’ or ‘Pflicht’, the sense of these


words had no religious connotation. Luther, however, translated this as 

meaning stay in your ‘calling’ (‘Beruf ’), whereby a job or work is now given 

a religious revaluation. 

There are many hermeneutical aspects to what Weber is undertaking. 

Weber establishes the new meaning of ‘Beruf ’ through a comparison of previous 

texts both in German and in the first language versions of the sacred 

text (Greek and Latin). The meaning of a word – here one word – is established 

in relation to a sentence. The previous normal sense of the sentence 

is established through its various translations. Luther alters the word and, 

from that point onwards in Protestant Bibles, the new sense of ‘Beruf ’ is 

conveyed. Hermeneutics operates by discerning the meaning of a word by 

placing it in a sentence. It is placed in a known context. That text is also 

placed in the context of the author. Weber makes the crucial point, both for 

his own argument and for the operation of hermeneutics: ‘but the fact that 

the word [Beruf] in its present meaning derives from the translations of the 

Bible, in fact from the spirit (‘Geist’) of the translators, not from the spirit 

of the original’. 13 Weber, I think rather lazily, does not inform us of Luther’s 

new spirit – presumably a tendency to accentuate work and its sense of joint 

community. The context, though, is Luther’s intent, and this gives Weber 

and other exegetical commentators the ability to note a semantic shift in an 

important Biblical word. 

Harry Liebersohn, coming to this passage in PESC by another route – a 

critique of meanings as derivable from ethnic primordialism – has this to 

say: 

The act of translation disrupts the continuum of culture and introduces 

a new concept. The search for origins does not lead to a primordial 

linguistic past but is arrested at a specific moment in Luther’s work. 

Weber’s survey of linguistic evidence goes on the assumption of the instability 

of linguistic meaning over time; he delineates how social and 

political institutions provide the proper frame of reference for the interpretation 

of words, whose meaning depends not on linguistic essence or 

folk spirit, but on social convention. 14 

Hermeneutics, then, proceeds by teasing out meaning or a shift in meaning 

through relating a word to its surrounding words (a sentence) and outwards 

to the intent of the author, and still further to the context of the author. 

This interpretation of the meaning and significance of ‘Beruf ’ is an absolutely 

critical stage in Weber’s argument. Luther switched the meaning of a 

concept, and the world in its Protestant sphere was set on a different path. 

Weber cements his argument by making a contrast between the medieval 

worldview of Dante and the new Puritan worldview expressed by John Milton. 

Weber assumes his readers already know the last canto of Dante’s The 

Divine Comedy. Weber therefore refers back to the reader’s own knowledge 

and understanding, inserting an emphatic point of his own argument. This


barely works for today’s reader because a knowledge and appreciation of 

poetry has been marginalized in favour of a more utilitarian curriculum. 

The Divine Comedy is a cosmological epic in which the poet is guided first 

through the inferno, then purgatory and, finally, into paradise where, right 

at the end, the poet looks upwards into the heavens, describing the divinity 

of God and the state of his own being. Weber could have explained to 

the reader that the poet’s vision and ecstasy is other-worldly and involves 

a mystic union of poet with the divine, where, through divine benefaction, 

the poet’s will and desire become perfectly reconciled. It is a kind of cosmological 

nirvana, an inverse of what Weber was later to term, in relation to 

Buddhism, an acosmic love where pure contemplation replaces the Christian 

notion of pilgrimage, of a necessary arduous and long journey before sight 

of the divinity is obtained. 

Milton’s Paradise Lost has the same structure of an epic as Dante’s Divine 

Comedy, but the cosmological psychology is entirely different. The worlds 

of heaven and hell are not invested with liturgy, magic and an intense devotion 

towards sacred objects and people. In a sense, the medieval Christian 

outlook tended to assimilate the supernatural into the everyday. For 

the Puritan, this was not allowed. His or her problem was not so much to 

attain a psychological state through mysticism, ecstasy and their accompanying 

techniques of sensory deprivation and intensification, but rather to 

ensure salvation after death. Weber quotes the passage where Adam and Eve 

are expelled from paradise, a simply unutterable thought for Dante as the 

culmination of a religious life was to gain some inkling of paradise. Milton 

allots some measured sorrow to Adam and Eve as ‘They looking back all 

the eastern side beheld/Of paradise so late their happy seat,’; ‘Some natural 

tears they dropped, but wiped them soon:’. Weber places the next two lines 

in an emphasized font (which has been accidentally omitted in the Talcott 

Parsons’ translation). ‘The world was all before them, there to choose/Their 

place of rest, and Providence their guide.’ The archangel Michael gives them 

some advice, a list of virtues they will need to get on in the world outside, 

saying with these they will not be sorry to have left paradise, ‘but shall possess/A 

Paradise within thee, happier far.’ Weber also emphasizes these lines 

(p. 88). 

Weber’s final comment reads, ‘One feels at once that this powerful expression 

of the Puritan’s serious attention to this world, his acceptance of his 

life in the world as a task, could not possibly have come from the pen of a 

mediæval writer.’ This is something of an understatement about a topic that 

could have been explored more extensively and more profoundly. Instead, 

Weber invokes the reader’s own poetic imagination and memory to mark the 

transition point between the medieval and (for Weber) modern sensibility. 

Weber’s interpretation of the meaning of these passages is dependent on the 

reader’s own knowledge and understanding. In the two paragraphs above, 

I have interposed my understanding of the gulf that stands between Dante’s


climactic of paradise and Milton’s endorsement of work as an alternative for 

the loss of paradise. As we shall see, this constitutes a permanent feature of 

hermeneutics. 

Puritanism revisited 

One of his English texts for PESC was Edward Dowden’s Anglican and Puritan, 

which was published in 1900, and whose importance for Weber at 

a critical stage in his life has been noted by Peter Ghosh. 15 Its chapter on 

John Bunyan is well worth reading, for it recreates the imaginative world of 

seventeenth-century English Puritanism. The chapter also advances some of 

the ideas that Weber integrates into his conceptualization of Puritanism. For 

us (c. 2006) to enter into Dowden’s evocation of Bunyan will take a little 

imaginative effort of our own. In my education in a Christian school, I do 

not remember reading Bunyan. I suspect this was because he was regarded as 

a little too desperate in his religious enthusiasm and his literalism – he was 

not a suitable role model. My students today are Islamic or Jewish or Christian 

in faith, or have a multifaith education. This raises the question of how 

an empathetic connection can be made with a seventeenth-century Puritan? 

And, more generally, how do we understand another person’s faith, or the 

absence of faith? 

Dowden has a phrase to describe this problem – ‘the parallax of truth’. 

Bunyan was the most popular author of middle and late seventeenth-century 

England – ‘who will not say that in the religious passion of an Englishman of 

the mid-years of the seventeenth century that the parallax of truth was not 

considerable?’ 16 So, from where a Puritan stood in the seventeenth century, 

what Bunyan wrote had the absolute conviction of truth. Moving forwards 

in time to 1900 and Dowden registers a problem that the parallax of vision is 

no longer looking straight ahead, but is looking backwards or not in a straight 

line. The credibility of Bunyan as an author does not convince in the same 

way. ‘If the deep realities of Puritanism remains – its seriousness, its ardour, 

its plea for the loins girt and the lamp lit – yet its exact modes of thought and 

feeling, which did their work and have been replaced by others, can no more 

be revived than its exact forms of speech.’ 17 Dowden himself exemplifies the 

problem of which he speaks. ‘Loins girt and lamps lit’ is the language of the 

seventeenth century. Dowden is being ironic, and he knows his readers will 

know he has ‘patched’ into the idiom of early modern English. Of course, it 

does not really work for us in the twenty-first century (other than through 

Shakespeare who, as a world author, keeps this language alive). 

Dowden regarded Bunyan as having a particular genius. ‘Had he interpreted 

what was peculiar to a special period and a particular phase of religious 

thought and feeling, what he has written might still be valuable as 

a document for historical students, but it could not be a living power with 

successive generations of readers of every class and in almost every region of


the world.’ 18 Weber, as will be seen, called this a ‘transcendental presupposition’. 

This means that, although we are no longer contemporaneous with 

past events, we can still understand what animated Bunyan’s writings. 

Bunyan has an intense feeling of holiness. Religion for him was ‘a personal 

unique experience’. He did not receive his religion through the organized Anglican 

Church which, with ‘its appointed bounds . . . forms and ceremonies 

[as] an aid to spiritual life’, was a form of ‘cultivated community’. Bunyan 

stood for the rawness of direct belief in his God. He found the deepest community 

‘not in institutions, or corporations, or Churches, but in the secrets 

of a solitary heart’. This individualized belief gave ‘an incandescence of the 

inward life . . . which touches heights and depths beyond what can be safely 

approached in forms suited for the general and habitual uses of religion’. 

Bunyan constructed an inward literary drama of his belief, which featured 

himself, God and Satan. He, as a solitary soul without help of church rites 

and ceremonies, has to escape the City of Destruction and journey to the 

Celestial City. It is a journey from everyday temptation and sinfulness to a 

realm of purity and salvation. In describing this journey, Bunyan reveals his 

most private experiences. Bunyan shared his experiential journey by writing 

Pilgrim’s Progress, a best-seller in the seventeenth century. He also wrote 

an autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, that chronicles 

the psychological mood changes of his journey: a ‘history of a soul struggling 

from darkness to light, from confusion to clearness, from weakness to 

strength . . .’. He wrote in Bedford jail in 1666, locked up for the zealousness 

of his religious convictions and the intolerance of government (whose 

laws were ameliorated in 1687). 

In speaking of the ‘disillusioned and pessimistically inclined individualism’ 

and the ‘deep spiritual isolation’ of the Calvinist, it is Bunyan whom 

Weber cites, 

To see the specific results of this peculiar atmosphere, it is only necessary 

to read Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, by far the most widely read book of 

the whole Puritan literature. In the description of [Mr] Christian’s attitude 

after he had realized that he was living in the City of Destruction 

and he had received the call to take up his pilgrimage to the Celestial 

City, wife and children cling to him, but stopping his ears with his fingers 

and crying, ‘life, eternal life’, he staggers forth across the fields. No 

refinement could surpass the naive feeling of the tinker who, writing in 

his prison cell, earned the applause of a believing world, in expressing 

the emotions of the faithful Puritan, thinking only of his own salvation. 

(PESC, p. 107) 

Grace Abounding shows that Bunyan was possessed by a literal and vivid 

understanding of heaven and hell, and his psychological states alternated 

between a visceral fear that he might die and descend to the tortures of hell, 

or the intensely felt joy that he might be saved and that his lonely earthly


existence would be replaced by entering the communion of saints and God 

in heaven. The Bible was more than a book of scriptures, it was, says Dowden 

‘the authentic voice of God’. It was not something to be interpreted 

by priestly experts, but it was the ‘sayings of the divine word; they leaped 

out upon him, now like angels waving swords of flame, now like winged 

messengers of consolation’. 19 Bunyan was both a martyr to and the glorified 

child of Puritan scripturalism, notes Dowden. Bunyan describes what 

would now be called neurotic and obsessive thoughts. When playing cards 

in a public house, a voice came into his head and spoke to him – ‘Wilt thou 

leave thy sins and go to heaven or have thy sins and go to hell.’ He enjoyed 

bell-ringing but, on occasions, he could not put out of his mind the idea 

that the bells and steeple were about to collapse on him, and the fear of 

this forced him to run out of the building. As he walked along the country 

roads of Bedfordshire tormented by the psychological agony of whether he 

was a sinner or whether he could be saved, he would seek a miraculous 

signal that he was after all to be saved. He would say to the puddles ‘be 

dry’ and to the dry patches ‘be you the puddles’. Bunyan was what Dowden 

terms ‘otherworldly’. He was always preoccupied by his own goodness or 

badness and his possible fate when he died, which in his neurosis he always 

imagined to be at any moment. Yet Bunyan describes this spiritual journey 

in a completely practical way. It is an empirical world of roads, trees, birds, 

animals, houses, family, friends and types of person. He lives in this world 

but is always thinking of another world. 

What caused Bunyan a particular sort of ever present terror was the 

thought that God had already decided who had received His grace and would 

join ‘the elect’ in heaven, and that he Bunyan was not among them. He was 

already, whatever his struggles, doomed to die a sinner and go to hell. The 

theological term for this is predestination, and its rationale follows from the 

idea that, if God knew everything, that he was omniscient, he would already 

know who was destined for salvation and who for damnation. Among the 

Puritan sects, it was the Calvinists who made predestination a central feature 

of their faith, unlike the mainstream churches who allowed the idea that, 

through good works, prayer and confession, all sinners might be saved. This 

particularly vicious piece of theology had reduced Bunyan to a psychological 

wreck. And it is an interesting psychological dilemma: if you personally 

are responsible for your sins directly to God without any intervention of 

priest, liturgy or confessional, yet God has already decided your fate, just 

what do you do? Deliverance came, literally, through the Bible. He read 

‘Behold, thou art fair, my love . . . thou art my love.’ This was a message 

from God to him that he was saved. He was unable to save himself, which 

as Dowden notes is a form of spiritual egoism. To achieve this, Bunyan tells 

us, he abandoned his self to the righteousness of God. Bunyan tells us that 

in this state of grace he saw Jesus at God’s right hand, i.e. he had attained 

an extraordinary psychological state. The idea of deliverance, redemption 

and abandoning oneself to a higher force is well captured in the German


word ‘Erlösung’. When Weber refers to ‘Erlösung’, the straight translation is 

‘salvation’. But Bunyan exemplifies, almost in a psychopathological way, the 

psychological dimensions of falling into salvation. 

Dowden’s recreation of Bunyan’s faith as psychological drama and crisis 

would, I suggest, have had a significant impact on Weber in his psychologically 

prostrated state. This points not simply to Weber’s own receptiveness 

to the otherwise strange world of English Puritanism, but also to Dowden’s 

imaginative powers in retelling Bunyan’s story. Of course, today, we are far 

less receptive. Bunyan comes across as naïve, simple and somewhat unhinged. 

His language and images seem strange if not bizarre. While the contemporary 

urbanite may believe in good and evil, the literal visual presence of heaven 

and hell may well seem far-fetched. However, central to Weber’s method is 

the acceptance that we can imaginatively recreate the psychological attitude, 

values and outlook of another person, across time and even across cultures. 

Ten years later, Weber was recreating the mentality of the Confucian in ancient 

China, the Hindu mystic, the Islamic warrior and so on. The grounds 

and reasons for this capability raise some interesting questions. 

Weber used the case of John Bunyan sparingly, mainly to illustrate the 

condition of spiritual isolation (as quoted above). In order for Weber to 

advance his study on the economic effects of religious belief, Weber required 

more practical attitudes. Bunyan was too extreme a case, bordering as we 

have seen on the psychopathological and certainly the neurotic. All the main 

ideas of Puritan behaviour are there in Dowden’s study. What we need to 

see next is how Weber reassembled them. Weber needed to demonstrate 

the psychological attitude of the mass of Puritans as a more normal phenomenon. 

When Bunyan was in jail, his wife brought him two books to 

read: Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and Bishop Bayley’s 

Practice of Piety. These texts were manuals of instruction and spelt out just 

exactly how one could and should behave in everyday situations. Weber 

used Bayly’s Practice of Piety and another work that was extremely popular 

in the seventeenth century, Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory. This latter 

book, technically known as a casuistry, is in the format of frequently asked 

questions. If you lend someone money, should interest be charged upon it? 

Under what circumstances should beggars be aided? This sort of book is far 

less fervent and far more a practical guide to everyday conduct. The readers 

inhabited the same set of Puritan beliefs as Bunyan, but here behaviour is 

both normalized and disciplined. 

Weber makes the point about Bayly (Weber uses the spelling ‘Bailey’) that, 

although doctrinal beliefs such as predestination were central to Calvinism, 

religious writers such as Bayly placed the emphasis not on doctrine but on 

how one practised one’s religion. ‘The emphasis was placed so strongly on 

the praxis pietatis that doctrinal orthodoxy was pushed into the background; 

at time, in fact, it seemed quite a matter of indifference.’ 20 And on Baxter, he 

‘stands out above many other writers on Puritan ethics, both because of his 

eminently practical and realistic attitude, and, at the same time, because of


the universal recognition to his works, which have gone through many new 

editions and translations.’ ‘. . . like so many of the best spirits of his time, 

[he] gradually grew away from the dogmas of pure Calvinism.’ ‘He sought 

his field of labour most especially in the practical promotion of the moral life 

through the Church.’ ‘His Christian Directory is the most complete compendium 

of Puritan ethics, and is continually adjusted to the practical experiences 

of his own ministerial activity.’ Baxter would preach to the weavers 

and other trades of Kidderminster in the English Midlands, forcefully telling 

them how they should behave in all practical aspects of life. 

Weber, then, combines a keen sense of the psychology of the Puritan predicament 

with its practical resolution. The principal theme of this resolution 

was work which, as Weber notes, has in many other religious situations, 

especially monasticism, been used as a way of controlling the emotions. Puritanism 

as a doctrine turned away from emotional display, it had a horror 

of sensuous and sexual enjoyment, it regarded art as frivolous, and regarded 

idleness as one of the greatest sins. If we accept that man and woman are 

sensual beings in their make-up, Puritanism can be seen to go against the 

grain of human nature. ‘To put this is in our terms’, writes Weber, 

the Puritan, like every rational type of asceticism, tried to enable a man 

to maintain and act upon his constant motives, especially those which 

it taught him itself, against the emotions. In this formal psychological 

sense it tried to make him into a personality (Persönlichkeit). Contrary 

to many popular ideas, the end of this asceticism was to be able to lead 

an alert intelligent life: the most urgent task the destruction of spontaneous, 

impulsive enjoyment, the most important means was to bring order 

into the conduct of its adherents. 21 

Understanding Calvinism 

Weber also uses the same passage to indicate the gulf between the Lutheran 

and the Calvinist outlook. ‘But it [life in the world as a task] is just as uncongenial 

to Lutheranism, as expressed for instance in Luther’s and Paul 

Gerhard’s chorales.’ 22 The reader, again, has to supply his own meaning, 

for Weber has assumed his reader attends, or has as a child attended, church 

services where this music is sung. The reader is meant to infer that participation 

in Luther’s church music ‘was to be the liturgical counterpart to his 

theological doctrine of the communion of all believers’. 23 Calvinism, however, 

is absolutely severe and far more abstract in its notion of divinity. Strict 

Calvinist churches play no music (just as they have no altars, stained glass 

windows or any other sensual evocation of the sacred). Milton was a Calvinist, 

although in later life, he escaped its full rigour. With this literary flourish, 

Weber turns the essay away from Luther (allowing, of course, his crucial admission 

of ‘Beruf ’ into German language usage) and comes to what he says 

is ‘the starting point in the investigation’ – ‘the relationship between the old


Protestant ethic [Lutheranism] and the spirit of capitalism in the works of 

Calvin, of Calvinism, and the other Puritan sects’ (p. 89). 

Weber goes on to state the main methodological purpose of his investigation. 

‘The following studies could, then, perhaps play a modest part in illustrating 

the manner in which “ideas” become effective in history.’ Weber’s 

academic or ‘sociological’ treatment of religious ideas was something new 

c. 1900. He has to reassure his readers that he has no interest in religious 

ideas for their own sake and, against materialist interpretations of history, 

he wishes to make two things clear. First, he rejects ‘any notion that economic 

changes could have led to the Reformation as a “historically necessary 

development” ’. Second, he has no intention of defending ‘the foolishly 

doctrinaire thesis’ that the ‘ “capitalist spirit” (as always in the provisional 

sense of the word in which we are using it), let alone capitalism itself, could 

only arise as a result of certain influences of the Reformation’. 24 ‘For we 

are merely attempting to clarify the part which religious forces have played 

in forming the developing web of our specifically worldly modern culture, 

in the complex interaction of innumerable different historical factors’ (p. 

90). From Weber’s methodological standpoint, what mattered was not being 

taken for an idealist, nor for being anti-materialist. His novel suggestion was 

that ideas could be treated as effective in history, one factor in a constellation 

of others. Weber is pushing for a more complex grasp of causes and their 

outcomes. Yet the identification and isolation of the ideas themselves, how 

they are articulated and expressed in texts, and how taken up within the 

practical behaviour of people also remains a methodological challenge about 

which Weber has little to say. 

Chapter 4, ‘The Religious Foundations of Wordly Asceticism’, presents 

two major challenges for the interpretation of meaning. Weber requires that 

his analysis of Calvinist theological texts pronouncedly displays the idea 

of predestination, and then he needs to show how the acute psychological 

problems presented by predestination are dealt with in everyday conduct. In 

respect of the first issue, I will discuss his interpretation of the Westminster 

Confessions and, for the second issue, I return to Richard Baxter. 

In Weber’s argumentation, Luther had no interest whatsoever in economic 

development. In economists’ terms, he was a traditionalist. However, 

within the realm of Calvinist doctrine and practice, a fundamental change 

in attitude towards business and work occurred. Weber quotes directly six 

statements from the Westminster Confessions of Faith of 1647 as evidence of 

the Calvinist dogma of predestination, and mentions in support the international 

synod held at Dordrecht in 1618 that formulated the principle tenets 

of Calvinist dogma. Actually, in the light of Weber’s eloquent discussion of 

the effects of Calvinist belief, the Dordrecht synod supplies the full tenor of 

predestination – more so than the Westminster Confessions. Diarmaid Mac- 

Culloch, a historian of the Reformation, writes of it, ‘The Synod formulated 

conclusions under five headings which would remain the reference points 

of developed Calvinism: the unconditional decree by God of election, the


limiting of Christ’s atoning death for humanity to those elect to salvation, 

the total corruption of humankind, the irresistibility of God’s grace, and the 

unchallengeable perseverance in saving grace of God’s elect.’ 25 As, today, 

only some few isolated communities live under the terror of this doctrine, it 

is probably necessary to probe some of the irrationalities of predestination. 

Following the writings of St Augustine of Hippo (fourth century ce), church 

doctrine has held that humankind had fallen into sin, ‘into death’ as the Bible 

quaintly puts it. Adam and Eve were the perpetrators of original sin and, 

hence, their mythical and poetical status in Christian belief. The Christian 

Church, however, offered forgiveness of sin through the performance of 

good works – charity, behaving in a Christian manner – and confession. Sins 

could be absolved in a person’s lifetime, even up until death. The Church 

in countless ways was the beneficiary of this contract. Calvinists considered 

the Church, under its papal leadership, an abominable interference in the 

word of God as revealed in the Bible. The Bible teaches that the Christian 

God is all powerful and all knowing; therefore, in a display of devilish consistency, 

the Calvinists argued God had already determined everything that 

could happen, and it was already chosen who were the damned and who 

would be saved, irrespective of people’s actual behaviour. Doctrinal points 

that the Calvinists and other sects frequently visited were whether a person 

chosen for election to heaven could, through their wickedness, alter that 

judgement (was it irresistible?); when God had first decided on the elect – at 

their birth, at their baptism, at some existential point when they received 

God’s grace (i.e. have been chosen), or even whether God’s soteriological 

lottery had been implemented prior to the appearance of Adam and Eve. 

The Calvinists were a new sect (under way by 1560), marginalized in Europe 

and frequently persecuted. So, by word of explanation, the social psychology 

of this belief system excluded any intellectual doubt about salvation and 

demanded complete confidence of its members that they should act as if they 

were predestined for salvation. 

Weber’s use of the Westminster Confessions can be criticized for its partiality. 

The full doctrinal extent of Calvinism could have been better presented, 

for instance through the Dordrecht synod. This would have better underpinned 

Weber’s wide-ranging subsequent discussion. Malcolm H. MacKinnon 

has criticized Weber’s partiality in another way. 26 In his excerpting of 

the Westminster Confessions, Weber mistook the main doctrinal thrust of 

the document. The statements that Weber quotes are a kind of preamble of 

what everyone already knew. They are of less significance than what follows. 

The real message of the Westminster Confessions was an amelioration of 

the doctrine of predestination in favour of God’s providential guidance of 

mankind. Providence still asserts the denial of free will to people in the face 

of God’s all powerful status, and it is God who will decide the fate of each 

individual irrespective of their attempts to influence his decision – a guilty 

thought or single bad deed can still lead to damnation. But God’s decision 

has not been predetermined. This offers a slightly more liveable contract, or


covenant as it was known, of Calvinists with their God. MacKinnon goes 

on to argue that this reduces Calvinists’ anxiety over their salvation, so the 

psychological tension that Weber argued for as crucial to disciplined conduct 

was historically inaccurate. 

There have been a number of assessments of just how damaging the 

MacKinnon critique is for the Weber thesis. 27 The technique of hermeneutics 

has the ability to resolve the MacKinnon/Weber dispute in terms of the interpretation 

of meaning. A principle of hermeneutics is to relate individual 

words, sentences and paragraphs within the whole text; also, the intentions 

of the authors of a text should be taken into account. If Weber were to 

provide an anti-critique to MacKinnon, he would have to follow such a 

procedure. 

MacKinnon also pursues Weber over his interpretation of Baxter and 

Bayly. It will be recalled that Weber’s final empirical proof for the effects of 

belief on conduct rested not on dogma but on how the lay population were 

guided in their practical behaviour. This is one reason for Weber’s justification 

of his reluctance to become too deeply involved in religious dogma. The 

doctrinal points that priests argued over, while of interest to theologians, 

have only indirect relevance for the economic historian. But MacKinnon 

argues that, if the true import of the Westminster Confessions allowed the 

idea of ‘effectual calling’, through correct spiritual exercise a person could 

influence their fate, then the task of Richard Baxter in his pastoral preaching 

was less daunting. 28 MacKinnon’s reading of Baxter is that a temporal calling 

is just another term or description for occupation with none of the religious 

overtones imputed by Weber to Luther. Also that Baxter and other Puritans 

distinguished between temporal calling and spiritual calling. It was the latter 

that was the object of Baxter’s ministry. Temporal calling was considered to 

be part of natural life and a matter of indifference in spiritual terms. 

MacKinnon’s critique has, in its turn, been subjected to a penetrating 

critique by David Zaret, who seeks to reinforce Weber’s view that Puritanism 

was ‘an anxiety-inducing creed’ and to restore Weber’s arguments on the 

‘spiritualization of secular employments’. 29 Once again, matters turn on the 

interpretation of documents, and Zaret notes that, within a proper selection 

of documents, there will be contradictory evidence, interpretations for both 

strict determinism and providential statements. Zaret puts his methodological 

requirements in the language of current qualitative social research. All 

researchers are faced with the problem of ‘exegetical selectivity’ – which 

texts and documents to present and which to leave to one side. This does 

not permit selectivity that eliminates the ambiguity of the original documents 

and discards any interpretation that goes against the researcher’s own 

favoured line of argument. The criterion of reliability stipulates thatnother 

researchers who come along and reassess the data would not expect to 

find marked biases of interpretation in the account of the first researcher. 

Obviously, there will be biases according to viewpoint, but science does 

not permit all evidence against a viewpoint to be dropped into the trash


can, and all evidence for to be ruthlessly extracted from the overall text. 

Second, the process of inference of behaviour from belief systems requires 

‘triangulation’, that is ‘corroborating interpretations of formal writings by 

consulting other types of textual data such as autobiographies, biographies, 

letters, juridical records, contemporary accounts, and so on’. 30 Third, when 

a document is studied, it is necessary to take account of the context in which 

it was written. 31 

Weber’s own presentation and the numerous subsequent debates demonstrate 

that one of the primary methodological fields in PESC concerns the 

interpretation of meaning. Before turning to Weber’s reluctance to make this 

an explicit topic in his methodology, I will finish this chapter with some observations 

on the rhetorical force with which Weber conveys his arguments. 

‘Der Rhetoriker’ 

In the interpretation of the significance and meaning of Puritan texts and religious 

praxis, Weber appears to follow the obvious procedure of presenting 

a text and then moving on to critical commentary of it. But his commentary 

quite quickly becomes a strongly moulded set of arguments whose purpose 

and endpoint are to offer a ‘characterology’ of the ascetic Protestant. Weber’s 

own argumentation is eloquent and is not without rhetorical flourishes. 

His method of exposition is highly effective, and he leaves the reader very 

much in possession of a fully explicated ‘character’. 

His discussion of Benjamin Franklin falls into this mode of interpretative 

procedure. Probably the most impressive example is his analysis of Calvinism. 

The Westminster Confessions are excerpted, some textual analysis occurs 

and then, around page 103 in the Parsons’ translation (which best picks 

up Weber’s eloquent flow), Weber launches into an almost intimate portrait 

of the predicament of the Calvinist. ‘For the damned to complain of their lot 

would be much the same as for animals to bemoan the fact they were born as 

men.’ Weber is paraphrasing Calvin, but is it Weber’s voice or Calvin’s voice 

we are hearing? 32 Weber acknowledges the majesty of Calvinist doctrine, 

almost personally. ‘In its extreme inhumanity this doctrine must above all 

have had one consequence for the life of a generation which surrendered 

to its magnificent consistency. That was a feeling of unprecedented inner 

loneliness of the single individual’ (p. 104). Here, Weber references Edward 

Dowden’s depiction of the Calvinist as a ‘solitary soul’. Of that inhumanity 

for the lone individual, Weber enthuses: 

No one could help him. No priest, for the chosen one can understand the 

word of God only in his own heart. No sacraments, for though the sacraments 

had been ordained by God for the increase of His glory . . . they 

are not a means to the attainment of grace . . . No Church, for though 

it was held that outside the Church there is no salvation . . . , nevertheless 

the membership of the external Church included the doomed . . . .


Finally, even no God. For even Christ had died only for the elect, for 

whose benefit God had decreed His martyrdom from eternity. 

(p. 104) 

The repetition of the negative followed by the explanatory clause is, of 

course, a cadence much used in the Bible itself, although Weber keeps his 

rhetoric within the bounds of ostensibly cultural science. 

Weber then moves on to the sensuous side of the Calvinist character: 

‘the corruption of everything pertaining to the flesh, this inner isolation of 

the individual contains, . . . the reason for the entirely negative attitude of 

Puritanism to all the sensuous and emotional elements in cultural and in 

religion . . .’ ‘. . . it forms one of the roots of that disillusioned and pessimistically 

inclined individualism’ (p.105). In this vein, friendship is mistrusted, 

for a Calvinist should place his trust exclusively in his God. Confession was 

disallowed. ‘The means to a periodical discharge of the emotional sense of 

sin was done away with’ (p. 106). Weber relentlessly heightens the sense of 

being shut off from all normal physicality, contact and pleasure and, at this 

point, introduces the figure of Bunyan, a man so obsessed with salvation that 

wife and children have to be left behind for its immediate search. Weber 

then enters into a number of literary comparisons on the matter of ultimate 

existential choices. The true Calvinist’s fear of death is like Döllinger’s description 

of Alfonso of Liguori. Bunyan is also like a character in one of 

Gottfried Keller’s novels, but he is quite unlike Machiavelli’s citizen who 

would place ‘love of their native city higher than the fear for the salvation 

of their souls’. And the Calvinist is even further away from the mock feudal 

fatalism of Wagner’s Siegmund ‘before his fatal combat’ (examples, p. 107). 

Some of these comparisons will not work for the current reader because he 

or she will have a different universe of historical and literary references. But 

what Weber is establishing with the reader is a sense of the position of the 

Calvinist as a character type in relation to other types. 

Weber enters into a four-way comparison: the Calvinist, the Lutheran, 

the Catholic and the monk. The Calvinist is wrenched away from the close 

ties that would normally bind him to the world. As an elect, predestined to 

heaven, his only way to realize the glory of God, which was a commandment, 

was to labour in a calling. The Lutheran, who also has to bear the 

sense of sin, can simply trust in God’s grace rather than trying to ‘prove 

it’ through labour as does the Calvinist. Work for the Lutheran can be a 

straightforward sense of brotherliness. Weber is drawing what for him was 

to be an important contrast of types. The religious believer can ensure a 

state of grace ‘either in that he feels himself to be the vessel of the Holy 

Spirit or the tool of the divine will. In the former case his religious life 

tends to mysticism and emotionalism, in the latter to ascetic action. Luther 

stood close to the former type, Calvinism belonged definitely to the latter’ 

(pp. 113–14). With these types is contrasted ‘the normal Catholic layman’ 

who ‘lives ethically, so to speak, from hand to mouth’ (p. 116), that is in his 

secular and temporal work, ‘did not necessarily form a connected, or at least


not a rationalized system of life . . .’. Against these, ‘the moral conduct of the 

average man [Calvinist] was thus deprived of its planless and unsystematic 

character and subjected to a consistent method for conduct as a whole’ (p. 

117). In this respect, as a planned form of asceticism as a way of seeking to 

ensure grace, it comes close to western monasticism. Western monasticism 

‘developed a systematic method of rational conduct with the purpose of 

overcoming the status naturae . . .’. Active self-control, as developed in the 

monasteries, became ‘the most important practical ideal of Puritanism’. The 

respect for ‘quiet self-control . . . still distinguishes the best type of English 

or American gentleman to-day’ (p. 119). 

Weber’s writing of these passages is masterful. He combines theological, 

ethical and practical precepts in developing a characterology or a series of 

character types: the average medieval layman, medieval monk, Puritan and 

Lutheran. Weber focuses the Puritan character in the reader’s mind through 

a series of well-handled comparisons. ‘The Puritan, like every rational type 

of asceticism, tried to enable a man to maintain and act upon his constant 

motives, especially those which it taught him itself, against the emotions. In 

this formal psychological sense of the term it tried to make him into a personality’ 

(p. 119). Asceticism, a practice, is made into a living thing, breathing 

form into the Puritan. Weber makes his characters, as average types, come 

alive for the reader. Given the complexity of the materials and the history 

with which he is working, this is a formidable achievement. He lodges these 

characters in the reader’s mind, and they become fixed reference points for 

an understanding of Reformation history and its long-term effects. 

In his summation of his essay, where Weber seeks to further emphasize 

his argument, he chooses the theme of the imposition of Puritan asceticism 

turning ‘with all its force against one thing: the spontaneous enjoyment of 

life’ (p. 166). Weber selects the episode in which King James I and Charles 

I of England tried to stop the Puritans’ banning of all popular pastimes on 

the sabbath. Enjoyment of life versus rational asceticism becomes a defining 

moment in the characterology of early modernity. Weber pursues this 

theme with considerable literary skill in the field of culture and arts. ‘Here 

asceticism descended like a frost on the life of “merrie Old England” ’. ‘The 

Puritan’s ferocious hatred of everything which smacked of superstition, of 

all survivals of magical or sacramental salvation, applied to the Christian festivities 

and the May Pole and all spontaneous religious art.’ ‘The theatre was 

obnoxious to the Puritans, and with the strict exclusion of the erotic and of 

nudity from the realm of toleration, a radical view of either literature or art 

could not exist.’ Warmth, sensuality, enjoyment on one side, and hoar frost 

on the other – the argument with its use of this imagery becomes irresistible 

in its rhetorical force. Asceticism was an attack against a universal character, 

the average sensuous living human being. ‘That powerful tendency toward 

uniformity of life, which today so immensely aids the capitalistic interest in 

the standardization of production, has its ideal foundations in the repudiation 

of all idolatry of the flesh’ (pp. 168–9).


Weber’s essay ends in pages that are now so well known that they have become 

etched upon our own consciousness. He does this by bringing together 

his historical characters and some of his recurrent images. Weber has related 

a story of where capitalist spirit originated from, how it entered the lives of 

the Puritans and was transferred into methodical conduct of the utilitarian 

outlook of the nineteenth century, and then that spirit disappearing from the 

human being as an animating principle to become the spirit inherent within 

the capitalistic economic cosmos of industrial capitalism; becoming, as if it 

were, the ghost in the machine. Weber, almost arrogantly and certainly in a 

Nietzschean flourish, discards the notion of a meaningful, animating sense 

of vocation for the modern professional. They are ‘sensualists without heart, 

specialists without spirit’. Weber conducts his argument through a deft handling 

of his historical characters pulling them onto a fast-moving historical 

stage whose backdrop is images of the human form, clothing, confines and 

machinery. 

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For 

when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, 

and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the 

tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now 

bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production 

which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born 

into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic 

acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them 

until the last ton of fossilized fuel is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for 

external goods would only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light 

cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment’. But fate decreed that 

the cloak should become a casing as hard as steel. 33 

In a recent contribution, Donald A. Nielson argues that Weber’s PESC is a 

‘grand narrative’. It cannot be considered a narrative in the normal sense as 

understood by historians, as it fails to adhere to any consistent time line. Weber’s 

examples shift backwards and forwards through time and place – Franklin 

in the eighteenth century, Baxter and Bunyan in the seventeenth century, 

the Wesleys in the nineteenth century and so on. But Nielsen suggests that, if 

the topics were joined up, then his thesis could become ‘the grand historical 

narrative of European civilization’s inner life’. 34 Nielsen rearranges Weber’s 

major topics and produces the following temporal series: monastic orders, 

Luther’s idea of calling, Calvinist teaching, Puritan ethics as an everyday 

accomplishment, Benjamin Franklin, Methodist workers, the iron cage of 

industrial capitalism. Nielsen’s perception is interesting, because it poses the 

question: just what would a narrative of a civilization’s inner life consist of? 

To make it ‘grand’ would surely lead such a historian into an idealist and 

essentializing methodology, as if there was a continuous mentalist thread to 

be grasped.


Weber does not do this. An alternative way of approaching this is through 

Wilhelm Hennis, who has argued, in a series of provocative and authoritative 

essays, that Weber is conducting throughout his oeuvre a form of philosophical 

anthropology. It is the human being who always stands at the centre 

of Weber’s interests. The materials Hennis brings together go far beyond the 

subject of this chapter, and he constructs a sociology of orders around the 

concept of the human being (‘Mensch’). His viewpoint, which he strongly 

attributes to Weber himself, is that the concept of the human being, or man, 

belongs to a long tradition of political thought from the Sophists, to Aristotle, 

to Machiavelli and to classical political economy, where the questions of 

politics – how should we live? – is always interlinked to a concept of man as 

a human being living together in society. This can be termed philosophical 

anthropology to the extent that the human being, as a living physical and 

cultural entity, is a constant reference point for study and for education; 

although Hennis would not accord a cardinal priority to anthropology separate 

from the political. The individual, as a human and cultural being, needs 

to be studied in relation to the social and political orders within which he 

and she is always to be found. 

On the basis on the PESC text alone, it goes too far to say that Weber was 

engaged in a philosophical anthropology. But Hennis has observantly noted 

that there is some sort of characterology at work here and that Weber is always 

concerned with living individuals and not an abstract entity like ‘homo 

sociologicus’ or ‘homo œconomicus’. 35 If a search is conducted using the 

prefix ‘Leben-’ (‘life’), the word is rife throughout PESC: ‘Lebensführung’, 

‘Lebensinhalt’, ‘Lebensbeziehung’, ‘Lebensfremdheit’, ‘Lebensreglementierung’, 

‘Lebenstechnik’, ‘Lebensbedürfnisse’, ‘Lebensstil’, ‘Lebenstempo’, 

‘Lebensgenuß’, ‘Lebensarbeit’, ‘Lebensideale’, ‘Lebensfreude’, ‘Lebenspraxis’, 

‘Lebensstellung’, ‘Lebensstimmung’, ‘Lebenszweck’, ‘Lebenshochmut’, 

‘Lebensweisheit’, ‘Lebensglück’, ‘Lebenslage’, ‘Lebensgestaltung’, ‘Lebenszeit’, 

‘Lebensanchauung’, ‘Lebensauffassung’. ‘Lebensführung’ occurs over 

65 times in the text. 36 

We should agree that the living individual in his and her inner and outer 

life is a central concept of PESC. To call it a grand narrative or a philosophical 

anthropology does not quite designate what Weber was doing in PESC. 

My conclusion from this chapter’s analysis is that Weber is presenting to 

the reader a set of characters who come to personify in their views, their 

behaviour and their outlook a series of historical types whose distinctive 

characteristics are revealed and thrown into relief through their comparison. 

In presenting these characters, Weber goes beyond the art of interpretation 

(hermeneutics) and offers the reader something closer to the art of the novelist. 

Imagery, rhetoric, eloquence and the play of character are all used to 

impress Weber’s cardinal aim: conveying to the reader the full significance 

and meaning of a crucial stage in the formation of modern rationalistic capitalism 

and culture. Weber gave a copy of PESC to Mina Tobler, who was a


close and amorous friend of his. Tobler wrote to her mother on 6 October 

1912: 

Isn’t that splendid, such an historical chain of arguments in which each 

part is remorselessly pieced together without any gaps, where, as in this 

case, ‘the writer’ makes himself totally invisible but nevertheless everything 

that is there is involuntarily animated by the heartbeat of a grand 

personality. He said I would find it boring, and I have read it as if it were 

a good novel. 37 

Professor Lepsius notes of Mina Tobler that she ‘could not provide Weber 

with any intellectual resonance, or act as a critic; she reacted spontaneously 

and emotionally’. 38 The academic criticism, as we have seen, is relentless in 

pointing out the various shortcomings of the PESC. But Tobler identifies the 

sense that PESC has for the first-time reader. It does read like a novel with 

a thread of arguments drawn together by the writer’s artistry. In expressing 

her views Mina Tobler was re-living the spontaneity of Weber’s original 

creativity. That for Weber probably concerned a mix of intellectual emotions 

– dread, joy, admiration, aspiration – emotions not unconnected to his own 

predicament in 1900. These he used to re-live and re-create the experience 

of Puritan beliefs and practice. Tobler reminds us that the interpretation of 

meaning is always about re-animating the experiences of not a dead past, but 

a past brought to life. This is what Dowden did, and what Weber did in his 

turn. And whether these works still speak to us will depend on our imaginative 

resources and circumstances.

4 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 

Tying PESC down to any specific method, or even set of methods, is a futile 

undertaking. As we have already noted, it is a fusion of methods and a highly 

imaginative intellectual project. Weber was offering a new solution to a wideranging 

debate on the origins and significance of modern capitalism. His 

originality lay in offering a new explanatory variable – ‘kapitalistische Geist’ 

– placed within his own framework of investigation. He used every available 

intellectual means to investigate and convey his thesis: statistics, philology, 

historical scholarship, theology, hermeneutics and a highly figurative and, at 

times, rhetorical mode of delivery. His work fell into no recognizable school 

of thought or discipline, yet it revolutionized how historians, cultural scientists, 

economic historians and sociologists would think about their subject. 

Weber had exceeded by far what had, up until then, been achieved in this 

subject area – and especially in the manner he had accomplished this. 

What I want to examine in this chapter is, broadly put, what Weber 

thought he had achieved. On a personal level, he had come back from academic 

oblivion, having lost his university chair as a full member of the faculty 

through illness, and established his reputation for originality, scholarship 

and the sheer imaginative power of his work. But he had also put himself 

in a new intellectual territory. While he may have started out as a nationaleconomist, 

after the completion of his essay he was in a new but undefined 

territory. He was not a sociologist. Not for him Durkheim’s systematic steps 

of founding a discipline first through definition of rules and, second, by brilliant 

vindication and realization of those rules. Weber had started on some 

methodological reflections in 1900 – a series of three essays on the ‘old’ 

‘Nationalökonomie’, which took him five years and then remained uncompleted. 

They were highly discursive, overly complex and still remain a topic 

of some scholarly despair among experts today – little Gallic illumination 

shines out. He also composed, in consultation with his fellow Archiv editors, 

a supposedly programmatic introduction on the occasion of assuming the 

editorship of the Archiv. From these writings, one can establish what he 

disliked and what were the new tasks, but they do not adequately explain


what he was doing in PESC. And from within PESC, the reader is given little 

practical guidance as to his own method of proceeding and, frequently, the 

reader is simply assumed to be informed about contemporary debates. An 

instance of this is the throwaway reference to the ‘historical individual’ – a 

less than intuitive concept formulated by the philosopher Heinrich Rickert. 

In this chapter, I give an exposition of some of the principal ideas of 

Wilhelm Dilthey, and I argue that they are the most relevant for what Weber 

achieved in PESC, especially the manner in which he did this. I examine 

critically the accepted position that Weber adhered to Rickert’s philosophical 

position on the validity of knowledge in the historical and cultural sciences. 

For reasons that have yet to be completely explained, Weber followed 

Rickert’s critical distance to Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences, 

even though that work presented the fundamental issues of how a science of 

mental life was both possible and necessary. Weber devised his own methodology 

of meaning and causation and, in his essay on ‘Objectivity’, he showed 

how progress in social science was possible – and transitory. 

The word itself – methodology – is fairly horrendous. Marianne Weber 

used the term ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ when referring to her husband’s ‘methodological’ 

writings, and this was the title she gave to the collection of those 

writings. ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ was already a ‘heritage’ word when Marianne 

Weber chose it (in 1922). She took it from the title of one of Fichte’s lecture 

courses in Berlin c. 1800, i.e. at the start of the whole revolution in method 

and techniques that so distinguished German academic knowledge throughout 

the nineteenth century. 1 Marianne Weber was alluding to the agreeable 

idea that ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ denoted an idea of knowledge and a way of 

learning; something one would do throughout one’s life as a developing 

potential and that would contribute to knowledge and culture in its turn. 

Methodology can, of course, be technical but, when the term is used in relation 

to Max Weber and his contemporaries, it still retained some component 

of learning as part of life and culture. Its Fichtean legacy concerned ontology 

– statements about the nature of reality and being – and epistemology 

– theories on the status of knowledge. In addition, there was a concern with 

the validity as well as the relevance of knowledge, where validity concerned 

the philosophical justification of knowledge itself. 

Marianne Weber, in resorting to Fichte’s Berlin lecture course (‘Wissenschaftslehre’), 

also makes the link between learning and a new national 

awareness. Fichte established patriotism among the educated middle class at 

the time of the Napoleonic rule of Prussia. From these small beginnings began 

the ascent of the idea of Germany as a cultural nation and the role of the 

educated middle class in propagating those ideas through a distinctive idea 

of learning (‘Bildung’). Education and, by implication, ‘methodology’ had a 

decidedly emancipatory flavour. Some of this emancipatory fervour is still 

detectable in Weber’s methodological essay on ‘Objectivity’ when setting out 

the agenda of the relaunched Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. 

Hence, when the word ‘methodology’ is used in this chapter, it is quite capacious 

in its various senses.

‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 75 

The study of methodology also has an unfortunate tendency to place 

people in schools and to create divides after the event. Weber himself, especially 

in the field of the philosophy of history, was a polemicist. But much of 

what Weber achieved came from his ability to synthesize different methods. 

Some care, therefore, has to be taken in inferring what positions, at the time, 

were complementary, what were compatible and what were truly opposed. 

I will outline the field of methodological forces at work; ‘in play’ would be 

a better phrase, because positions had not yet solidified. For example, when 

Weber does cite Dilthey or Husserl or Vossler, it would be a mistake for us 

to conclude that somehow Weber should be considered to be sympathetic to 

vitalism, phenomenology or linguistics respectively. The period c. 1900 was 

awash with new ideas and new approaches, and it is only later rationalizations 

of academic knowledge that have retrospectively codified these fluid 

positions into opposed schools. 2 We also need to take on board recent work 

by Austin Harrington who argues that, in the subsequent codification of debates, 

false oppositions have been created – crucially, between hermeneutics 

and objectivity; equally, the work by Michael Friedman that points out that 

the split between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy occurs was not as 

clear cut in the period in which Weber was writing, and Stephen Turner, 

who argues the relevance of Weber’s philosophy of social science in connection 

with recent work on action, explanation and cause. In the formation 

of later positions, each side drew from a common store of philosophical 

presuppositions. 3 

I present the main elements in the methodological field of debate, in 

which it should be noted that Weber himself is an interacting and not yet 

stabilized element. The main figures include Wilhelm Dilthey, whose whole 

approach to academic knowledge insisted that we, as academic writers, are 

embedded in the flow of life and this affects how we revisit our subject material, 

for example history. Georg Simmel is an important referent, because he 

had already articulated the validity grounds of knowledge in cultural science 

and sociology in The Philosophy of Money (which we have already discussed 

in relation to the debate over modern capitalism). Both Dilthey and Simmel 

were drawn to certain ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche who, from a methodological 

point of view, can be regarded as something of a ‘wild card’. His 

thinking injected creativity and instability into the force field. Carl Menger, 

who we have already encountered, offered Weber the heuristic option of 

modelling the complexity of social reality. Lastly, the Baden epistemologists, 

Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, attempted to impose their own 

philosophical order on the field. They stood in the Kantian tradition that the 

flux of reality had to be tamed through the imposition of categories, classifications 

and judgements. This, to repeat, is schematic in presentation, and 

one has to remember that the German tradition was rooted in a very keen 

sense of the history of philosophy, including classical Greek philosophers 

and schools. Weber can at times be quite disconcerting, plucking ideas or 

concepts unreferenced (because he expected his readers to know the reference) 

from both the history of philosophy and his own contemporaries.


Wilhelm Dilthey 

Dilthey is the most intriguing influence. He is mentioned least by Weber, he 

is usually presented in opposition to Weber, yet PESC is the most ‘Diltheyan’ 

of all Weber’s works. Anyone who doubts Dilthey’s pervasive influence 

need only consult a glossary of his terms in order to realize their take-up in 

writers such as Max Weber: ‘Bedeutsamkeit’, ‘Bedeutung’, ‘Erfahrung’, ‘Erklärung’, 

‘Erlebnis’, ‘Geist’, ‘Geisteswissenschaften’, ‘Gemeingefühl’, ‘Handlung’, 

‘Herrschaft’, ‘Kausalzusammenhang’, ‘Kulturwissenschaften’, ‘Leben’, 

‘Lebenseinheit’, ‘Lebensführung’, ‘Lebensgefühl’, ‘nachfühlen’, ‘psychophysische’, 

‘Sinn’, ‘Sittlichkeit’, ‘Stellung’, ‘Trieb’, ‘Urteil’, ‘Verhaltung’, ‘Verstand’, 

‘Verstehen’, ‘Weltbild’, ‘Wirklichkeit’, ‘Zusammenhang’, ‘Zweck’. 4 

Many of these words are simply common German words. ‘Verstehen’ is the 

verb ‘to understand’. But it is the use to which Dilthey puts them that marks 

them out as part of his conceptual vocabulary. They are all used, often in a 

reconceptualized form, by Weber. Translating the above list of terms, it will be 

seen that many of them are everyday terms: ‘Significance’, ‘meaning’, ‘experience’, 

explanation’, ‘lived experience’, ‘spirit’ or ‘mental life’, ‘the sciences 

of mental life’, ‘feelings held in common’, ‘action’, ‘power over somebody’, 

‘causal nexus’, ‘life’, ‘the individual as an entity’, ‘conduct of life’, ‘feeling 

of life’, ‘to re-experience feeling’, ‘psychophysical’, ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’, 

‘ethical life’, ‘attitude’, ‘drive’, ‘judgement’, ‘behaviour’, ‘comprehension’, 

‘understanding’, ‘worldview’, ‘reality’, in the sense of what (the social scientist) 

wishes to designate as real, ‘an interrelated context’, ‘purpose’. Most of 

these words belong to the language of life, and their usage by both Dilthey 

and Weber demonstrates that a social or cultural science will operate with 

words that are commonly used by people themselves. Unfortunately, it is not 

quite that simple, because their use within science involves treating them as 

concepts with fairly precise definitions, and procedures have to be followed 

within research in order to ensure accuracy and truthfulness. The language 

of life confers its own relevance on study, but the social and cultural science 

has its own ways of proceeding. 

Dilthey (1833–1911) belonged to the generation before Max Weber’s. 

In fact, he was a friend of Weber’s father in Berlin in the 1860s. The young 

Max Weber visited Dilthey as a sixteen-year-old during a walking tour in 

Bohemia. In his letters home from the walking tour, he treats Dilthey with 

some familiarity. 5 In the 1860s, Dilthey worked as a journalist before establishing 

himself in an academic position and, as a philosopher, he still 

continued writing articles for newspapers on a huge range of topics: culture, 

literature, science, politics, religion. He was a voracious reader and followed 

developments in both humanities and natural sciences. These last two terms 

are common to the Anglophone world. Dilthey argued for a cultural science 

alongside natural science. Both would be sciences, and the German 

word ‘Wissenschaft’ allows this latitude as well as indicating that science 

was also knowledge and learning. ‘Humanities’ in the Anglophone sense 

would remain for literary and cultural studies, but a science of culture or


of human and mental life he termed ‘Geisteswissenschaft’. This, as befitting 

a science, would be as systematic, objective, reliable and truth establishing 

as the natural sciences; however, the cultural and natural sciences each had 

their own subject material and would therefore pursue their broadly similar 

goals through different routes and methods. The subject material of the 

natural sciences was matter, whereas in the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’, what 

was studied was the expression (in language, text, artefact and art) of human 

mental life. ‘These are only accessible to understanding and require 

interpretation.’ 6 Dilthey was the first person to establish a rigorous set of 

criteria for distinguishing between the natural and the cultural sciences and 

their respective approaches. Simmel, Weber, Windelband and Rickert all 

followed his lead in making this distinction, even though they introduced 

qualifications, amendments and objections of their own. When Max Weber 

speaks, successively, of a cultural science, a social science and a sociology, it 

was Dilthey who provided the gateway into a scientific approach that placed 

meaning and cultural significance at the heart of the enterprise. 

While understanding and interpretation may be thought of as normal 

words and everyday accomplishments, Dilthey specified their operation 

within the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’. Central to the cultural sciences is the 

interpretation of meaning. Human activity has the capability of communicating 

meaning. The method of comprehending these meanings is hermeneutics. 

Dilthey saw this as a rigorous and difficult accomplishment, as equal 

to corresponding activity in the natural sciences. Writing at the end of the 

nineteenth century, he keenly appreciated the advances that had been made 

in philology, law, history and theology from the start of that century. In 

theology, close textual analysis of the Bible in its various original languages 

(Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Latin) had identified the history of its compilation 

– that the first five books of the Old Testament were not the oldest 

parts as the Genesis story would imply, and that, from the literary styles of 

the New Testament gospels, much could be learnt about their authors and 

their intentions. While for the believer the Bible was the word of his or her 

God, for biblical scholars, the historicity of its origins could be established. 

In history and law, the study of historical documents, records and inscriptions 

allowed the actual history of, say, ancient Rome to be ascertained in 

place of literary treatments of a mythical past and romantic ruins. Likewise, 

the history of the German language could be traced from its earliest appearances, 

a scholarly exercise that was crucial to an emergent sense of a German 

cultural heritage. These achievements for Dilthey rivalled those in natural 

science which had emancipated itself from medieval theories of substances 

and essences, from alchemy and from religion. 

In his Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey writes with as much 

confidence as a Comte or Durkheim. 

The sciences which take socio-historical reality as their subject matter 

are seeking, more intensively than ever before, their systematic relations


to one another and to their foundation. Conditions within the positive 

sciences are working in this direction together with powerful forces 

stemming from the upheavals in society since the French revolution. A 

knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have reproduced 

its upheavals, and of society’s resources for promoting healthy 

progress has become of vital concern to our civilization. Consequently, 

relative to the natural sciences, the importance of the sciences dealing 

with society is increasing. On the large scale of modern life, a transformation 

of our scientific interests is taking place comparable to that 

which occurred in the small Greek city-states in the fifth and fourth 

centuries B.C . . . 7 

Like Comte and Durkheim, Dilthey insists that the study of history, society 

and culture will be a science. It will be ‘a complex of propositions 1) whose 

elements are concepts that are completely defined, i.e., permanently and 

universally valid within the overall logical system, 2) whose connections are 

well grounded, and 3) in which finally the parts are connected into a whole 

for the purpose of communication.’ In a further comment, Dilthey wrote: 

‘Thus, all philosophy of science is governed by the concept of scientific certainty 

in its various forms, such as the conviction of reality in perceptions, 

evidence in reasoning, and the consciousness of necessity in accordance with 

the principle of sufficient reason in knowledge.’ 8 

Unlike Comte or J.S. Mill, whose works Dilthey had studied closely, the 

sciences of society, culture and history – the human sciences (‘Geisteswissenschaften’) 

will not be based on ‘a definition of knowledge which arises from 

a predominant concern with the natural sciences . . .’. It is because of this 

mistaken identification of social with natural science – an ‘arbitrary concept 

of knowledge’ says Dilthey, ‘some have shortsightedly and presumptuously 

denied the status of science to the writing of history as it has been practiced 

by great masters . . .’. 9 

The human sciences are faced with difficulties of their own, but this 

should not be used to deny their scientific approach and ambitions. History, 

social science, sociology, the study of culture, the moral sciences – these all 

have in common a concern ‘with the facts of the human spirit’ (‘geistigen 

Lebens’). A science of this spirit (‘Geist’) has ‘the advantage of appropriately 

characterizing the central sphere of facts in terms of which the unity of these 

disciplines was actually perceived, their scope outlined, and their demarcation 

from the natural sciences established, no matter how imperfectly’. This 

unity resides in ‘human self-consciousness’. 

Dilthey’s programme will establish how ‘human self-consciousness’ may 

be scientifically studied, how this will be constitutionally different from the 

natural sciences, and how this study undergirds the unity of the human sciences. 

The quality of human self-consciousness Dilthey refers to as ‘geistlich’. 

This is the same word that Max Weber used in the title of PESC – Die protestantische 

Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus. Weber placed ‘Geist’ in


inverted commas, and we have seen that this could have been a direct reference 

and distancing from Sombart’s use of the same phrase. Equally though, 

we come to the issue of how the facts of human self-consciousness can be 

studied, which is the challenge Dilthey sets out to answer. ‘Spirit’ as a translation 

misleads. What Dilthey is trying to grasp by scientific means can be 

termed, alongside human self-consciousness, a quality of mental life, or the 

psychological medium of cultural communication between individuals. We 

can intuitively understand what Weber is conveying in his term the ‘spirit of 

capitalism’. It is a specific type of human self-consciousness shared through 

the medium of religious practice by a large number of people. Dilthey’s task 

is to demonstrate how there can be a robust science of what is intuitively 

obvious to us as social and cultural beings – something Weber presumes (on 

the basis of Dilthey I will argue) rather than explains. 

Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences has the sense of a pioneering 

work. There have been advances in both the natural sciences and the 

humanities, and his chosen task is to place a science of mental life on firm 

foundations. Initially, he circles around his task, pointing out the difficulties 

that are peculiar to studying human and social life. The individual is able 

to reflect on his or her own experience, yet is also aware that the facticity 

of that existence is tied to a biological body with its own demands and 

constraints. Psychological reflection, what Dilthey terms the ‘psychic’, cannot 

be separate from the body: there is a ‘psychophysical unity of human 

nature’. 10 ‘Psychophysical’ was the term Weber also used, realizing that the 

study of meaning could always be overshadowed by the determination of the 

physiological. 11 Dilthey continues to the capability of the individual to have 

‘sovereignty of the will, a responsibility of actions’ that distinguishes him 

from the rest of nature. ‘He exists in nature as a realm within a realm . . .’. 

‘Thus from the realm of nature he distinguishes a realm of history, in which, 

amidst the objective necessity of nature, freedom is manifested at countless 

points. In contrast to the mechanical course of natural change which at the 

outset already contains everything that follows from it, acts of will exert 

force and involve sacrifices, whose meaning is evident to the individual in his 

experience and which actually produce something.’ 12 In Weber’s essay on the 

logic of the cultural sciences, he took up the same theme that the individual 

person is both an agent of his or her own destiny as well as being controlled 

by both natural and social processes. 13 

Dilthey raises the difficult issue that people are evaluating, opining and 

judging creatures. His solution here is to offer a threefold analytical differentiation. 

There can be a science of cultural life and history that is concerned 

at one level with facts, at another with theories and at a third level the 

judgments people make. ‘The human sciences consist of these three classes 

of statements: facts, theorems, value judgements and rules.’ 14 This is recognizably 

the same as Weber’s later distinction between the empirical, the 

ideal typical and value judgements in his essays on ‘objectivity’ and value 

freedom.


Dilthey’s concentration on ‘spirit’ and ‘Geist’ should not be confused 

with the ‘spirit of the people’ (‘Volksgeist’). This quite major part of German 

nineteenth-century thinking is quickly dispatched to the trash can. The 

events and outcomes of a people or nation can come to possess a common 

genealogy – Dilthey has no objection to that (and nor I think should we). 

There can be no commonality based on ‘somatic constancy’ (what we today 

would term gene pool); instead, ‘historical and spiritual physiognomy creates 

ever more refined differences in all the various spheres of the life of a 

people’. In our terms, the contingency of history and the agency of decision 

supervene over any primordial nation. Dilthey is harsh in his criticisms of 

those attempts to appropriate the concept of ‘Geist’ into a romantic, essential 

spirit. ‘The individual unity of life in a people that is manifested in 

the affinity of all its life expressions, such as its law, language, and religion, 

is mystically expressed in terms such as Volksseele, Nation, Volksgeist, and 

Organismus. But these concepts are no more usable in history than is the 

concept of life-force in physiology.’ 15 

Dilthey also eliminates approaches which for him cannot succeed with his 

chosen subject of study. In considering the psychic dimension of human life, 

a descriptive psychology is allowed, but an explanatory psychology based 

on the assumption that the individual is some mechanical unit about which 

assumptions are based and conclusions drawn about human nature is dismissed. 

16 This point needs registering in light of subsequent critical attacks 

on Dilthey for his ‘psychologism’. The ambitious scientific systems of Comte 

and J.S. Mill are rejected. ‘In the spirit of eighteenth-century French philosophy, 

Comte’s sociology subordinated the historical world to the system 

of the natural sciences. Mill retained and defended the idea that at least the 

method of studying the facts of the human world should be subordinated 

to the methods of the natural sciences.’ ‘In Comte’s view, the study of the 

human mind is dependent on the science of biology, and the uniformity that 

can be detected in a succession of mental states is the effect of uniformities 

of bodily states. Thus he denies that lawful relations between psychic 

states [Dilthey’s project] can be studied.’ 17 Dilthey dismisses Comte for the 

presumption that the whole of social reality was amenable to the science of 

sociology – a critique later expounded by Karl Popper under the pejorative 

term of ‘holism’. 18 Both Mill and Comte are taken to task for their misuse of 

natural scientific methods. 

Especially in Mill do we hear the monotonous and tedious clatter of the 

words ‘induction’ and ‘deduction’ which now resounds around us from 

all neighbouring countries. The entire history of the human sciences 

stands as a refutation of the idea of such an accommodation. These sciences 

have a wholly different foundation and structure than the natural 

sciences. Their subject matter is composed of unities that are given rather 

than inferred – units that are understandable from within. 19


This is not the place to enlarge on Dilthey’s quite expansive critique of 

Comtean positivism. It was a line followed by Weber who, in referring to 

positivist sociology, would usually have Comte in mind, whose mistake, for 

Weber, was on the basis of a deductive science to derive laws of society from 

which individual behaviour would be inferred. In his later comparative studies, 

Weber did, however, absorb some of J.S. Mill’s methodology. Whatever 

their faults, it should be noted that both Comte and Mill offered the largest 

and most coherent account of a positivist scientific account of society, culture 

and history. In dismissing them, Dilthey signals his own ambitious plans 

for a unified science of cultural and human sciences, and Dilthey’s writings 

here far outstrip any of his contemporaries. 

So, how does a science proceed from an understanding ‘from within’? An 

object of study is created in the human sciences in one or other of two ways: 

‘either when a purpose grounded in some aspect of human nature – which 

for that reason is enduring – relates psychic acts in different individuals to 

join them into a purposive whole (“Zweckzusammenhang”)’. This, says 

Dilthey, creates a cultural pattern within society. Or ‘when enduring causes 

bind the wills of many into a single whole, whether these causes be rooted in 

the natural articulation of social life or in the purposes which drive human 

nature’. This latter option creates the ‘external organization’ of life ‘which 

man has created for himself. The latter consists of states, associations . . .’. 

Dilthey continues that, when the enduring volitional bonds between individuals 

are probed, this brings us to the various forms of association of society 

– the basic relations of power, dependence, property and community. 20 

This is fairly dense writing and it needs to be ‘unpacked’ somewhat. The 

two options, the either/or, both produce what Dilthey terms a ‘Zusammenhang’. 

Dilthey’s translator renders this as ‘system’, but this goes too far. Both 

options create an interconnected entity made up of the purposive activities 

of individuals. Dilthey says, at one level, this produces a cultural entity (or 

‘system’) and, at a level external to the individual, a state and the forms of 

society. 

Later in his exposition, Dilthey makes clear that the distinction between 

the external level of institutions such as the state, law or ethics as an external 

‘system’ enforcing, for example, conscience within the behaviour of individuals, 

and the more associational and immediate linkages between individuals, 

which he designates as cultural life, is not an absolute one. In the sphere of 

ethics, individuals act from their own ethical volition as well as reacting to 

the force of ethical injunctions. In one form, ethics ‘appears as a living force 

of motivation, in the other as the force that responds from without’, approving 

and disapproving of the behaviour of individuals. ‘In this twofold form, 

ethical consciousness permeates the overall life of society in an infinitely 

complex play of impulses and reactions.’ 21 Law is also characterized by the 

same twofold form. In customs, common law and feelings such as the sense 

of justice, it is a cultural form of the psychic–cultural life. When codified or


‘ “objectified and compressed in the smallest possible form, i.e., the shape 

of legal constructs” ’ (here, Dilthey is quoting the legal theorist Jhering), it 

is like the state and represents an organization external to the individual. 22 

And even that state itself has limits. ‘The volitional relation of power and 

dependence is limited by the sphere of external freedom’ just as ‘the relationship 

of community is limited by the sphere in which an individual exists 

for himself ’. 23 

Individuals, in interrelating their mental behaviour in a purposive way, 

create culture, society and state. This can be taken as a protosociology of 

social action – a forerunner of what Weber constructed more systematically. 

But Dilthey refuses to call his analysis sociology. That, for him, meant either 

organicist accounts such as Shäffle’s and von Mohl’s or positivist schemas 

such as Comte’s. Dilthey’s ambition is to construct the mentalist (‘geistlich’) 

basis for all the human sciences: anthropology, economics, psychology, law, 

ethics, politics, sociology, etc. 

Dilthey has more to say about purposive behaviour and its formation 

of interconnected entities (‘Zusammenhänge’). This can be represented 

as propositions, ‘but propositions of very diverse kinds. Depending on 

whether the psychic elements connected in the purposive system belong predominantly 

to thought, to feeling, or to will, we must differentiate between 

truths, expressions of feelings, and rules respectively.’ 24 Purposive behaviour, 

therefore, comprises thought or intentional action, feelings or some 

sort of emotional action, and will or what an individual wants. This remains 

some distance away from what Weber was to develop into a theory of social 

action, and it is probably wrong to force this connection at this juncture. 

The substratum, though, of Dilthey’s claim to create a human science is 

that (1) individuals are volitional and purposeful, (2) this covers a range of 

behaviour including the rational, affectual and evaluative, and (3) the ways 

in which the volitional behaviour of individuals combines in ‘systems’ or 

(sociological) entities gives us culture, the forms of society and the external 

organization of the state. 

Dilthey provides the reader with an interesting illustration of his approach. 

Theories can be generated from ‘systems’ or entities. Within a 

‘system’ or set of purposive psychical or pyschophysical elements, certain 

dependencies can be generated. Individuals can express religious feelings as 

purposeful activity, for example through the feelings generated by congregational 

worship, and these can exist in a dependency relation to religious 

dogma and their worldviews. Dilthey refers to the work of Schleiermacher at 

this point as an exemplar of such a theory. 25 Dilthey does not offer complete 

clarity as to what he is saying here, but it is not impossible to read in this a 

methodological justification of Weber’s PESC. A dependency relation exists 

between the religious (predestinarian) feelings of Puritans, on the one side, 

and the conduct of life, on the other. Dependency relationships, which for 

Weber become causal relationships, can be adduced from the interactions of 

individuals (socially groupable) at the psychic or psychological level.


One would not single out Dilthey’s account of psychophysical life as the 

clearest statement of a theory of social action, which Weber was to achieve 

with a far tighter focus. But the two accounts of human action indicate that 

Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences was a not incompatible starting 

point for Weber’s own deliberations. Also Dilthey, in his Introduction, 

established the key principle that its ‘logic’ was to be built on the propositional 

statements of individuals in their lives. Social and cultural scientists 

should take statements such as ‘I want such and such’, ‘what I feel is such and 

such’, ‘I accept the prince’s authority as absolute’, ‘I judge this person in such 

a way’ as their datum. These are the statements that the social or cultural 

scientist will use in their relational interdependence to construct purposeful 

edifices of sociopsychic life. It is Dilthey who insists that a future science of 

mental life will work with the language of life. 

Hermeneutics 

In the last chapter, the question was raised about whether Weber’s interpretation 

of predestinarian doctrines and everyday practices could be accepted. 

Was he correct and how would we adjudicate this? Dilthey is the author who 

has most to offer on the subject. Dilthey’s starting point here is the interpretation 

of texts, and his inspiration was the advances made by historians, 

theologians and philologists in their interpretation of historical documents, 

sacred texts and ancient languages. In these situations, the meaning has to be 

deciphered and thought about, and it is in these non-transparent situations 

that Dilthey worked out the rules or methods of interpretation. 

It is important to grasp the thrust and impetus of this background that had 

developed spectacularly over the nineteenth century. Hermeneutics enabled 

classical historians such as Niehbuhr to assemble the first reliable account of 

the history of Rome. It enabled theologians and philologists to work on the 

historical stages of the composition of the different books of the Bible and 

to distinguish between apocryphal and traditional religious texts. In philosophy, 

the writings of Plato were placed within the context and traditions 

of Greeks schools of thought and the practice of learning and disquisition. 

In philology, the genealogical history of languages was being established. 

Documents, inscriptions, texts all provided the source material for gaining 

a scientifically reliable way of establishing ‘what really happened’, to use 

the historian Ranke’s famous phrase. And what really happened was pieced 

together by correctly extracting the information contained in the various 

forms of historical evidence. This procedure was taught and transmitted in 

the university seminar. The professor had mastered the sources of evidence 

in his field, and his students had to demonstrate their own competence (or 

incompetence) in their interpretation of historical (primary) sources. Weber 

himself was a product of this system, which had come to define the university 

during the nineteenth century. He worked with historical law documents 

with Frensdorff and other legal scholars at the University of Göttingen. 26


To an extent, it was a tradition and procedure that Weber could well have 

taken for granted in his own writings. It was a technique and discipline that 

had to be mastered as part of an academic’s training, rather than standing 

for a methodological novelty (now designated as working with ‘primary 

sources’). 

Dilthey took what many practitioners would regard as a necessary skill 

and made it into a component of his philosophical approach to the human 

sciences. He makes the point that, just as the natural scientist has the experimental 

method as a way of establishing truth, so the human sciences have 

hermeneutics as the art of interpretation. If this statement is read through 

the lenses of Heidegger, Gadamer and Derrida, who have come to characterize 

the hermeneutical operation over the twentieth century, an opposition 

between science and art will be assumed. Science is concerned with exact 

certainty, whereas in the humanities, everything is subject to interpretation, 

and the meaning inferred will be highly dependent upon the interpreter’s 

own situation. Dilthey’s own writings can be pulled in the direction of the 

arbitrariness of viewer (as opposed to the object studied for its meaning), 

and this relates to one of the weaker flanks of Dilthey’s position (which we 

will consider shortly). But the opposition between science and art is not 

Dilthey’s point. Science and art are equivalents in the search for truth. The 

German word for art, ‘Kunst’, denotes not only art in the aesthetic sense 

but also art in the sense of skill, as in ‘artistry’. The art of interpretation has 

been developed to ‘crack open’ documents and all expressions of the human 

spirit that had remained indecipherable, misunderstood or have received 

mistaken readings. Such procedures do not eliminate all ambiguities, and 

major debates are sometimes required before contradictory interpretations 

are resolved. But the whole tenor and practice of hermeneutics was to establish 

certainty of meaning. It is a standard that most professional historians 

still adhere to. 27 

In a lecture to the Prussian Academy of Science in 1896, which was published 

in 1900, Dilthey noted that ‘philology and history rest on the assumption 

that the understanding of the unique can be made objective’. Disciplines 

in the human sciences, such as history, ‘depend for their certainty on the 

possibility of giving general validity to the understanding of the unique’. 28 

Data in the human sciences derive from the expressions and utterances of 

other human beings, and these do not face the investigator, as in the natural 

sciences as an insensate reality, but can be understood from within. The 

‘systematic understanding of recorded expressions we call exegesis or interpretation’. 

‘The art of understanding therefore centres on the interpretation 

of written records of human existence.’ 29 

The art of interpretation has developed just as slowly, gradually and in 

as orderly a way as, for example, the questioning of nature by experiment. 

It originated and survives in the personal, inspired virtuosity of


philologists. Naturally it is mainly transmitted through personal contact 

with the great masters of interpretation of their work. But every skill 

also proceeds according to rules which teach us to overcome difficulties 

and embody what can be transmitted of a personal skill. So the 

art of interpretation gives rise to the formulation of rules. The conflict 

between such rules and the struggle between different schools about the 

interpretation of vital works produces a need to justify the rules and this 

gives rise hermeneutics, which is the methodology of the interpretation 

of written records. 30 

At a technical level, these rules involve what today is called triangulation 

(see above p. 67) – a number of methods are used in combination to 

pin down the exact place and meaning of, say, a text. Hermeneutics can be 

seen ‘as an edifice of rules – the parts of which – the individual rules – were 

held together by the aim to achieve a valid interpretation. It had separated 

the functions which combine in this process into grammatical, historical, 

aesthetic-rhetorical and factual exegesis. From the philological virtuosity of 

many centuries it had crystallized the rules according to which these must 

function.’ 31 By grammar, Dilthey means a given language – its syntax, vocabulary 

and range of meanings have to be learnt. The first recognizably 

modern theorist of hermeneutics, Schleiermacher, argued that this occurred 

through an iterative process of relating a part of a text to the whole – of a 

word within a sentence, an expression within a language. Only by going 

backwards and forwards between part and whole can a language and, therefore, 

the meaning of a word or text be established. The historical meant that 

the historical origins of a text have to be established. A book might come 

down to us as a seemingly unified entity, but historical analysis can reveal 

it to be a composite of texts from different periods and pens. Texts convey 

their meaning, as communication, through the use of imagery, tropes and 

rhetorical devices. Aristotle was the first analyst to provide an inventory of 

rhetorical devices. These have to be recognized and, to an extent, put on one 

side in order to study the factual or substantive level of the text. 

In the development of hermeneutics over centuries (from the second and 

third centuries bc), there is, says Dilthey, a history of wrong-headed interpretation, 

of what Dilthey refers to as ‘allegorical’ interpretation. Allegory is 

used as a way of avoiding the truth of what is stated or written down. Veracity 

is abandoned, often in the face of religious, political and other subversive 

pressures, in favour of interpretivist accounts. In Christianity, the New 

Testament is seen as following on from the Old Testament. In particular, the 

prophecies scattered over the Old Testament have to be made to conform 

–when clearly many of these do not – to Jesus Christ as the foretold messiah. 

Historical theological scholarship points to the lack of fit, when the text is 

read for what it actually says; the imperatives of revelatory belief mean that 

these inconsistencies have to be explained away through fanciful allegories.


This, for Dilthey, would be an interpretation of meaning but not hermeneutics. 

Another and more relevant example concerns the Christian Reformation. 

In the face of Jean Calvin’s interpretation of the sacred texts, which 

also at points explained the rules of interpretation, the Catholic Church 

asserted that the scriptures were ‘obscure’ and had to be interpreted through 

Catholic traditional doctrine. The Lutheran theologian Flacius understood 

the need to demonstrate that the scriptures could be interpreted correctly 

and, in doing this, ‘he became conscious of [new] methods and rules which 

earlier hermeneutics had not elicited’. ‘It was Flacius who was also the first 

to grasp the significance of the psychological or technical principle of interpretation 

according to which an individual passage must be interpreted in 

terms of the aim and composition of the whole work. He was the first to 

use methodically the insights of rhetoric about the inner units of a literary 

product, its composition and effective elements for technical interpretation.’ 

Flacius used the methodical aids of ‘context, aim, proportion and the 

consistency of individual parts or links in determining the definite meaning 

of passages’. 32 Dilthey follows the history of the development of biblical 

hermeneutics through to Schleiermacher at the beginning of the nineteenth 

century. Schleiermacher is a pivotal figure for Dilthey, and this is where his 

account stops, but Dilthey could have traced the continuation of Protestant 

historical theology in the figures of Harnack, Ritschl and Troeltsch. Hermeneutics 

had a mission within Protestant theology – of combating tradition 

with the presentation of the truth of the text. This was a trail that led directly 

to Weber’s academic front door. 33 

One section of Dilthey’s thinking can help with our treatment of Max 

Weber in the last chapter. In writing on methodology, there is a tendency towards 

the pedagogic exposition of rules – hence, the rules of hermeneutics. 

With Schleiermacher, Dilthey encountered someone who had not only absorbed 

these rules but, through his inspirational gifts, had gone far beyond 

them. We can refer to this as the virtuoso ‘problem’. When we read Erving 

Goffman, Richard Sennett or Harry Braverman, it is possible to specify their 

methodological procedures but not, however, to account for the extra brilliance 

that suffuses their writings and explanations. There may also be a 

difficulty, as with Weber, that what they say they are doing and what they are 

actually achieving can be (artfully) different. 

Dilthey is adamant that hermeneutics involves more than the specification 

of rules which ‘only produces blind windows through which no one 

can look. An effective hermeneutics could only emerge in a mind which 

combined virtuosity of philological interpretation with genuine philosophic 

capacity. A man with such a mind was Schleiermacher.’ ‘He recognized 

that the imaginative consideration of the creative process through which 

a vital work originates was the basis for appreciating the process by which 

we understand the whole of work from its written signs and from this the 

purpose and mentality of its author.’ Reading a text (or, more widely, reading 

a sociological situation) should at its best involve creativity. ‘Receptivity


and creativity cannot be separated.’ 34 A literary text possesses the creativity 

of the author. 

Such a work meets with the insatiable desire of the reader to supplement 

his own individuality through contemplation of that of others. Understanding 

and interpretation therefore are constantly alive and active in 

life itself, but they are perfected by the systematic interpretation of living 

works and the unity they were given in the author’s mind. This was the 

new conception in the special form it assumed in Schleiermacher. 35 

The last part of this statement says that the researcher has to penetrate the 

writer’s own mind and intentions, and to recreate the vision and outlook of 

the author if the full sense and meaning of the text is to be garnered. In terms 

of social research, an investigator has to give something creatively of his or 

herself in the process of interpretation. The realm of public, social and civic 

life that Sennett brings to life in his Fall of Public Man had to be creatively 

reconstituted. The documents and testimony drawn on by Sennett were not 

ready and waiting in the archives, requiring only presentational display. A 

breath of inspiration, the creativity of the investigator to imagine how it 

might have been, and was, in revolutionary Paris was required. On this basis, 

it is what the student brings creatively to interpretation – in conjunction with 

mastery of methodological rules – that always makes possible the next masterpiece. 

In Weber’s case, penetrating the mindset of the seventeenth-century 

Puritan and bringing it alive to the twentieth-century reader would fulfil the 

full creative potential of hermeneutics for Dilthey (although it should be 

added that we do not know what he thought of Weber’s masterpiece). 

There is a case for stopping the methodological exposition at this point. 

There are rules, and those who can go beyond them (without egregiously 

breaking them) fall into the master class. Methodology cannot legislate for 

this extra brilliance; all it has to do is allow it to happen. To an extent, 

Dilthey himself rests the argument at this point. For him, what is important 

is that a linkage is made between a past or objectivated expression of human 

consciousness and the self-awareness of the researcher in his or her world. 

Understanding is a living process, where one person creatively relives the 

outlook and expression of another era (‘nacherleben’) through a process of 

ascribing. Ascetic (English) Protestantism was not an academic construction 

for Weber in c. 1900, it was a significant part of his own self-conception, 

indeed, if not an ideal that he would have preferred more of his fellow 

countrymen to have experienced. 36 It is on this basis that Weber was able 

to bring his Puritan character to life on the academic stage. These creative 

academic works add to the canon of a society or civilization’s own heritage, 

self-awareness and educative potential. This is the completion of the hermeneutical 

task for Dilthey. 

But Dilthey does not allow this creative ‘loose end’ to remain unsecured.


He wants to tie it into a complete philosophy. His argumentation here displays 

vulnerabilities, which will be quickly sketched before moving on to 

some of Dilthey’s more academicist critics (with whom Weber is more usually 

aligned). 

Schleiermacher had expanded the rules of interpretation (more accurately 

‘explication’/‘Auslegung’) to include the psychological motivation of 

an author and his place in historical context; this involved a creative act of 

understanding. 37 This, for Dilthey, is an act of artistic fusion. ‘The concepts 

which guided him [Schleiermacher] in his brilliant works on Greek poetry, 

Goethe and Boccaccio were: the inner form of the work, the development of 

the author and the articulated whole of literature.’ Schleiermacher ‘rejected 

the division of the exegetic process into grammatical, historical aesthetic 

and factual interpretation’, for this has to be combined with psychological 

interpretation that penetrates the inner creative process. 38 In philosophical 

terms, Dilthey terms this, with critical intention, transcendental idealism: 

that the creative act itself gives one access to the mental expressions of any 

other human being and time. And underlying this assumption is the further 

opinion that human beings as natural beings have access to an understanding 

of nature, and that the world of spirit and that of matter are not necessarily 

apart. This philosophical doctrine owed more to poetic influences such as 

Goethe than it did to philosophy proper. Dilthey knew this and set about 

reworking the philosophical basis of what may be termed transcendental 

understanding. This becomes a validity question: how can we know that 

we have this ability to reach across from our own world to penetrate the 

outlook of another era or social world? 

This is a question that is more strictly formulated in the philosophy of 

Locke and Kant respectively. In the English tradition of Locke and Hume, 

what our minds know of external reality remains a philosophical mystery, 

simply because our minds are separate and different from reality ‘out there’. 

We obviously receive sensations from reality, but our thoughts and ideas can 

only be said to be fading reflections of sensations which, by their nature, are 

only momentary. I leave the seminar room to allow my students to discuss 

the topic, but how do I really know they are still in the seminar room when 

I have shut the door? All I have is the fading impression of what I, in the 

seminar room, immediately knew. This is philosophical scepticism. Dilthey 

is pretty scathing about this approach because it conceives reality ‘out there’ 

in physicalist terms. Reality is also, for Dilthey, the life of the mind, so why 

reduce it to pale and wan impressions of sensate data? This is no way to 

think about ideas, culture and all the expressions of the mental capacity of 

human beings. Immanuel Kant attempted to secure the faculty of reason in 

the human mind in the face of the rather depressing implications of Humean 

scepticism. Reason gives us the ability to think rationally and to act morally, 

and the mind also has the capacity of aesthetic appreciation and ennoblement. 

Kant argued that, although we only apprehend the appearances of 

a reality ‘out there’, we – everyone – do have root mental capacities that


allow us to order that reality in terms of fundamentals such as the passing 

of time, spatial awareness, causality. These properties of mind Kant termed 

transcendental categories. Overall, it needs to be noted that these problems 

are designated, both now and by Weber and his contemporaries, as dualism; 

there is the perceptual world of the human being and there is a world of 

external reality. Weber’s friend, the philosopher Emil Lask, referred to this 

as an unbridgeable gulf – a ‘hiatus irrationalis’, and Weber agreed with this 

stance. 

Dilthey is dismissive of philosophic dualism. In the Preface to his Introduction 

to the Human Sciences, he notes: 

Although I found myself frequently in agreement with the epistemological 

(‘erkenntnistheoretischen’) school of Locke, Hume, and Kant I 

nevertheless found it necessary to conceive differently the nexus of facts 

of consciousness . . . No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing 

subject constructed by Locke, Hume and Kant, but rather the diluted 

extract of reason as a mere activity of thought. A historical as well as 

psychological approach to whole human beings led me to explain even 

knowledge and its concepts (such as the external world, time, substance, 

and cause) in terms of the manifold powers of a being that will, feels, 

and thinks. 39 

Dilthey’s solution is to lay aside transcendental categories in favour of 

categories of life. Instead of making the Kantian assumption of transcendental 

categories, Dilthey holds that these categories are part of our existence 

as human beings. We all experience time, its passing and its duration and 

sense of present and future, we are all in our lives exercising our capacity to 

understand and make sense and meaning of the world in both its parts and 

whole, and we all make positive and negative valuations of the world around 

us. 40 This is ingenious and it added considerably to the methodological field, 

where other attempts – most notably phenomenology and pragmatism – were 

being undertaken not to solve the dualism problem but to go around it and 

render it irrelevant. In this light, Dilthey may be referred to as post-Kantian. 

Weber, in his explicit epistemological (‘erkenntnistheoretische’) writings, 

remained locked into the dualism problematic, although as I have suggested 

in the previous chapters, PESC should be regarded as his most hermeneutical 

work. 

Dilthey wanted to push philosophical thinking into the language and experience 

of life itself. 

I will relate every component of contemporary abstract scientific thought 

to the whole of human nature as it is revealed in experience, in the study 

of language, and in the study of history, and thus seek the connection of 

these components. The result is that the most important components of 

our picture and knowledge of reality – our own personality as a living


entity, the external world, other individuals, their temporal life and their 

interactions (‘Wechselwirkung’) – can be explained in terms of this totality 

of human nature. 41 

This was a prefatory statement, one of ambition rather than its realization, 

so we cannot adequately assess Dilthey’s success in this enterprise (which he 

never completed, leaving as he did many unfinished manuscripts). 42 Nevertheless, 

we can glimpse how the enterprise could founder: by collapsing the 

issue of the categories of knowing into an insufficiently distinctive conception 

of ‘life itself ’. Such a judgement cannot be made here, and it would be 

contingent on an assessment of how Dilthey handled the relation of the parts 

of the world to its whole. 

The neo-Kantians 

The neo-Kantians, Windelband and Rickert, colleagues of Weber at the universities 

of Freiburg and Heidelberg, are Kantian in the following respects. 

Scientific work has to proceed through the construction of concepts in order 

to perceive and make sense of reality, and a philosophy of knowledge has to 

be used to impose some sort of ordering of scientific work in the cultural and 

historical sciences. In Rickert’s hands, a highly detailed ‘logical’ account is 

given of how the investigator relates to the subject being researched and how 

the dualistic split between concept and reality is to be handled, so preserving 

the scientific validity of work in the human and cultural sciences. Rickert was 

critical of the efforts of Dilthey, regarding his underpinning of the validity of 

knowledge as ‘ontological’, i.e. the categories of life. Rickert advocated quite 

prescriptive procedures for ensuring the validity of scientific knowledge in 

the cultural and historical field. This is the sense in which Rickert is termed 

a neo-Kantian – the abiding concern is how to secure the grounds on which 

scientific claims for knowledge can be made, once the duality and scepticism 

of the observer–world split are admitted. Dilthey, as we have seen, was quite 

aware of this issue but chose to treat it as, in large part, solved by academic 

work using the methods of hermeneutics and as, ultimately, a condition of 

human existence, whereas Rickert turned to logical or formal solutions. 

Quite an amount of tension sprang up between the Rickert and Dilthey 

approaches, but it is important to recall that they had a common enemy 

in the positivistic conception of natural science. Scientific advances in evolutionary 

biology, embryology and cellular research, electromagnetism, 

entropy in physics, the bacterial origins of diseases, and the support given 

by the Prussian Ministry of Education to research institutes and professorial 

chairs in the natural sciences had placed the humanities on the back 

foot. The balance of influence and prestige was moving from the seminar 

to the laboratory and, unless a claim for the scientificness of historical and 

cultural disciplines could be advanced, their standing within the university 

system and as a cultural force within society would be diminished. Another


Comtean moment had been reached. The genius of the young Comte in 

his Discourse on Positivist Philosophy (1822) had provided a conspectus of 

recent scientific advances and had perceived the shift from ‘Aristotelian’ substances 

and teleology to a proper understanding of causation in the physical 

world; for Comte, this was the move from the metaphysical to the positivist 

conception of knowledge, and the new science of society, sociology, would 

model itself on the same scientific principles. 

In Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, the Comtean moment 

appeared in the guise of scientific monism. The dualistic notions that there 

exist scientific theories and hypotheses, on the one side, and the ultimately 

unknowable world of brute reality, on the other, were being swept aside by 

scientific discoveries and a rapid progress, which suggested to some that 

all that was needed was the laboratory, technology, experiments and the 

gathering and analysis of facts and the laws of the natural world would be 

revealed. Regularities of law-like certainty were a feature of physical reality. 

It was not brute, chaotic or unknowingly noumenal; properly addressed, it 

revealed its secrets. Furthermore, the psychophysical human being could best 

be explained through its natural properties. The human being was a product 

of biology, of cellular embryology, and consciousness through experimental 

methods would be shown to operate in terms of stimulus and response. A 

scientific psychology started by Fechner and Wundt would demonstrate how 

thinking and feeling were constituted and produced in the psychophysical 

organism. 43 The human being possessing the sovereign faculties of reason 

– Kant’s postulate – could be dispensed with. The autonomy of will – thinking, 

feeling, wanting, valuing – was to become subsidiary to causal determination. 

A monistic conception of science held that the human being was 

reducible to the rest of physical reality, which, when approached with the 

instruments of natural science, would reveal its laws and mechanisms. While 

Dilthey’s ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ is now translated (not wholly satisfactorily) 

as ‘human sciences’, there were major efforts around 1900 to create the 

human sciences through a reduction of the human organism to physicalist 

mechanisms. 

Much of Weber’s ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ is taken up with very combative 

refutations of the claims and illusions of a unified science of ‘Natur’ and 

‘Mensch’ on monistic principles. (And, by implication, there is far less writing 

– than we might wish – devoted to practical methodological issues in the 

social, historical and cultural sciences.) Weber attacked the startlingly ambitious 

programme of the evolutionary biologist and chemist, Ernst Haeckel, 

who in his book The Riddle of the Universe saw monism rather in the way 

Comte came to inscribe positivism as a controlling ‘Weltanschauung’ with 

its own priesthood. Karl Lamprecht is vituperatively rubbished for his grandiose 

schema for outlining in his Deutsche Geschichte the laws of succession 

of culture and the determining mentalities of each epoch. Economists 

are attacked for believing that utility maximization will be secured through 

psychological laws of diminishing response to stimuli. The legal theorist


Stammler is demolished for asserting that legal norms are a reflection of 

the materialist laws of society – this was monism though the evolutionary 

Marxism of Engels and Kautsky. In the same vein, the older generation of 

national-economists, Roscher and Knies, are criticized for securing their 

theories to evolutionary entities seen in organic terms, where ‘Volksseele’ 

and ‘Volksgeist’ become real and growing objects. And Ostwald’s championing 

of entropy as the key to a unified science is revealed as an extraordinary 

gambit. 

Weber’s place in the force field of debates on the nature of science should 

be seen as the major antagonist in favour of a culturalist approach and 

against an encroaching monism. All the academic writers discussed so far 

– Schmoller, Sombart, Simmel, Dilthey, Windelband, Rickert – align with 

Weber against a positivizing approach to science. By comparison with this 

major division, the neo-Kantian direction is significant but represents a minor 

divide. 

In opening the neo-Kantian case in 1894, Windelband acknowledges a 

generic point. The cultural and historical sciences have to lay claim to their 

own legitimate place as science in the face of the natural sciences, which 

make that claim by a different route. Windelband makes his, by now famous, 

distinction between idiographic science that focuses down on the singularity 

of phenomena and nomothetic science whose goal is to explain by showing 

the operation of laws and their causal effects. The nature of the object being 

studied determines the particular method of investigation. History, for 

example, studies particular events, personalities and their motivation, and 

the contingency of processes. Explanation tends to reside in the in-depth 

knowledge of these topics. Unlike natural science, the materials studied do 

not offer up striking regularities that can then be formulated as laws. This 

opening has much in common with Dilthey’s own setting out of the issues 

(at roughly the same date – 1893). 

Having made the case for the difference between, but equivalence of, the 

two approaches to science, Windelband had little to contribute on just how 

the idiographic would secure its scientific validity. This was developed by 

Heinrich Rickert in The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science, 

published in 1902. Weber read it in Florence in 1902 while recuperating 

from his illness. He pronounced it as ‘very good’ in a letter to his wife, 

although his subsequent comments were less approving. 44 Hence, we know 

he had read Rickert, also that he took over some of Rickert’s terminology, 

but just how much of Rickert’s solution to the epistemological problems of 

the cultural and historical sciences Weber took over into his own work will 

require consideration below. 

Rickert framed the problem, ‘in what areas the formation of concepts 

of natural science makes sense, and in what areas the sense of that kind of 

concept formation is by necessity lost’. 45 Rickert treated the world of reality 

‘out there’ as being composed of objects that were innumerable. In physics 

today, especially particle physics, this is a reasonable proposition – the idea


that reality can be broken down into ever smaller objects, until they are 

infinitesimally small. Rickert asserts this as a logical proposition that, in the 

dimensions of both time and space, the objects that could be perceived are 

infinite. In this respect, reality cannot be cognized in its complexity. We use 

words to reference objects in this infinitely complex reality, and scientists use 

concepts, which give precise definitions of objects. Again on formal or logical 

grounds, Rickert asserts that, in the natural sciences, concepts can group 

together objects that have common properties. These concepts in their turn 

can be fitted together to arrive at laws describing the regularities of objects. 

Concepts in the natural science, therefore, tend to an ever increasing abstraction 

of reality. In the study of social and historical life, ‘objects’ are 

individual, that is they do not present commonalities that allow them to be 

grouped together under abstract concepts. This presents two classes of concepts: 

those that travel away from reality in the direction of abstraction; and 

those (in the historical sciences) that attach themselves as closely as possible 

to the individuality of the past. Individuality – and this works slightly better 

in its Latin form – should be understood as the individuation, or the dividing 

up, of reality into specific objects. 

So informed, it is now feasible to return to Weber’s usage of the term in 

PESC. Introducing the phrase ‘the spirit of capitalism’, Weber says of it, 

If any object can be found to which this term can be applied with any 

understandable meaning, it can only be an historical individual, i.e. a 

complex of elements associated in historical reality which we unite into 

a conceptual whole from the standpoint of their cultural significance. 

Such an historical concept, however, since it refers in its content to a 

phenomenon significant for its unique individuality, cannot be defined 

according to the formula genus proximum, differentia specifica . . . 

(PESC, p. 47) 

The Latin phrase means that individual specifics can be grouped together 

to produce more general concepts, i.e. the method of increasing abstraction. 

This cannot be done with historical concepts, which have to attach as far 

as possible to the object’s unique reality. Rickert therefore introduces the 

term a ‘science of reality’ (‘Wirklichkeitswissenschaft’) to depict this movement 

towards objects. It is a term that Weber himself deploys in his essay 

on ‘Objectivity’ in the social sciences. Because reality (‘Wirklichkeit’) is not 

subsumable under general concepts and is infinite, in both time and space 

– what Weber refers to as ‘extensive and intensive infiniticy’ 46 – the historian 

is forced to be selective in approaching this infinite multiplicity. 

Selectivity is a fairly open-ended notion. Selection could mean selection 

to your point of view or opinions. This is not what Rickert, or Weber, meant. 

Many histories are written from an opinionated standpoint or with a blatant 

bias that leads to absurd situations. For example, a Catholic historian 

will write a history enumerating Catholic martyrs and their torture in the


Reformation, whereas a Protestant historian will do the same but for Protestant 

martyrs, and no doubt an atheistic historian would argue that religion 

is bad for your health. 

Rickert argues for something far more neutral, what he calls value orientation. 

Human beings are purposive, and they make evaluations of the 

world. Reality, argues Rickert, with regard to history only has meaning for 

the purposive and active human being in so far as it is unique. 47 This line of 

thought is not dissimilar to Dilthey’s recreation of the historical through the 

historian’s own values of life. But Rickert turns what sounds like a practical 

evaluation into what he terms a ‘value relation’ (‘Wertbeziehung’). This 

means it is worthy of interest, although what practical evaluations may be 

drawn is a different matter – one to do with what Weber termed value judgements. 

Both Weber and Rickert insisted on the distinction between value 

relation and value judgement and, without the insistence, the distinction 

easily falls back to a more encompassing ‘point of view’. 

Rickert also argues that what is of interest to the historian must be a reflection 

of what is of general interest to the community of historians and their 

public. This gives a value relation a general validity, and it is not hard to trace 

the Kantian influence here. Kant had argued that practical reason derives validity 

in the applicability of a (moral) rule as being true for all members of a 

community, indeed as universally valid. In a more restricted community – of 

historians – validity is conferred through some sort of consensus, as opposed 

to the possibly idiosyncratic view (value relation) of the lone historian. In 

passing, one cannot help but observe that this would seem to condemn value 

interest to the conformity of the generally accepted, and that innovation in 

historical science could not be generated from what initially might seem to be 

obscure and of no interest. 48 Also, it would seem to beg the question of what 

constitutes value in the first place. The obligation of the historian, writes 

Bruun about Rickert, is ‘always to let his value relations be guided by values 

which are generally (empirically) valid in the “Gemeinschaft” [community] 

for which his account is written . . .’. 49 Empirical validity here means the 

values actually held by a community. Furthermore, these values, insofar as 

they can claim validity, are general values. Each community for which a historian 

writes and, by this, Rickert means Church, state, law, science and arts, 

hold values that are ‘cultural values’. 50 History must therefore be oriented 

to culture. And, because these values are general to each community, they 

have normative force. It is this aspect of selection, a difficulty that applies 

to both natural and historical sciences, that confers empirical validity and so 

objectivity to history. The selection is empirically valid because it is a reflection 

of the relevant values of the normative community of historians. This, it 

should be noted, is not how methods in history would be thought of today. 

Actual methods of interpretation and verification would be emphasized – for 

example, is the document original and to be trusted, what are its origins, 

who or which persons wrote the document and for what purposes, and so 

on? Rickert turns the emphasis around, pinpointing an exercise – that of


selection – that most historians ignore or remain unaware of. But in choosing 

a subject, and bringing certain value questions to bear on it, for Rickert, this 

is to confer an empirical validity on the topic selected. 

This, I think, takes Rickert down an overly prescriptive road incompatible 

with other scientific values of spontaneity, creativity and the ability to 

cause value positions to be changed within a public. Kantian imperatives 

might be considered as a viable system of ethics but, within the sphere of 

science, at the operational level, i.e. choosing what to study, this meeting of 

validity claims involves too much of a sacrifice of the historian’s own individuality. 

The anarchic spirit of Nietzsche – to ask the questions that nobody 

else permits themselves to ask – would be appalled. Rickert was concerned 

to exclude just that sort of arbitrariness in which question, judgement and 

evidence are reduced to an aphorism; however memorable the aphorism 

might be, it could be no substitute for scientific procedure. Rickert would 

also be able to point out that historians in their periodizations and dividing 

up of the historical past into topics, such as legal history, ecclesiastical 

history, economic history, etc., are proceeding in the way he suggests and 

prescribes. But, in following this procedure, it can be noted that Rickert 

clearly separates his procedure from that of Dilthey’s, for whom the movement 

between investigator and objects studied is far more fluid. It allows the 

researcher freedom and creativity to move back into any aspect of historical 

and cultural life, and to reanimate for himself and perhaps to create a new 

audience and field of interest. Rickert’s concern is to place the epistemology 

on a more specified basis. 

In relation to Dilthey’s work, it is worth noting where Rickert himself 

places the stress. He agrees that the division between the science of nature, 

concerning non-meaningful objects, and the science of mental life, which 

concerns meaningful behaviour, can be a common starting point for epistemologists. 

History ‘is primarily concerned with cultural realities that are 

meaningful and mental. For this reason, a representation of this object requires 

a value-relevant, individualizing concept formation. The domain of 

nonmeaningful “nature”, on the other hand – in other words, everything 

whose existence independent of value and meaning – intrinsically conforms 

to a system of general concepts.’ 51 On the basis of ‘the distinction between 

meaningful and nonmeaningful realities’ that forms ‘the real core of Dilthey’s 

theories of the human sciences . . . there can be no question of a fundamental 

opposition between Dilthey’s ideas and those set out here’. What Dilthey 

fails to provide, says Rickert, is a ‘clear conceptual analysis of the essential 

feature of his principle of demarcation’. 52 

Their differences, in Rickert’s hands, are quite subtle though important. 

(And they should not be depicted unsubtly, as many commentators do, 53 as 

an opposition between an expressive, relativistic ‘Lebensphilosophie’ and 

the tight conceptual formulation of Rickert.) Having made the meaningful–non-meaningful 

distinction, Rickert goes on to insist that meaning is 

a non-real and transcendent category. It is not an empirical and objective


category. Only when meaning is ascribed through value relation to a historical 

object does it take on the status of the empirical; otherwise, it is a freefloating 

supposition. The historical individual as a topic, period, personality, 

etc. contains value in itself, asserts Rickert, and the historian is informed by 

his or her own value community. The value relation that connects these two 

is an empirical one, opening the way to establishing questions of objectivity 

and of what is true and false. Values in themselves can claim to be valid (as 

truth, as aesthetic, as moral, etc.) but in themselves are not real. 

Values as such are never real. On the contrary, they hold validly. In other 

words, the values themselves cannot be real, but rather only the things 

(‘Güter’) in which they are ‘realized’ and in which we discover them. In 

the same way, the meaning reality acquires with reference to value does 

not itself fall within the domain of real existence. On the contrary, it 

obtains only in relation to a valid value. In this sense, the meaning itself 

is unreal. In consequence, by culture we understand, first, real historical 

life to which a meaning is attached that constitutes it as culture. In 

addition, we can also understand by culture the nonreal ‘content’ itself, 

conceived as the meaning of such a life that is detached from all real 

existence and is interpreted with reference to cultural values. 54 

Rickert adds that, although ‘meaning’ and ‘value’ interpenetrate our sense 

of life, in theoretical terms, they should be distinguished. 

Undoubtedly, there is a strangeness to Rickert’s argument and its Kantian 

style and the way in which he deploys the categories of value. 55 It is by these 

means that he hoped to place the cultural sciences on a more objective basis, 

even though it is quite hard to discern just how his conception of objectivity 

is made to work. In particular, Rickert addresses Dilthey’s lecture (1900), 

outlined above, accusing him of over-reliance on the re-experiencing of inner 

experience as the basis of understanding. He quotes Dilthey: ‘We call 

that process understanding in which we acquire knowledge of something 

that is inner on the basis of externally given signs.’ Of this, Rickert opines, 

‘We know how vacuous the concept of an inner process is.’ ‘The signs that 

are “externally” given must make it possible to acquire knowledge of more 

than a real “inner” process. Otherwise they will remain unintelligible.’ 56 The 

simple Diltheyan riposte to this is that the interpretation of inner experience 

attaches to its objects of expression – texts, pictures, gestures – and the 

interpretation of authorial intention has to be inferred from the historical 

situation. And if we revisit Dilthey’s sentence, in the official translation, it 

reads: ‘On the logical side of this process [the possibility of valid interpretation 

deduced from the nature of understanding] is one of coming to know 

a whole context from only partially defined signs by making use of existing 

grammatical, logical and historical knowledge.’ 57 Hermeneutics, for Rickert, 

would seem to include the art of paraphrase. 

This is not the place to argue out the dispute over the best scientific


treatment of the meaningful in history, other than to note that it was a 

sophisticated debate and that neither side had abandoned objectivity and 

truthfulness. Reading much of interpretative sociology today, of which Weber 

is said to be a founder, it would be a complete misreading to assume that 

Weber is arguing that ‘subjective understanding’ equates with the subjectivity 

or relativism of truth. He is part of a tradition whose concern was to establish 

objectivity through a proper conceptualization of values. 

Weber’s critical distance from Dilthey 

Pietro Rossi points out that Weber acknowledged Dilthey’s work, and that 

his knowledge of his works was quite comprehensive. It included Introduction 

to the Human Sciences, Ideas on Descriptive and Analytic Psychology 

and his lectures on ‘The Origins of Hermeneutics’ and ‘Studies towards the 

Foundation of the Human Sciences’. These references occur in the footnotes 

of Weber’s methodological essays on Roscher and Knies. They acknowledge 

Dilthey’s importance but are accompanied by references to Rickert. Dilthey 

was the first to establish the division of the sciences, but it was Windelband 

and Rickert who revealed the ‘logical distinctiveness of history’. Weber, following 

Rickert’s argument, noted that Dilthey’s distinction between ‘inner 

“experience” (“Erlebungen”)’ and ‘outer appearances’ was not just ‘logical’ 

but ‘ontological’. Weber continued that he favoured Rickert’s logical and 

conceptual approach to the study of history. 58 

Hence, Weber’s comments on Dilthey are meagre, not fulsome, and critical 

of his ontology. It is a difficult judgement to make, but how much of that 

eruptive work of genius – The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 

– was reliant on Dilthey’s expansive intellect and how much on Rickert’s 

logic? It was Dilthey who opened the door to the in-depth exploration of 

the inner life and meaning of historical lives and documents, and it was he 

who underlined the importance of hermeneutics and ‘Verstehen’ as a reliable 

method of study. Dilthey also supplied an embryonic sociology that was able 

to link the internal dimension of people’s actions with the external structures 

of society that surrounded them. Rickert supplied a way of using concepts 

that neutralized the observer’s engagement with history, and so offered the 

assurance of objectivity in place of a subjective engagement with the lives and 

artefacts of the past. Dilthey’s imaginative and energetic intellect celebrated 

our ability to make just such an engagement. The question, which I leave on 

the seminar table for discussion, is: what kind of exercise was Weber pursing 

in his imaginative and energetic engagement with Puritan history? 

The actual dynamics of this debate – its cross-currents, debates and conversations 

– have yet to be fully investigated from a history of ideas standpoint. 

Toby Huff ’s discussion of the Weber–Dilthey relationship points out 

the complexity of the debates and the large number of other actors, minor 

and major, who were also on stage. For Huff, the critical split, which he 

terms a ‘theoretical gulf ’, was over the issue of psychologism. When Dilthey


published his Ideas on Descriptive and Analytic Psychology in 1895, it was 

critically taken apart by Ebbinghaus. Dilthey immediately withdrew from 

any further work in that direction. I am not sure whether this provides 

enough evidence to locate the split in terms of psychologism. 59 Dilthey’s 

Introduction to the Human Sciences places the emphasis on descriptive psychology, 

simply in the sense that the historian needs to recreate the thoughts, 

ambitions and feelings of historical personages. No ‘scientific’ discipline of 

psychology is alluded to as providing an explanatory tool. Dilthey’s move 

into ‘analytic psychology’ did make that move – but then he withdrew from 

such a project. 

I would hypothesize that psychologism was a more general threat, seen 

by a large number of academics as the next big breakthrough in the human 

sciences. Dilthey might have given hope to those ambitions, and hence he 

was suspect. But, in his lecture on hermeneutics, I do not see how calling for 

the motivation behind a work of art also to be taken into account constitutes 

a cardinal sin. It is abundantly clear that Weber did not like psychologism, 

and he spent a considerable amount of methodological ink in condemning 

it. The principal object was that a science of psychology – and it would be 

based on natural scientific procedures – could provide a royal road into the 

human and cultural sciences; in the same way, today, evolutionary psychology 

offers that possibility. Very many economists persevered with the idea 

that a psychology of stimulus and response would explain the underlying 

mechanism of desire, utility and its satisfaction. 60 Weber disagreed with this 

on the grounds that social economics provided the basis for imputing desires 

and motives to economic actors; this was a sufficient explanation. In the 

area of ‘Verstehen’, so crucial to Weber’s cultural science, psychologism offered 

not so much a science as a loose account of how re-experiencing and 

empathy operated. 

Simmel was one of the worst offenders in this respect. In his 1892 publication 

of The Problems of the Philosophy of History, Simmel wrote: 

We must be able to recreate the mental act of the historical person. As 

this is sometimes expressed, we must be able to ‘occupy or inhabit the 

mind of the other person’. The understanding of an utterance entails 

that the mental processes of the speaker – processes which the words of 

the utterance express – are also reproduced in the listener by means of 

the utterance. 61 

For Weber, and hermeneutics in general, both the subjectivity of the 

speaker and the objectivity of the utterance are important. The mistake is to 

short cut from the subjectivity of the person, whose mind we in some wise 

inhabit, to the objective meaning of what is said – or expressed in writing or 

in artefact or in observed behaviour. Simmel was guilty of taking this short 

cut. Intuition, sympathy and feeling were the ways into the mind of another 

person and, in so understanding the mind of another person, their utterances 

could be understood. With Weber, motives have to be inferred, and what is


said as an utterance, having an objective empirical existence separate from 

the intentions of the speaker, has to be interpreted; what Weber does not 

say is – interpreted according to hermeneutic rules. Simmel was capable of 

assuming a spirit world of the soul as a common property of humankind; 

hence, empathy was always possible and self-evident. For Weber, it can only 

be taken as an unprovable assumption that such understanding of motives 

and feelings is possible. This is the transcendental presupposition. What then 

matters is the procedure, which has to be critical not credulous. 

It was Simmel who used the example ‘one does not have to be Caesar in 

order to understand Caesar’, in The Problems of the Philosophy of History. 62 

Weber agreed with this as a possibility and uses the phrase himself. But as 

Huff points out, Simmel gave validity to this process by virtue of feeling 

alone. He quotes Simmel: ‘. . . the kind of general validity that is at stake 

here is a psychological property of mental activity itself. It is a feeling immediately 

given in mental activity’ (p. 65). Weber’s and Rickert’s methodology 

was designed to place this possibility of understanding on a sounder and 

more objective basis. Huff notes, ‘In short, Simmel substitutes “feeling” for 

objective and logical criteria of “validity” ’ (p. 66). I think Huff is correct 

in presuming that this not minor methodological difference is the basis for 

Weber’s very prominent disavowal of Simmel’s subjectivity. In Weber’s two 

sociological essays – ‘Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology’ and ‘Basic 

Sociological Concepts’ – Simmel is both acknowledged and reprimanded in 

the opening preamble. ‘I deviate from the method adopted by Simmel in his 

Sociology of Money in that I make as clear as possible a distinction between 

intended and objectively valid “meaning” (“Sinn”), a distinction which Simmel 

not only sometimes fails to make, but often deliberately runs together’ 

(EW, p. 311). Simmel, it seems to me, redeems himself through his depiction 

of objectification as well as the central feature of his sociological and cultural 

analysis, the reciprocity of life and its forms. 

Weber’s distrust of Dilthey, I suspect, stems from the issue of vitalism. 

Simmel’s psychologism and subjectivism are ways into what interests him 

most of all, the energy and creativity of life itself. Weber never reconciled 

himself to this feature of Simmel’s work. Yet the word ‘life’ (‘Leben’) and 

its compounds are central to Weber’s own work. It is perhaps here that 

Weber’s preference for Rickert over Dilthey should be sought. Dilthey, as 

noted in the preceding section, effectively collapsed his hermeneutic method 

into the ‘categories of life’. This was as much a move into vitalism as it was 

a psychologism. It was a move incompatible with the ambitions for a science 

of human and cultural life with any claims to validity in terms of critical 

distance and objectivity. It was just this distancing of the investigator from 

the embrace of vitalism that Rickert supplied to Weber. 

There is an important corollary to this debate, which was conducted as 

much covertly as textually explicitly. Weber, so to speak, sheltered behind 

Rickert rather than directly engaging in methodological debate with Dilthey. 

Weber also seized hold of the method of causal attribution. Neither of these 

manoeuvres obviates the need for a critical discussion of hermeneutics. I flag


this up for future discussion, and I agree with Huff ’s recommendation that 

the work of recent language philosophy, particularly Donald Davidson, 63 

will show the way forward – in a way that accords with Weber’s ambitions 

for ‘objectivity’ in the human sciences. 

The ‘objectivity’ of knowledge 

We do not have to make Weber conform to either the Diltheyan or the Rickertian 

line. He does need, however, to be placed in the extraordinarily rich 

context of methodological work that was reflexively coming to terms with 

a century of academic progress in the historical and cultural disciplines and 

with the recent challenge of the all too successful natural sciences. 

Key to Weber’s views is his essay ‘The “Objectivity” of Knowledge in 

Social Science and Social Policy’. This is a massive essay in its length, topics 

and issues covered, and its innovative approach. In terms of pedagogic 

understanding, it is probably one of the more difficult pieces of his writing 

and one lecturers probably have the most difficulty teaching, even though it 

will always appear in a ‘theory and methods’ syllabus. It contains just about 

all the ideas and concepts of Weber’s thinking on methodology, although we 

need to make the proviso that he had not at this point developed a theory 

of social action. It has no subtitles, and it certainly should have them, because 

of its large array of topics. There is some evidence that it was written 

under pressure in order to front up the relaunch in 1904 of the Archiv für 

Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik by its new editors, Max Weber, Werner 

Sombart and Edgar Jaffé. 

It was composed in order to raise and answer questions at a number of 

levels. It takes until the halfway point of the essay before the topic of ‘objectivity’ 

and the issues related to PESC are discussed. It is preceded by an 

introduction signed by all the editors (‘Die Herausgeber’) that signals the 

change of direction in the journal. Under its old editor, Heinrich Braun, its 

major orientation was the labour question (‘Arbeiterfrage’), and the journal 

had had an explicit reform agenda, which it promoted through the publication 

of details of labour statistics and labour legislation. Under the new 

editors, the labour question is widened and deepened to consider the origins 

and consequences of the revolutionary process of capitalism on economic 

life and to consider this in the interaction of the social with the economic. 

The editors wrote as economists (‘Nationalökonomen’) but in the pursuit 

of the study of the ‘general cultural significance of capitalist development’. 

A theory of the social would establish the specific meaning of the social 

phenomena of culture (‘Kultur’). This, in its turn, demanded a consideration 

of the relation between conceptual constructs (‘Begriffsgebilde’) and reality 

(‘Wirklichkeit’). This was necessary if the journal was to meet scientific 

standards and, hence, the introduction would be followed by an essay by one 

of the editors (Weber) on ‘Erkenntniskritik’ (epistemology) and ‘Methodenlehre’ 

(research methods). 64


So Weber’s essay on ‘Objectivity’ emerges within the context of the 

capacious manifold of national-economy, a reform-oriented analysis of 

modern capitalism and a commitment to science. While it was written at the 

same time as PESC, the essay does not have a specifically cultural, religious 

or sociological focus. PESC can be placed within the new programme of the 

Archiv. It would be an example of the cultural determination of the economic 

development of capitalism. PESC might exemplify the new programme and 

its approaches, but it did not constitute a new disciplinary departure in the 

social sciences. While, as we have seen in the last chapter, PESC does indeed 

have major implications for social and cultural science, Weber’s overall 

methodological comments keep his cotemporaneous essay within the bounds 

of the scientific project of the new programme for national-economy. 

Weber’s essay opens with an aggressive attack on the prevailing orthodoxy 

in national-economy and social science. This attributed too much faith 

to the explanatory power of science, assuming that, once the laws of societal 

development or the laws of the mind derived from biology, then all sociopolitical 

decisions and ethical choices could conform to scientific analysis. 

Weber terms this historical relativism, and he applies this critique to historical 

materialism as well as Spencerian evolution. 

Value judgements 

His other associated main theme is value judgements. Science, Weber says, 

can establish what is, but it cannot prescribe what we should do in the light 

of scientific information. The ends of our actions, our goals and purposes, 

belong to a realm separate from that of science. Science can tell us how to 

pursue an end and the consequences flowing from the achievement of that 

end. Science can analyse means, but ends belong to the purposive activity 

of human beings. Weber had a huge fight on his hands in advocating this 

position. The general public (then, as now) was quite happy to accept the 

scientific logic of statements such as ‘scientific research has shown, for example, 

smoking damages your health’ and therefore we ought as a society to 

adopt the recommendations of scientists. For Weber, something like ‘smoking 

damages your health’ might be demonstrable and ‘self-evident’ through 

research, but what we choose to do about it as private citizens and public 

governments is another matter. Professors, whether in public health or social 

science, in his day saw no point in conducting research unless they could tell 

or prescribe what people and governments ought to do. The economists, of 

all persuasions, were especially inflexible. Forces of economic determination, 

for Weber, clearly could not be denied, but how citizens and governments 

reacted still remained a realm of freedom of choice within certain 

boundaries, i.e. capitalism could not be reversed, but it could be shaped, and 

the direction of its shaping was a matter of citizen/political debate. It was on 

this front that the Archiv wanted to open up the subdiscipline of social economics. 

Weber’s remarks remain persuasive today. East coast US economists


in the early 1990s demanded, on the basis of free market economic theory, 

neo-liberal solutions for the ex-Soviet Union, and they did this in the certainty 

of scientific truth – which for Weber would have been a value judgement. 

In a Weberian scientific world, neo-liberal recommendations would be 

analysed as one policy option with certain benefits and disadvantages and, 

crucially, they would be compared with alternative economic prescriptions 

(EW, p. 362), both open to public debate. 

In very broad terms, Weber’s position on value judgements is considered 

Kantian in that it follows in the footsteps of Kant’s threefold analysis of cognitive 

(pure) reason, moral (practical) reason and artistic judgements. 65 Each 

of these spheres has its own philosophical logic. In contrast, the dominant 

Anglophone philosophy of utilitarianism tends to collapse these categories: 

what a person finds rational tends to coincide with what he or she wants, and 

what gives pleasure is what he or she fancies, whether aesthetic or any other 

cultural good. In the sense of this gross contrast, Weber is Kantian. But, on 

the formation of value judgements, Weber is not strictly Kantian. 

The fate of a cultural epoch that has eaten from the tree of knowledge 

is that it must know that we cannot read the meaning of world events 

out of the results of any analysis, no matter how complete that might 

be; but that it has to be prepared to create such a meaning itself, that 

‘worldviews’ can never be the product of enhanced experiential knowledge, 

and that therefore the highest ideals that move us most strongly 

are forever formed in struggle with other ideals, ideals which are as dear 

to others as ours are to us. 

(EW, p. 364) 

We cannot decant our view of the world from scientific knowledge. But 

for Weber, our view of the world may well be in opposition to another one 

and, in this sense, we assert our meaning against other viewpoints. It is an 

agonistic or competitive vision. In the Kantian and more ordered world of 

Rickert, value judgements would emerge from values that were held in common 

by a community, and they would be prioritized according to areas of 

life. 66 Habermas, one of the most prominent critics of Weber in this respect, 

argues that moral values and norms should emerge from an open discussion 

within any one community and that their validity derives from a procedure 

that can produce a consensus within a community. Habermas criticized Weber 

for his ‘decisionism’ – that ethical and political judgements are reduced to 

individual decision-making unreflective of wider group norms. And, in later 

work, Habermas specified the procedures whereby those norms could best 

be realized within groups. 67 With Weber, the formation of value judgements 

appears to rest on the desirability of commitment, that one set of values are 

supported while openly recognizing that others commit to opposing value 

judgements. Kant’s moral philosophy endorses the community consensus 

because it can secure a more universal basis, and so validity. Weber endorses


the heterogeneity of values that may exist in perpetual conflict rather than 

being resolvable to any one consensus. 

Weber insists that ‘a social scientific periodical as we understand it should, 

inasmuch as it is scientific, be a space where truth is sought, truth which can 

claim to be a valid conceptual ordering of empirical reality . . .’ (EW, p. 365). 

Truth is a scientific standard that is universally valid. Weber continues that 

two obligations follow from the inability of scholars to refrain from introducing 

value judgements into their work. 

First of all, both readers and editors should be at all times entirely aware 

which standards are here applied for the measurement of reality, and 

from which a value judgement is derived; contrasting with the all too 

frequent practice of an imprecise mingling of the most diverse values, 

confounding the conflict between ideals in an effort to ‘offer something 

to everyone’. 

(EW, p. 366) 

Secondly, value conflict should lead to a clear ‘confrontation’ of value 

standards. 

Any meaningful evaluation of alien aspirations can only be a critique 

formed from one’s own ‘worldview’, a struggle against alien ideals on 

the basis of one’s own ideals. If in individual cases the ultimate value-axiom 

underlying a practical aspiration is not only identified and subjected 

to scientific analysis, but its relationships with other value-axioms made 

clear, then ‘positive’ criticism of the latter through systematic exposition 

is unavoidable. 

(EW, p. 366) 

Education and science, then, will form the basis for a critical debate over 

policy issues. A strong commitment to wealth creation is not necessarily 

reconcilable with egalitarian viewpoints. In this ‘confrontation’, scientific 

analysis would remove empirical errors and lack of clarity in arguments; it 

would not remove the underlying convictions that may be deeply held, but 

it could place the debate on policy on a new footing. 

Weber is eloquent and insistent on this issue for many pages, very much 

aware of the opposition he would face. As the policy and social sciences were 

new and innovative, there was a belief that they would change the world for 

the better. This was an aspiration held in various policy forums such as the 

Verein für Sozialpolitik in Germany, the L’Anneé Sociologique in France and 

the Fabian Society in Britain. Weber’s scepticism on values was later to lead 

to a major crisis (1909–14) in his relationship with the German Sociological 

Society and the Verein für Sozialpolitik. At this point, however, his insistence 

on scientific standards will be pursued. Bruun pertinently notes that 

the separating of value judgements from scientific analysis has the corollary


that greater emphasis is placed on the objectivity of knowledge – the title of 

Weber’s essay. 68 

The challenge 

Weber was facing a major challenge. He insisted on scientific validity in the 

sense that the truth of empirical facts in the social and cultural world can 

be established and that truth will be universally valid. He is not able to fall 

back on a ‘correspondence’ account of empirical truth, that facts ‘speak for 

themselves’ – ‘naïve self deception’ (EW, p. 381). Rickert had put this issue 

beyond contention as, in the infinite nature of the world, there are a 

number of facts that can be presented, and the procedure becomes one of 

selection of facts and the aspectual character of what we know. There is no 

‘real’ underlying structure to the world whose nature is presented to the 

scientist through unambiguously true facts. Weber also follows Rickert on 

the conceptual dualism that an ontological gulf separates the mind of the 

observer from reality itself (‘Wirklichkeit’). If anything, Weber stresses this 

gulf even more than Rickert. Weber takes the reality ‘out there’ to be an irrational 

chaos, and holds that the role of the social and cultural scientist is 

to impose some kind of ordering. 69 Weber also assumes that people make 

evaluations and hold to deeply held beliefs and convictions. These, however, 

need not coexist in some kind of order, in the way in which Rickert sought 

to structure values. Heterogeneity of values is the assumption that Weber 

makes, what he would later call the polytheism of beliefs. 70 Weber belongs to 

the philosophical tradition that the human, social being is a feeling, wishing 

and evaluating entity. 71 In his refusal of reductionism, and this is how he uses 

the term ‘relativism’, Weber continually insists that the acting human being 

– what Spinoza termed the ‘conative’ part of being – cannot be explained 

away as determined by forces of biology, evolution or materialism. 

Weber cannot, therefore, follow the full Rickertian programme of securing 

some kind of ordering among scientists and citizens, which then confers 

some kind of validity upon the process of selection. Weber’s position – and 

solution – is unique to him, and he carries a fairly minimal amount of baggage 

as measured in presuppositions or ‘a priori’ assumptions. The ‘Objectivity’ 

essay marks the coming of age of twentieth-century social science 

and the removal of the comforts of positivism, naïve empiricism and the 

transcendentalism of ideas and values. 

The only existing English translation (until Keith Tribe’s translation in 

2004 72 ) rendered the title, ‘ “Objectivity” of Social Science and Social Policy’. 

Edward Shils, its co-editor and co-translator, was a forceful advocate not 

only for social science, in post-1945 North America and Great Britain, but 

for a Weberian conception of it. In his Introduction, he speaks of a marriage 

of policy and science and, to a certain extent, he forces the linkage of these 

two – and this appears in the English title. The German runs, ‘Die “Objektivität” 

Sozialwissenschaftlicher und Sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’: ‘The “Ob-


jectivity” of Social Scientific and Social Political Knowledge’. Weber’s intent 

is to separate policy from science and to downplay the claims of science. 

Weber does not use the term ‘science’ (‘Wissenschaft’) in the title, he uses 

‘knowledge’ (‘Erkenntnis’) and, whether science or knowledge, the word is 

dropped entirely in the Shils and Finch edition. 73 ‘Erkenntnis’ has the sense 

of the getting of knowledge, and its English equivalents from a standard 

dictionary read: ‘realization’, ‘recognition’, knowledge’ and (in philosophy) 

‘cognition’. ‘Science’, in contrast, has a spurious finality. 

It is in the second part of the essay that Weber gives his solution. Weber 

defines the object of study as ‘socioeconomic’ in character. In meeting their 

economic needs, people engage in ‘careful forethought, effort, a struggle with 

nature, and the need to work in association with people’. These phenomena 

have no inherent objectivity. Rather, study ‘is determined by the direction 

of our cognitive interest, arising out of the specific cultural meaning that 

we attribute to the individual process in question’. Where a specific event 

or process has such a meaning, a social scientific problem is found. This 

problem and its circumstances then becomes a task for a discipline that seeks 

to clarify the problem and its ‘underlying circumstances’ (EW, p. 368). 

Because the essay is directed towards how people meet their external 

physical needs, i.e. economics in its widest sense, Weber places stress on 

economic motives but also their interaction with cultural life more generally. 

In this more general field, a topic only becomes an object of study when it 

becomes ‘problematic’, and what the Archiv considers to be problematic is 

‘the constellation of interests and conflicts of interest arising out of the leading 

role played by capital in search of investment opportunities in modern 

developed economies (“moderne Kulturländer”), their present significance 

and their historical formation’. This leads to a subset of problems, such as 

the labour question or tariff question, that are ‘formed by the particular 

nature of the economic foundations of our culture, and hence specifically 

modern cultural problems’ (EW, p. 371). 

The creation of an object of study, therefore, is not the free play of academic 

discourse but something far more ‘hard-nosed’. Weber was slightly 

premature in his diagnosis of the carving up of the world into investment 

opportunities (although not in its colonial phase), whereas today this is 

happening with a frightening intensity and speed. Today’s satisfaction of 

material, and ideal, needs generates enormous problems and, for Weber, 

inevitable conflicts – now, for example, the desire for motor cars and a 

clean environment, or the interests of the developed world and those of 

the developing world. The Archiv’s general problematic has become even 

more pressing and urgent. Socioeconomic life generates issues which then 

become objects of disciplined methods and study. ‘Scientific domains,’ says 

Weber, ‘are constituted not by the “objective” (sachlich) relation of “things”, 

but by the relationship of problems in thought: a new “science” emerges 

wherever new methods are applied to a new problem and, in this way, truths 

discovered which disclose significant and new perspectives.’ So, for example,


climate warming ‘objectively’ had been occurring throughout the twentieth 

century. It was only when it was defined as a problem in the 1970s–80s that 

the swathe of environmental subdisciplines were created. 

Weber is scathing about the scientific priority that investigators allocate 

to their subject in the name of ‘objectivism’. He has in his sights the (Marxist) 

materialist interpretation of history where everything is reducible to the 

circumstances of economic motives and interests; likewise, theories of race 

rooted in the objectivism of biology. What is required in their place is ‘the 

enlargement of the possibility of certain imputation of individual concrete 

cultural events occurring in historical reality to concrete, historically given 

causes through the acquisition of exact observational material furnished by 

specific perspectives’ (EW, p. 372). Racial biology – ‘a product of the modern 

rage for founding new disciplines’ – fails as a science because it misplaces 

the role of science, which is exact method and not ‘objective realities’. The 

modern rage for sociobiology on genomic principles would equally have 

incurred Weber’s ire. 

There is no absolutely ‘objective’ scientific analysis of cultural life 

. . . there is no ‘objective’ analysis of ‘social phenomena’ independent of 

special and ‘one-sided’ perspectives, on the basis of which such phenomena 

can be . . . selected as an object of research, analysed and systematically 

represented. The reason for this arises from the specificity of the 

cognitive aim of social scientific work which seeks to move beyond a 

purely formal consideration of legal or conventional norms governing 

social association. 

(EW, p. 374) 

This passage points both towards Rickert’s principle of selection and 

against any formalism of pre-existing norms, of which the study of law, or 

of theology, would be examples. ‘The social science that we wish to pursue 

is a science of reality (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft). Our aim is an understanding 

of the uniqueness of the lived reality within which we are placed . . . to 

understand the context and cultural significance of individual phenomena 

in this lived reality – and, on the other hand, the reasons for their being 

historically so and not otherwise’ (EW, p. 374). Weber squarely places the 

enterprise as a science of lived experience, of life, but the epistemological 

route for apprehending reality follows Rickert. 

All cognitive knowledge of infinite reality by the finite human mind thus 

rests upon the implicit presupposition that at any one time only a finite 

part of this reality can be subjected to scientific scrutiny, that only this 

part is ‘material’ in the sense of ‘worth knowing’. 

(EW, p. 374) 

This is close to Rickert’s distinction between the real and the non-real. For


Rickert, what is worth knowing is valid but not real, but through the process 

of selection of infinite reality, it attaches to a segment of material reality. 

Weber draws the same sort of contrast as Windelband and others between 

a science framed in laws and a science that seeks out the individuality of 

phenomena. Astronomy conforms to the former and is quantitative, whereas 

social science is concerned with the qualitative. In dealing with mental processes 

(‘geistiger Vorgänge’), understanding (‘Verstehen’) is gained through 

re-experiencing (‘nacherlebend’) (EW, pp. 375 and 386). This is a sentence 

straight out of Dilthey, who put forward a method of empathy and re-experiencing 

as a way of connecting the investigator to the expressive human 

subject. In the social sciences, although there might be regularities falling 

short of laws, these would not constitute, or point to, a topic worth studying. 

Instead, it is the investigators’ own evaluation of what is of interest that 

confers cultural significance upon reality. 

The significance inherent in the formation of a cultural phenomenon 

and the bias for this significance cannot be taken, founded and rendered 

intelligible from a system of law-like concepts, no matter how complete, 

for the significance of cultural phenomena implies a relationship to evaluative 

ideas (Wertideen). The concept of culture is an evaluative concept. 

Empirical reality is for us ‘cultural’ in the sense, and to the extent that, 

it is related to evaluative ideas; it comprises those elements of reality 

rendered meaningful by this relationship, no more. 

(EW, p. 377) 

It takes a little concentration at this difficult juncture of the ‘Objectivity’ 

essay to grasp that Weber is using terms very close to Rickert’s terminology, 

but is not following in his exact footsteps. Key to Rickert’s argument was 

the term ‘Kulturwerthe’ but, with Weber, this has become ‘Wertideen’. Rickert’s 

cultural values structure and impose validity on ‘Wirklichkeit’. Weber’s 

‘Wertideen’ cannot perform this task, because Weber has already admitted 

to the heterogeneity of values. Instead, they become for him the pretext for 

selection in terms of meaning from the complexity of ‘Wirklichkeit’. 

Of course, this is not made any easier to follow by the slightly contrived 

nature of Rickert’s own argumentation. The issue of concern here is the 

Hume/Kant one of epistemological dualism. Dilthey had one solution, Rickert 

another. What was Weber’s? This matters because on it hangs Weber’s 

methodological treatment of the meaningful. Weber got more from the 

analysis of the meaning and significance of culture than just about any other 

practitioner in the social, cultural and historical sciences. Weber produces 

colour where other social scientists manage tones of grey. If the social sciences 

were to deal with its subject matter, as defined through the process of 

selection as being of evaluative worth – and hence concerned with a meaningful 

segment or aspect of culture – what makes this ‘objective’, even within 

scare quotes?


Reading this section of his essay, a clear answer is not to be had – if one 

is looking for a philosophical answer to epistemological dualism. Weber appears 

to be saying that we throw or project our own ideas of value against a 

brute complex reality and so illuminate it, in some aspect, as meaningful. But 

the underpinning operation is left unresolved, neither Rickert’s validity of 

cultural values nor Dilthey’s categories of life. Weber presses on to provide 

other forms of assurance in the form of research techniques that are more 

clearly in line with how objectivity is secured in current research practice. 

One conclusion, however, is that Weber is giving himself covert Nietzschean 

licence. To make a value relation and confer value is tacitly to re-evaluate; 

not in Nietzsche’s own ‘über’ sense of the aesthetic or the will to power, that 

is of imposing oneself – as a higher being – on brute reality, but nonetheless 

having the freedom to decide oneself what is of cultural value and thereby 

becoming an object of study. This gives Weber room for his own undoubted 

creativity and also contributes to his own powers of attraction to his audience. 

Validity questions pertained to causation, not meaning and values. Weber 

follows the Rickertian line that causal explanation occurs only when 

attached to the individual event or fact. Concepts of increasing generality, as 

in physical laws or, indeed, in the mass regularities of exchange behaviour, 

contain less explanatory power the further removed they are from concrete 

individual events. ‘The more general, that is the more abstract, that the 

laws are, the less work they do for the requirements of causal imputation 

of individual phenomena, and hence indirectly for the understanding of the 

significance of cultural processes’ (EW, p. 379). 

Weber applies the argument that only historical causation is a real explanation. 

He uses the example of exchange behaviour. ‘The cultural significance 

such as exchange in a money economy lies in the fact that it appears 

in the form of a mass phenomenon, which is a fundamental component in 

modern cultural life. But if we are to understand the cultural significance of 

the historical fact that it plays in this role, then its historical emergence has 

to be causally explained’ (EW, pp. 377–8). The money economy, like modern 

capitalism, is a system that has specific causal/historical origins – the invention 

of money, or the rise of the Puritan middle class, for example. However, 

like the orbit of a comet in the natural sciences, price and exchange 

behaviour will take on regularities that can be explained by theories such 

as the quantity theory of money or market behaviour. But the actual position 

of a comet or the actual price of a commodity is the real that is caused 

by the antecedent events. In a diachronic analysis, history matters, because 

certain historic events have long-term repercussions. In synchronic analysis, 

the regularities occurring at a point in time provide the social scientist with 

powerful explanatory theories. Weber’s answer to these arguments would be 

that all reality is diachronic – every event and every fact has a history – and 

this is the only ‘real’ there can be, and hence is the site of causal explanation. 

If one wishes to choose to divide time and space up into the diachronic and


synchronic, the social scientist can do this, but these divides would be purely 

concepts not descriptions of an indivisibly complex reality. 

Weber’s radical insistence on the unknowability of the infinitely complex 

real forms the basis of his discussion of where he wishes to place the emphasis 

of ‘objectivity’ – on causal adequacy and ideal types. Before turning 

to this, it is worth reflecting on Weber’s style or way of arguing. He refers 

in passing to logical developments in the theory of knowledge. But he fails 

to provide bibliographic references, and this applies to both Rickert and 

Dilthey. His transposition of Rickert’s argument on values to causality and 

meaning is hard to discern. He has denied Dilthey in the name of Rickert, 

and he has replaced Rickert’s strict treatment of values by inserting in their 

place the Diltheyan emphasis on meanings. He hopes to secure his position 

with the empirical testing procedures of causation of concrete events. 

Reasons and causes of action 

In the continuous war of a positivistic versus an interpretivist version of social 

science, one of its front lines has been the dispute about whether human 

behaviour is ‘caused’ by factors external to the individual or whether a person 

is a participating and, in principle, freely deciding member of a culture 

and society. It is a debate that sets in, on one side, with scientific earnestness 

with Comte, and continues through Durkheim, behaviourism and current 

versions of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. And those positivistic 

claims are resisted by the humanities, by the ‘scientific’ humanities (Dilthey) 

and the long interpretivist tradition of the twentieth century that originates 

in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz. The methodology 

wars of the twentieth century have disputed every term in the lexicon 

of social research. Precise definition of terms, their operationalization, hypothesis 

forming, empirical proof, causal explanation belong to positivism. 

The understanding and elucidation of meanings, how they are shared and 

how they affect individuals and groups belong to the interpretivist account. 

It is one of the heavy burdens of postgraduate training in social research 

methods that some part of this conflict has to be imbibed (even though the 

slightly more farcical situation seems to have been reached where these debates 

now come down to a choice between ‘hard’ quantitative methods versus 

‘soft’ qualitative methods; a choice that makes risible any credible claim 

to research design). 

Weber simply walks across this line, seemingly unaware of the sound of 

gunfire. As the champion of meaning, he moves straight to the assertion that 

individual actions are ‘caused’. Yet the language of causation belongs to the 

natural sciences and the nomological. If we follow Martin Hollis’ highly 

commended essay ‘Models of Man’, in which the two opposing schools are 

schematically represented as ‘autonomous man’ (the interpretivist account) 

and ‘plastic man’ (the positivistic account), some care is exercised by Hollis 

in his own use of terminology. In the former account, individuals have


‘reasons’ for acting; in the latter, they are have ‘causes’ for action. 74 This, 

incidentally, is not a debate about free will versus determinism. Durkheim 

and Weber both agreed that people are placed in sociological situations that 

are beyond their making, but within which they can exercise free will. 75 And 

Marx said a similar thing in his theses on Feuerbach. But each of these social 

theorists operates with different and opposed methodologies of causation. 

Weber is impervious to this methodological divide. For him, even if there 

were nomological regularities in social science, these would not explain the 

actions of individuals. This he asserts on the grounds of the non-real status 

of concepts. Causal forces, like Durkheim’s suicidogenic currents, have no 

ontological validity for Weber. It is, however, permissible to attribute to 

individuals the reasons/causes for their observed behaviour. In this way, a 

reason for acting becomes an imputed cause for Weber. Causality becomes a 

retrospective operation and can never be a predictive science. In his causative 

model, the situation offers various ‘objective possibilities’; sociologically, 

we do not live in a realm of freedom but of constrained choices. Causal 

explanation operates through imputing or attributing causes to actions. In 

an English coroner’s court, the ‘objective possibility’ facing an inquest is the 

person was murdered or died of natural causes or took their own life. In 

reaching a verdict, the coroner imputes a possible cause. The coroner may 

well turn out to be wrong in his or her attribution, but this highlights the 

nature of probability in sociological judgements. Hence, the judgement from 

a social scientific perspective, which would, optimally, operate to higher 

levels of evidence and investigation than an average coroner’s court, is that 

someone probably took their own life. Weber expects the social scientist to 

imagine the range of possible causes of an event on the basis of his or her 

experience of life and accumulated academic knowledge. These form the 

basis of objective possibility, a term not dissimilar to counterfactual possibility, 

i.e. the course of action could have been ‘a’, ‘b’ or ‘c’ but, on the basis of 

the evidence, a cause is attributed to an outcome. 76 ‘Concepts of this sort are 

constructs in whose terms we formulate relationships through the employment 

of the category of objective possibility; and these constructs are judged 

with respect to their adequacy by an imagination oriented to, and guided by, 

reality’ (EW, p. 390). 77 

After some few pages in which Weber berates the claims of abstract theory 

as being able to deduce causal explanation of ‘real’ events and actions (and 

a reflection of the eruptive debates in German-speaking national-economy), 

Weber outlines the ideal type. Weber has, so to speak, prepared the epistemological 

ground for this and, conversely, it is not advisable for a student to 

look this term up in the index and expect to comprehend what is at stake! 

It is in the nature of social science that the researcher has to be content with 

choosing an aspect of reality as worthy of study and, in this sense, all theory 

is one-sided; this would apply to Marxism as much as to marginalism, for 

neither can validly claim to be a comprehensive account of reality. Marginalism 

as much as Marxism is a theoretical or accentuated account of reality. 

In this sense, both are conceptually utopian – they do not exist in reality


and neither can they be produced out of history. We can, says Weber, have 

an ideal grasp of processes of markets, commodities, exchange, competition 

and rational action. 

This construction brings together certain relationships and events of historical 

life into an internally coherent conceptual cosmos. This construction 

has the substantive idea of a utopia arrived at by the conceptual 

accentuation of particular elements of reality. Its sole relation to the empirically 

given facts of life is where relationships there represented abstractly, 

i.e. events related to the ‘market’, can be identified or supposed 

as existing in reality; and we are therefore able to make the characteristic 

features of this relationship pragmatically lucid and understandable in 

terms of an ideal type. This procedure can be of value, even indispensable, 

heuristically as well as in exposition. The concept of the ideal type 

can direct judgement in matters of imputation; it is not a ‘hypothesis’, 

but seeks to guide the formation of hypotheses. It is not a representation 

of the real, but seeks to provide representation with unambiguous means 

of expression. 

(EW, p. 387) 

Weber himself notes the ambiguity of the term ‘ideal’ in ideal types. Ideal 

types can be constructed just as much from saintliness as from prostitution. 

Perhaps it would have been better for Weber to call them heuristic types, an 

adjective he uses on a number of occasions. Ideal types seek to accentuate 

meaning, but note that the word hermeneutic never crosses Weber’s lips. We 

can only guess that hermeneutics belongs to a sort of preliminary enterprise, 

and belongs to the researcher’s accumulated understanding, knowledge and 

experience of the world. An ideal type is a sharp conceptual instrument 

for the purpose of elucidation. Hermeneutics belongs to the exegesis and 

explication of the text and other cultural artefacts. Heuristics is a conceptual 

contrivance for shaping and dissecting cultural meanings, while hermeneutics 

has to attend to the facticity of the artefact. While I have drawn this 

distinction, so to speak on behalf of Weber, I would not myself like to defend 

the distinction as hard and fast, for both would seem to involve parallel, if 

not overlapping, conceptual operations. Weber has his gaze firmly set on 

causal explanation as the standard of objectivity and of science. But to do 

this, he has to interpose hypothesis construction between ideal types and 

causal explanation. Were the Herrnhuter a sect? In ideal–typical terms, this 

cannot be answered but, if we hypothesize certain characteristics, indicative 

of and drawn from the ideal type of sect, the empirical facts of Herrnhuter 

could be said to meet those characteristics. Weber says very little on the 

subject of hypothesis formation, although he does say that the overall aim 

is to compare (EW, p. 396) or even confront (EW, p. 402) empirical reality 

with ideal type. This is not terribly satisfactory, and modern methodology 

in social research has not fared terribly well either in working out the relation 

between concepts of meaning and the investigation of empirical reality


– as debates over ‘grounded theory’ and ‘sensitizing concepts’ have shown. 78 

Weber is aware that problems remain to be elucidated on the relation of ideal 

types to other seemingly similar concepts such as ideals in life, like Christian 

ethics, collective concepts, normative concepts of value as in economic 

theory or normative concepts of the state. But, he says, ‘we must simply 

abandon any ambition of seriously examining in any greater depth practical 

methodological questions that are here only briefly exposed . . .’ (EW, 

p. 397). One is tempted to observe that methodological questions can only 

be practical and that Weber remains delinquent on how to investigate how 

values are empirically attached in the world. 

Weber does offer a very brief discussion of the role of ideas in history, a 

topic which unsurprisingly was going to occupy more of his attention in the 

light of the publication of PESC: ‘the causal relationship between a historically 

existing idea that rules men, and the components of historical reality 

from which its corresponding ideal type can be abstracted, can be formed in 

quite various ways’ (EW, p. 391). Weber, needless to say, stresses the procedure 

of abstracting the ideal type of ideas from their complex manifestations 

in history. ‘. . . the “ideas” that govern the people of a given epoch . . . can 

(where a degree of complexity of thought construct is involved) only be 

grasped with any kind of conceptual clarity in the form of an ideal type, since 

this idea empirically inhabits the heads of an indeterminate and constantly 

changing number of individuals . . .’ (EW, pp. 391–2). And, ‘the empiricohistorical 

process in the heads of human beings has to be understood as a 

psychological process . . .’. ‘Ideas are historically effective, and they live on 

in the minds of men long after the fundamental “idea” has . . . died out . . .’ 

(EW, p. 392). This is unambiguous. Ideas are causally effective, existing as a 

psychological reality in the minds of men and causing them to act in certain 

ways. 

The progress of knowledge 

Weber has a number of scattered remarks about how knowledge advances. 

This has become one of the major themes of the philosophy of science, especially 

in the second half of the twentieth century. Here, as in much else, 

Weber anticipates future developments. When his remarks are brought together, 

a motif can be discerned, which I think comes to be a characterizing 

feature of Weber’s own creation of social scientific knowledge. 

This can be envisaged, mentally rather than diagrammatically, as a background 

reality of continuously flowing space and time coordinates. The 

investigator occupies a ‘pod’ in this reality that is filled with his or her experience 

and knowledge. Around this is a larger pod of the scientific or 

disciplinary knowledge. The investigator shines a torch (powered by evaluative 

ideas) on to the otherwise impenetrable complexity of reality. This 

cognitively defines and fixes an aspect of reality. This is then subjected to 

the dual operation of ideal type and causal analysis. The result could be 

prosaic or highly creative. If the latter, then it feeds back with considerable


impact into the scientific/disciplinary pod and as a cultural product to the 

researcher himself. The process could then repeat, for example as critique 

and anti-critique, as it did in the case of PESC itself. The epistemology of this 

has been outlined above. But the temporality of knowledge is worth noting. 

Knowledge is never secured to time and place and, in this sense, it cannot 

be ‘objectively’ banked. The researcher lives and works in the continuous 

flow of time, and this temporality characterizes both what counts as scientifically 

interesting and the results of scientific investigation in the cultural and 

historical fields. 

This would seem to be the ‘model’, although Weber puts it far more eloquently. 

For the normal researcher, evaluative ideals lead to selection and the 

attribution of meaning, so ‘the direction of his personal belief, the refraction 

of his values in the prism of his mind, gives direction to his work’. ‘And the 

values to which the scientific genius relates the object of his inquiry may determine, 

i.e. decide the “conception” of a whole epoch, not only concerning 

what is regarded as “valuable” but also concerning what is regarded as significant 

or insignificant, “important” or “unimportant” in the phenomena’ 

(EW, p. 381). Essentially, this what I have argued in Chapter 3 with regard to 

Weber’s own scientific genius and achievement with PESC. 

Weber goes on to argue that a closed system of knowledge cannot be 

achieved. ‘The stream of infinite events flows constantly towards eternity. 

The cultural problems that sway humankind are constantly renewed and 

reformulated . . .’. ‘The points of departure for the cultural sciences remain 

mutable throughout an endless future, so long as a Chinese ossification of 

intellectual life does not render mankind incapable of posing new questions 

to eternal, inexhaustible life’ (EW, p. 383). Specialization can lead to the 

consolidation of knowledge. ‘And that is a good thing. But at some point 

the atmosphere alters: the significance of viewpoints used unreflectively 

becomes uncertain, the path becomes lost in twilight. The light cast by the 

great cultural problems has moved onward. Then even science prepares to 

shift its ground and change its conceptual apparatus so that it might regard 

the stream of events from the heights of reflective thought’ (EW, p. 403). 

The body of knowledge and procedures known collectively as ‘science’ 

is itself a floating temporal object in the flow of time. Science, as Weber 

was later vigorously to assert, only arose in the Occident and was particular 

in its maturing to a period and place. ‘For scientific truth is only valid for 

those who seek truth’ (EW, p. 383). The resurgence of anti-modernity at the 

beginning of the twenty-first century unfortunately gives this insight added 

weight. Science tout court is an evaluative idea that confers a particular sort 

of significance upon reality – it brings, to quote Weber, ‘order out of chaos’, 

and without the evaluative idea, no science. 

Conclusions 

A great many ideas and projects in the philosophy and methodology of the 

social sciences can be traced back, or at least imputed, to this transformative


essay that so confounds the claims of scienticism, empiricism, reductionism, 

idealism and evolutionism. The traceable ideas include Popper’s conjectures 

and refutations as the solution to Humean scepticism, Kuhn’s idea of paradigm 

shifts as an account of ‘progress’ in science and Rorty’s anti-foundationalism 

and the wider field of pragmatism, to name the most prominent. 

Equally, the essay offers little support to an interpretative project concerned 

with meanings per se and understanding (without causal explanation). 

The consolidation of this split between positivistic explanation and 

interpretative understanding postdates Weber, so was obviously no concern 

of his. The split, as it predated him, no doubt he reckoned to have handled 

authoritatively, indeed muscularly. But some confusion and difficulty 

remains and, reading the essay, it is a reasonable inference to say that Weber 

was looking for various solutions in the course of writing the essay itself. 

In particular, how is meaning and its interpretation assessed prior to being 

incorporated into a cultural science? 

At the end of the essay, Weber provides a sort of summary, more in the 

way of looking back and assessing the long route he has taken. 

We have come to the end of this discussion, the only purpose of which 

has been to trace the fine line that separates science and belief, and 

makes clear the meaning of the search for socio-economic knowledge. 

The objective validity of experiential knowledge rests, solely rests, upon 

the fact that given reality is ordered by categories which are in a specific 

sense subjective: they represent the presupposition of our knowledge 

and are based on the presupposition of the value of those truths which 

experiential knowledge alone is able to give us. 

(EW, p. 402) 

This part is Diltheyan. Scientific questions originate in life, but they cannot 

be validated by the empirical material. 

The ‘objectivity’ of social scientific knowledge depends rather on the 

fact that the empirical given is always related to those evaluative ideas 

which alone give it cognitive value, and the significance of the empirically 

given is in turn derived from these evaluative ideas. But this empirical 

given can never become the pedestal upon which is based an empirically 

impossible proof of its validity. 

(EW, p. 403) 

Objectivity is constituted by something outside the empirical – this part 

is an adaptation of Rickert on empirical validity. Our highest and ultimate 

beliefs, in which, says Weber, we ‘anchor our being’, do not exclude the notion 

that we can always change our scientific viewpoint. The transitivity of 

viewpoints and the corresponding transitivity of reality is Weber’s ‘base-line’


(or anti-foundationalist) position, and it underwrites and promotes progress 

– if one chooses to believe in science. 

life, in its irrational reality and its store of possible significances is inexhaustible, 

the concrete formation of value relations remains therefore 

fluid, subject to change in the distant future of human culture. The light 

given off by these highest evaluative ideas falls upon an ever-changing 

finite part of a monstrously chaotic stream of events that flow through 

time. 

(EW, p. 403)

5 The reluctant sociologist 

From the Protestant ethic to the 

Grundriss der Sozialökonomik 

This chapter, and the following, covers an extensive segment of Weber’s 

intellectual life (1905–14), in which he made a number of intensive commitments 

to a variety of projects. The chapter will register the various phases of 

this period in terms of the goals and markers Weber had set down in PESC 

and the essay on ‘Objectivity’. The phase up until around 1909 is marked by 

unsuccessful attempts to answer his critics. Weber’s difficulties stem from the 

difficulty of solving the highly problematic issue of multiple causation. The 

second phase (1910–14) is a creative convulsion taking his work way beyond 

the Protestant ethic studies. There are a number of trajectories which, I shall 

argue, we should not try to arrange into a neat order. One strong dynamic 

of the second phase, however, is developmental history on a comparative 

basis bringing with it a further, but not final, elaboration of methodology. It 

is here that Weber has to construct a sociology of his own making and for 

his own needs. 

The Protestant ethic thesis is not an easy matter to grasp and the grounds 

for mistaking what kind of thesis it was are not minor. As has been argued, 

it offered an explanation as a contribution to a wider debate, which was not 

in itself visible from the text of PESC. It could be mistaken in the appearance 

of its arguments as a narrative history, which was not its intention. It 

presented itself as an ideal type of a historical individual, a self-presentation 

that has continually failed to secure widespread comprehension and acceptance. 

It was an exemplification of the ambitions laid out in the ‘Geleitwort’ 

of the ‘Objectivity’ essay and explicated as a new methodological way of 

doing cultural science in that essay. But the connection – between PESC 

and ‘Objectivity’ – was not a programmatic formulation. Finally, through its 

rhetorical verve, PESC dazzled its critics, leading to them to praise or blame 

features that were not necessarily core to the thesis. 

PESC suffers an inconsistency between the boldness and ambitions of the 

thesis, on the one hand, and the caveats and qualifications that are introduced, 

on the other. In addition, Weber announces at the beginning that his main 

concept, the spirit of capitalism, cannot receive a final definition until the 

end of the essay (PESC, p. 47). But at the end, he says that systematic work

The reluctant sociologist 117 

in a worldly calling was the most powerful factor contributing to ‘that attitude 

toward life which we have here called the spirit of capitalism’ (PESC, 

p. 172). At this point, the spirit of capitalism still awaits its definition. And 

right at the end, he writes that ‘one of the fundamental elements’ of the spirit 

of capitalism was ‘rational conduct on the basis of the idea of calling’ (PESC, 

p. 180). From these statements, one concludes either that, in the end, Weber 

failed to provide a definition, or that what definition he did provide seems 

in part to include the causal factor (religious calling) that is meant to explain 

the spirit of capitalism. The latter option comes close to being an identity 

and not a causal relationship. This is a very large weakness to expose to your 

critics. The thesis can, however, be saved because it is not hard to assemble 

from Weber’s incisive argumentation the characteristics of the spirit of modern 

capitalism, i.e. systematic and rational attitude to life and work, unceasing 

labour, asceticism of conduct, the concentration on means and technique 

over ends. These are the ingrained attitudes of those who work and live 

in the modern capitalist economy and culture. Weber offers up Benjamin 

Franklin in his systematic and rational search for profit as an illustration of 

the spirit of capitalism (PESC, p. 64). But much ink and controversy would 

have been spared if a complete definition of this concept had been supplied 

– preferably at the outset where the reader would expect it. 

Weber writes that his study ‘may thus perhaps in a modest way form a 

contribution to the understanding of the manner in which ideas become effective 

in history’. Hartmut Lehmann points out that Weber insistently refers 

to his ‘provisional remarks’, ‘provisional illustration’ of the spirit of capitalism 

and ‘provisional’ definition of traditionalism. 1 To this he adds another 

caveat that he did not subscribe to the ‘foolish and doctrinaire thesis’ that 

capitalism as an economic system is a creation of the Reformation (PESC, 

pp. 90–1). The second statement certainly qualifies the scope of the thesis. 

The thesis is not an idealist theory of history. What it seeks to do is ‘ascertain 

whether and to what extent religious forces have taken part in the qualitative 

and the quantitative expansion of that spirit over the world’. This reads like 

a caveat. Just like the ‘modest way’ the study would be a ‘contribution’, but 

equally they can be read in their own terms as very strong propositions. Was 

PESC just another bit adding its own causal factor in the edifice of European 

historiography, or was it boldly reformulating the hitherto hidden realm of 

effective ideas in history? If Weber is arguing for the interaction of material 

forces and effective ideas in history, as he undoubtedly is, can we formulate 

the (null) hypothesis boldly and sharply in these terms: no Puritanism, no 

ascetic practice, no spirit of capitalism, no modern capitalism as we know 

it? This formulation of the hypothesis is not without its own problems, but 

it does illustrate the ambiguities that come to the surface when critical questions 

are asked of the thesis. I will in due course return to the null hypothesis 

(no Puritanism . . . no modern capitalism) in a discussion of what I term the 

singularity argument. Against the bold hypothesis, and when read in the 

light of the essay on ‘Objectivity’, PESC is slight in its intentions. Weber


found Puritanism to be a subject of value to be studied, whereas before it had 

been neglected; he isolated an aspect he found significant and offered it as a 

contribution to the development of modern capitalism. This combination of 

methodological slightness and boldness of hypothesis has created confusion 

and difficulties in the critical interpretation of the thesis. 

In his replies to his critics, Weber consistently, and sometimes angrily, 

insisted that they had misunderstood what he was saying. In the next section, 

I will focus on his inability to provide the ‘killer’ answer to his critics, and 

will suggest that this inability is inherent in PESC itself. 

Weber replies 

A Dr Karl Fischer, about whom not much is known, posted the first review 

in 1907 and in the Archiv. He was the first of many to take the thesis as an 

idealist account in place of a materialist one. Because Weber, as we know, 

devoted some pages in PESC (pp. 90–2) specifically arguing for the combination 

and interaction of material and ideal forces, he could rebut this 

suggestion. But the amended position – ideas as ‘effective forces in history’ 

– would still require a more robust methodology than the couple of references 

to ideal types. 

Fischer raised a valid point about Weber’s interpretation of Luther’s 

translation of work as ‘Beruf ’ (see pp. 56–7). ‘For how did Luther arrive 

at the idea of using Beruf for his translation of the passage in Jesus Sirach? 

Presumably, he could not have meant his Bible translation to create a religious 

system in which even work in a worldly calling was to have a place. 

Rather, he must have thought that by using this common expression, he was 

choosing the best, most easily understandable term for ordinary people.’ 2 

The point Fischer was making was that economic development had already 

preceded the Reformation, and that Luther’s use of terms was a reflection of 

existing use of meaning, i.e. ‘Beruf ’ had already taken on the connotations 

of calling prior to Luther, therefore he, or the movement of Protestantism 

more generally, did not amount to the effective force of an idea in history. 

Fischer also raised the question of the psychogenesis of modern capitalism, 

referring to Sombart’s moderne Kapitalismus on the origins of acquisitive behaviour 

in Europe. Fischer correctly identified the psychological explanation 

of motivation as central to the thesis. It is interesting to see that Fischer was 

unable to discern the Sombart–Weber linkage on psychogenesis, and Weber 

is forced with some asperity to acknowledge his link ‘to my good friend 

Sombart’ (PE Debate, p. 32). Fischer drew on the English utilitarian tradition 

as formulated by J.S. Mill and Herbert Spencer to suggest that, if the 

acquisition of money as an end in itself is the thing to be explained, then ‘we 

can understand it in terms of the pleasure of the individual in active exertion 

of his powers’ (quoted by Weber, PE Debate, p. 35). The pleasure of exerting 

oneself is a generality that hardly applies to the ‘reigned-in Puritans’. Weber 

reckoned himself to have refuted such simplistic psychological explanation


elsewhere (in his ‘Objectivity’ essay and his articles on Roscher and Knies). 

This, though, still leaves the door open to the more complex question of 

how historical situations come to determine the psychological outlook and 

thinking of social groups. 

Weber’s response is to accuse Fischer of not providing any evidence for 

his argument. ‘Philological findings may obviously correct my conclusions 

at any time. However, as the evidence stands, this certainly cannot be done 

merely by asserting the opposite’ (PE Debate, p. 32). Weber certainly closes 

down this avenue of criticism, but it still remains an interesting conjecture 

worth exploring in its own right – despite Fischer’s failure to substantiate 

it. Meaning could well be given by ordinary (German) language use. David 

Chalcraft notes in his introduction to Weber’s replies that much of the debate 

turns on misunderstandings, and therefore on hermeneutics. Weber, 

notes Chalcraft, finds debates on terminology sterile. ‘Yet, when discussing 

the meaning of a Franklin, or a Luther or a Sir William Petty, it is clear that 

what is said in particular places and contexts in their texts is at the heart 

of the matter.’ Chalcraft concludes that one searches in vain for a consistent 

hermeneutics’ in Weber’s replies (PE Debate, p. 14). What is consistent 

about the replies and PESC is that Weber does not enter into the field of 

Diltheyan hermeneutics, despite his dependence on such procedures. 

Weber’s strategy is to focus debate on the role of causation in history, the 

groundwork for which he had laid down in the ‘Objectivity’ essay. Fischer 

remained unsatisfied with Weber’s reply and, in 1908 in the Archiv, he published 

a rejoinder, in which he accused Weber of being ‘temperamental’ – no 

doubt because Weber, fairly roughly, accused him of being ignorant of the 

historical facts and misunderstanding his approach. Fischer said there was 

no doubt that Puritanism strengthened the methodical conduct of life, but 

the issue still remained to be debated about ‘the genesis of the spirit of the 

methodical conduct of life in this period’ (PE Debate, p. 41). To settle the 

genesis question, Fischer said Weber would have to eliminate other possible 

causes in order to show that only religion remained as the prime determinant 

of life conduct. (To an extent, this is how Durkheim proceeds in Suicide, 

eliminating possible alternative explanations, leaving his own favoured one 

as the sole survivor.) Weber resiled, pointing out that the historian could 

scarcely be expected to take on ‘the negative burden of proof ’. ‘Normally he 

works the other way, investigating the effects of the other causal components 

positively [the economic, political components, etc.]. In this way, he will 

arrive at an ever more comprehensive (but never entirely self-sufficient) attribution 

of causes . . .’ (PE Debate, p. 46). 

The issue of causality arose again when Felix Rachfahl, a historian specializing 

in German and Dutch history, made a number of objections to the 

Protestant ethic thesis, of which he designated Troeltsch as well as Weber the 

authors. Rachfahl noted that economic development had occurred in France 

and the Low Countries prior to Protestantism, and that, in the case of England, 

the decisive move in economic development occurred in the eighteenth


century under entirely different religious influences. And in North America, 

capitalism did not accelerate until the late eighteenth century and then under 

the influence of secular rationalism. Rachfahl contended that a methodical 

conduct of life was the result of the development of business as a vocation in 

the Renaissance period prior to Protestantism. He also objected to Weber’s 

use of an abstracting ideal type, when what was required was country-specific 

historical analyses in order to handle the complex factors at work. 

Weber’s response here, as with Fischer, is to assert the ascendance of the 

causal change he had sketched out, i.e. religious vocation → conduct of life 

→ spirit of capitalism. He refers his critics back to a key passage, on multiple 

causality, in PESC. 

In view of the tremendous confusion of reciprocal influences emanating 

from the material base, the social and political forms of organization, 

and the spiritual content of the cultural epochs of the Reformation, the 

only possible way to proceed is to first investigate whether and in what 

points particular elective affinities between certain forms of religious 

belief and the ethic of the calling can be identified. At the same time, the 

manner and general direction in which, as a result of such elective affinities, 

the religious movement influenced the development of material 

culture will be clarified as far as possible. Only then can the attempt be 

made to estimate the degree to which the historical origins of elements 

of modern culture should be attributed to those religious motives and to 

what extent to others. 3 

Fischer’s method of elimination cannot operate because of the confusion 

of reciprocal influences. It remains methodologically impractical, even 

impossible, to isolate a cause, such as prior economic development, and its 

effect upon the conduct of life. Weber’s tactic is to assert his historical grasp 

of the linkages, and his opponents’ weaknesses in this department. The onus 

then rests upon the critics to come up with a better historical account. Weber, 

no more than his critics, has not solved the conundrum of multiple 

causality. Having established the positive linkages, he does concede it would 

be necessary to go back and investigate a different train of linkages, for example 

the economic and material factor operating upon religious influences. 

Weber never denies the converse: that material factors shape religion. It is 

just that he reckons he has established the superiority of his explanation over 

competing accounts. 

Methodologically, what Weber proposes is akin to principal components 

analysis (or multifactorial analysis). Suppose the thing to be explained is 

the incidence of heart disease in a population. In a research design, various 

factors are held to account in different measure for its incidence. So smoking 

may come top of the list, followed by diet, followed by exercise. Applied to 

the Protestant ethic thesis, religious influences take priority over economic, 

political and social factors. The technique is to demonstrate that one factor


takes priority over another. The other factors cannot be eliminated; also 

because they may be co-relational and co-terminous, the principal factor 

cannot even be isolated – it is probable that smoking will co-relate with bad 

diet and the two remain inextricable. 

Weber, of course, did not have the luxury of thinking in terms of principal 

components analysis (which is, in addition, wholly dependent on statistical 

inference. Rachfahl did in fact suggest using statistics on economic growth, 

and Weber rightly points out that motivational influences in the past would 

not be susceptible to such analysis; PE Debate, p. 70.) Weber was in something 

of a quandary on the issue of competing causes, as no answer – then or 

now – can put the issue to rest. He makes two further responses. He places a 

greater emphasis on causal adequacy. Rachfahl had contested the linkage between 

capitalism as an economic system and the ‘spirit of capitalism’. Weber 

replies that particular historical forms of capitalism have to be discussed in 

relation to different kinds of spirit, and he makes this point in contradistinction 

to talking of capitalism in general across history and place. 

A historically given form of ‘capitalism’ can be filled with very different 

types of ‘spirit’; this form can, however, and usually will, have different 

levels of ‘elective affinities’ to certain historical types of spirit: the ‘spirit’ 

may be more or less ‘adequate’ to the ‘form’ (or not at all). There can be 

no doubt that the degree of this adequacy is not without influence on the 

course of historical development, that the ‘form’ and ‘spirit’ (as I said 

previously) tend to adapt to each other, and, finally, that where a system 

and a ‘spirit’ come up against each other, there ensues a development 

of (even inwardly) unbroken unity similar to that which I had began to 

analyze. 4 

An ‘elective affinity’ was a peculiarly nineteenth-century way of speaking 

about chemical bonding. Whereas today, we think in terms of two oxygen 

electrons binding together with a hydrogen nucleus (to form water), Goethe, 

reflecting his scientific knowledge, spoke of elective affinity (‘Wahlverwandtschaft’); 

it was also the title of one of his novels that catalogued friendship 

between two people – indeed, in Goethe’s hands, as a new literary genre. 

So, individuals are drawn to each other in the strong sense that chemical 

elements bond together. Weber asserts that this reciprocal bonding lies at the 

heart of his research: modern capitalism and the vocationally specific spirit 

of capitalism. Weber allows the complexity of factors in play that have to be 

sifted by the historian, but what he has discovered is an immensely strong 

linkage. Weber’s usage of ‘causal adequacy’ goes somewhat beyond imputation 

here. He is close to saying that this linkage is a real occurrence in history 

– a standard of objectivism he has already rejected. 

His other reaction is to signal a retreat from the Protestant ethic thesis. 

He had intended to expand the scope of his studies. At the end of PESC, 

he wrote that ‘it would be further necessary to investigate how Protestant


asceticism was in turn influenced in its development and its character by the 

totality of social conditions, especially economic’ (PESC, p. 183). He also 

referred to the period prior to the Reformation when the interaction of economic 

development and religion would become ‘a further chapter’ (PESC, 

p. 284, n. 118). This same note also registers Weber’s distaste for writing big 

books ‘I have no great inclination . . . to write heavy tomes’. Weber intended 

in 1907 to make further clarifications of PESC for its publication as ‘a separate 

edition’ (PE Debate, p. 34). In 1908, he referred back to his previous 

statements in PESC ‘about future investigations for completing, interpreting, 

and testing it further’ (PE Debate, p. 45). 

During this period, Weber’s close colleague at Heidelberg, Ernst Troeltsch, 

was also working intensively on Protestantism. He gave a lecture entitled 

‘The Significance of Protestantism for the Origins of the Modern World’ at 

the Historians’ Conference in 1906. (This was translated into English in 

1912 as Protestantism and Progress. 5 ) Hans Kippenberg notes of this lecture 

that Troeltsch was elaborating Weber’s distinction between the capitalist 

system and the spirit of capitalism as it occurred in Holland, England and 

America, and that Troeltsch was indicating that, as the historical and theological 

expert, this was his field of specialism. Troeltsch was also publishing 

a series of articles in the Archiv, covering all aspects of Protestantism and 

western Christianity. (These later became the book The Social Teachings of 

the Christian Churches.) Weber had indicated in 1908 that there was an 

unnecessary duplication of work between himself and Troeltsch and, effectively, 

he was bowing out to the specialist theologians. 6 

But, if we read his second and last reply, in 1910, to Felix Rachfahl’s critique 

of PESC, Weber’s own stance to further research in this field remains 

unclear. He admits that further specialized research is required, and goes 

on: ‘However necessary (indeed substantially more necessary) it may be to 

compare the various characteristics of the individual countries influenced 

by ascetic Protestantism (which alone will help explain evident differences 

in development), the most pressing questions for me lay and lie elsewhere.’ 

Weber then goes on to specify where further research needed to be done. 

‘First . . . I needed to differentiate the various effects of Calvinist, Baptist 

and Pietist ethics on lifestyle, much more deeply and in detail than had been 

done before. We must also investigate thoroughly the beginnings of similar 

developments in the Middle Ages and early Christianity, as far as Troeltsch’s 

works still leave scope for this – which will certainly require very intensive 

collaboration with theologians.’ (Weber inserts a footnote here on his relation 

to theologians.) He continues, ‘Then we need to consider how best to 

explain, from the economic standpoint, that ubiquitous elective affinity of 

the bourgeoisie to a definite kind of lifestyle . . .’. ‘Numerous things have 

been said from many different quarters about this more general problem, 

but much more remains to be said – including, I believe, all that is fundamental.’ 

7 

In his footnote on his relationship to theologians, Weber says that – in


contrast to the criticisms of the bungling, amateur and dilettante Rachfahl 

– his PESC had been well received. ‘However,’ he goes on, ‘such merely 

“sociological” work must also be carried out – as it has been done by some of 

the theologians themselves, pre-eminently by Troeltsch. It should surely be 

done best by the specialists, to whom we outsiders can just here and there offer 

possible perspectives on the problem . . .’. 8 There certainly is an element 

of Weber giving the problem back to sociologically attuned theologians, preeminently 

Troeltsch. 

But Weber also says fundamental work still remains to be done. I take 

Weber here to be referring to his own plans. The Protestant ethic studies 

can be interpreted as still remaining a focus for his research programme, but 

the specialist historical work on the Puritan sects would be accomplished by 

others. The Protestant ethic essay never did become a stand-alone book, as 

his publisher fervently hoped. 9 The enlargements, as promised, never did 

materialize. Peter Ghosh has observed that, by the time Weber had replied 

to his critics, he had exhausted the subject of capitalism and its relation 

to ascetic Protestantism. 10 This comment cannot, I think, be extended to 

Weber’s interest in capitalism as a socioeconomic phenomenon subject to 

cultural influences, because the period 1910 onwards represents just such a 

commitment but now on a universal–historical scale. It is difficult to reach 

a conclusion. Had Weber effectively retreated in the face of the demands of 

his critics, especially in respect of the highly problematic field of multiple 

causation? Or was he about to rework the problem of causation through 

comparative analysis? It is probably a mistake to search for continuity, and 

we need to register the author’s discretionary right to switch fields, not least 

as a new energizing source of enthusiasm. This does not, however, make the 

problem of multiple causation go away; rather, it moves it to a higher, and 

no less problematical, level. 

The agrarian regimes of ancient civilization 

Rachfahl’s criticisms had prompted from Weber a reflection on the analysis 

of European-specific capitalism and whether other historical, but ideal–typical, 

constructs of capitalism could offer a point of comparison. This, he says, 

‘is what I tried to do for the “capitalism” of the ancient world as an economic 

system, although certainly in a very incomplete way (see my ‘Agrarverhältnisse 

im Altertum’ in Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaft, third 

edition, Vol. 1, 1909)’ (PE Debate, pp. 74–5). The comparison would operate 

by presenting features ‘not so present in other epochs’. Hence, both early 

modern European development and antiquity could be constructed as types 

of capitalism, but one (antiquity) would lack the ‘spirit of capitalism’. The 

implication – and this is all it is at this stage in Weber’s thinking – is that a 

missing cause will have missing effects, so throwing into relief their presence 

in Protestant Europe. This represents a new approach, as yet not clear in its 

logic, to the methodology of causation.


But Weber himself admits in his 1910 reply to Rachfahl that his attempt 

was incomplete. ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ was not written with comparison 

in mind. It belonged to a series of initiatives and projects, like his 

intensive involvement in the literature coming out of Russian in 1905 on 

revolutionary activity and like his study of the industrial psychology of 

workers in 1907, that led him away from ever completing the promised 

additions to the Protestant ethic ‘sketch’. 

‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ was a commissioned entry for an encyclopaedia, 

and this meant that it had to conform to a format, title and style 

laid down by the editors of the Handwörterbuch. This placed constraints on 

Weber’s ability to pursue his favoured methodology of the ideal type. The 

encyclopaedia format was very popular in the German universities – as it 

is again today. The whole approach favours the reader who, essentially, is 

able to find information on an indexed or alphabetical system. The format 

tends to the presentation of reliable and accessible knowledge rather than 

the more usual academic habit of getting embroiled in controversial debate. 

The Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaft in its third edition was a 

well-established and respected encyclopaedia. Weber had provided short 

entries of eighteen pages for the supplementary volume of the first edition 

in 1897 and an amended version for the second edition of 1898. This probably 

explains Weber’s sense of obligation to contribute to the third edition 

of 1909, but not why his entry was so extensive. Weber’s entry ran to 136 

double-columned pages. By comparison, the entries by Karl Lamprecht on 

agrarian regimes in the Middle Ages ran to three pages and agrarian regimes 

of modernity by Freiherr von der Goltz ran to eighteen pages. The entry 

title was given to the author: ‘Agrarian regimes in the ancient world’. An 

introduction was required: ‘on the economic theories of states in the ancient 

world’. Part 2 provided a breakdown of the agrarian history of ancient 

civilization (‘alten Kultur’) – in Mesopotamia, Egypt, ancient Israel, Greece, 

Hellenism, Rome and the basis of development in the Roman Empire. 

So, it was a commission, for a dictionary/encyclopaedia, and had seemingly 

little connection to seventeenth-century Protestantism. Where, it might 

be asked, was Weber going with this academic enterprise? Initially, he considered 

it an obligation he could not refuse and that he would return to 

the Protestant ethic. On 26 December 1907, Weber wrote to Oskar Siebeck 

(his PESC publisher) that the article for the Handwörterbuch was a ‘terrible 

obligation’ that he could not decently refuse to do. He thought he would be 

finished in a few weeks, and then he would concentrate on a separate publication 

(‘Sonderausgabe’) of the ‘Geist des Kapitalismus’ for Siebeck. Weber 

never delivered on that promise, and one implication is that his move into 

comparative historical sociology blocked his return to the Protestant ethic 

study. 11 ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ is a work that is held in some awe by 

classical historians. Alfred Heuss considered it ‘the most original, daring and 

persuasive analysis ever made of the economic and social development of 

Antiquity . . . the area in which Weber’s judgement, especially in the details,


was most sovereign and surefooted . . .’. 12 And the foremost classical scholar 

of the twentieth century, Moses Finley, wrote, ‘When I read in Marianne 

Weber’s preface that Max Weber’s Agrarverhältnisse was the result of four 

months’ intensive work, I react as to one of the miracles of the Bible. It 

takes me four months to study Demosthenes.’ 13 Marianne Weber, when she 

had the article reprinted, added a footnote at the start saying its contents 

far exceeded the prescribed title – it was ‘a social and economic history of 

antiquity’. 14 

This raises a large question about what is meant by the term ‘history’, especially 

at this juncture in Weber’s intellectual career. I think Guenther Roth 

is right to say that Weber was advancing ‘a limited developmental scheme’ 

or, more simply, ‘developmental history’. 15 This is the direction of travel in 

another of Weber’s enterprises that he agreed to the year before, an encyclopaedia 

under his own editorial control, the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik 

(which is considered in the next section). Heuss refers to Weber as being 

‘sure-footed’ in the field of classical studies, but his last effort in this field 

was a lecture in 1896 and his 1897 entry to the Handwörterbuch. What has 

to be grasped here is that Weber’s footwork allowed him to change direction 

at will and to generate enormous impetus in a very short space of time – another 

of his ‘temperamental’ qualities. During the period 1909–14, Weber 

generated a truly enormous output of material that can be broadly described 

as developmental history. Considered from the stance of 1904 and 1905, 

this was tangential, even perverse. The strategy then was not history per 

se in its narrative traction and multiple complexity, but by a point of view 

determined by the author’s value-signifying discernment and deployment of 

the thrown net of the ideal type. In ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’, Weber 

is not allowed to roll out his pet method of ideal types – just three mentions, 

and one of these in the bibliography. 

I have translated ‘Agrarverhältnisse’ as agrarian regimes. The difficult 

word here is ‘Verhältnisse’ whose literal translation is ‘relationships’ or, more 

loosely, ‘organization’. ‘Regime’ suggests itself because, while Weber does 

not ignore the agricultural dimension – the topography of garden culture, 

cereals, forests, rivers, irrigation, coastal settlements etc. – he is much more 

interested in the arrangements for the delivery of agricultural and economic 

goods. He is concerned with the relationship between landlord and serf, 

freeholder and renter, estate owner and slave, monarchs and taxation, land 

grants and their legal conditions. It is the power and status distinctions that 

structure the delivery of agrarian products that Weber works with. In this 

sense, he is concerned with the regimes of agrarian societies. 

Weber would have been approached by the editors of the Handwörterbuch 

(Conrad and Lexis) as an agrarian expert. 16 His postdoctoral thesis 

(‘Habilitationsschrift’) on the changing legal forms and economic conditions 

of Roman agriculture was based on the analysis of primary documents (laws, 

legal documents, wills, inscriptions). And, as a national-economist in the 

1890s, Weber’s empirical inquiries on agrarian conditions had established


him as an authoritative expert. It is this expertise that Weber delivers to the 

Handwörterbuch. 

Turning, at random, to the section on Mesopotamia, how does Weber 

proceed? First, he indicates the state of the historical sources – the development 

of cuneiform scholarship. Throughout the section, he refers back to 

the sources available, for example the laws of Hammurabi. Weber was not 

equipped to read the primary sources but, as his bibliography shows, he 

was up to date with the German, French and American scholarship. 17 Weber 

then fashions this source material to the ways in which he thinks about the 

agrarian economy. As might be expected, he starts with a (brief) description 

of agriculture – domestication of animals, horticulture, irrigation – but then 

he quickly turns to the political system of the monarchy and its economic 

base: how taxes and labour services were delivered by the different status 

groups (slaves, serfs, landowners and subjects). The economic resources of 

the temple are mentioned as are the military campaigns to acquire booty. 

The basis of the military system of obligation is outlined (mercenaries, vassals, 

community forces). The economy is discussed in terms of what could be 

inferred from documents: the forms of property – the ‘oikos’, the ownership 

of private land and the limitations placed on its sale (alienation). Subsections 

follow on the organization of the family and the status of women, 

slaves and wage labour, rental agreements on land, the existence of money 

and its restricted use as an indicator of value of bartering, loans and money 

transactions, trade in benefices as a form of interest-bearing bonds and the 

regulation of prices. 

This may well seem prosaic, but it is where Weber’s historical expertise 

lay. Weber makes some acute judgements. He notes the danger of basing 

arguments using analogies from modern states, yet inevitably he has to draw 

on the language of modern economic usage. A ‘money man’ in ancient Mesopotamia 

is someone who does not act as buyer and seller but is an estimator 

of value in a predominantly barter economy. And, under old Babylonian law, 

caravans were given commissions to ‘buy at the going price’. This was not 

evidence of a free market economy, but an instruction to buy at the ‘price 

set by the royal or temple storehouse’ (AS, p. 104). Weber was working with 

very few translated documents, yet he is able to discern and mark out the 

principal legal, social and economic forms and the undergirding structure of 

economic obligations between status groups. Weber processes the existing 

source material to a very high level of intelligibility and, if one consults, in 

contrast, the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Mesopotamia, it is a 

mass of undigested philology, dates and genealogies. 

The Handwörterbuch article reminds us that Weber was ever the nationaleconomist 

and agrarian expert. He had accumulated over the decades of the 

1880s and 1890s a fund of knowledge and expertise that he could draw on 

at will; or at least the ability to update his knowledge in a very short period. 

Having noted this, though, it is still permissible to ask in which direction this 

work was leading him. Recent work by Hinnerk Bruhns, Luigi Colognesi,


Jürgen Deininger and Mohammad Nafissi alerts us to Weber’s continuing 

engagement with the ‘Kapitalismus’ problematic. 18 

In his few uses of the ideal type, Weber enters into a discussion of whether 

there is a generic ideal type of capitalism. From his 1898 Lecture Outline, it 

is clear that Weber was fully informed about Bücher’s division of economic 

history into three stages: the ‘oikos’ economy, the city economy and the 

national-economy. Weber was probably agreeable to this as a useful periodization, 

although he would have rejected a theory that held this to be a kind 

of evolutionary necessity. ‘Oikos’ is a ‘Wirtschaft’ or an ‘economy’ (indeed, 

it is the Greek root word for ‘economy’). An ‘oikos’, for Bücher, was an economically 

self-contained, rural-based estate headed up by a patriarch. The 

patriarch or head of the household would rule, organize and look after the 

needs of his family, personal retinue, serfs and slaves. While an ‘oikos’ might 

make a surplus, this was stored rather than traded or invested. Bücher held 

that the ‘oikos’ was the main economic institution of the ancient world of 

Greece and Rome, its use of slavery being particularly characteristic. It was 

preceded by a form of tribal and clan organization. The ‘oikos’ stage marked 

a decisive step forward from the ‘primitivism’ of the clan. An ‘oikos’ was embedded 

in a wider political community, which in Greece culminated in the 

‘polis’ (that, in Athens for a brief period, initiated and attained a democratic 

form). The city economy pertained to the Middle Ages, differentiating itself 

from feudal and manorial regimes. The national-economy started to become 

the predominant phase in the modern period, fostered by absolutist states 

from the sixteenth century onwards. 19 

The classical historian Eduard Meyer challenged Bücher’s construction 

of the ‘oikos’ as the dominant economic form of antiquity. He disputed the 

emphasis that Bücher placed on slavery, and his ignoring of the role of free 

labourers, markets and factory enterprises. Mohammad Nafissi refers to 

Meyer as a ‘modernist’. Meyer regarded it as acceptable to use modern economic 

terms to describe the ancient world. His argument was that the ancient 

world had attained a high level of economic development. ‘Meyer pointed 

to widespread commerce, developed accountancy systems, and transportation 

networks linking various centres of the pre-classical ancient Orient from 

the third millennium BC to the fall of the Persian Empire more than two 

thousand years later.’ ‘By displaying the breadth and depth of commercial 

activity in the ancient Near East, Meyer at the same time painted Greece and 

Rome as inheritors of a process of commercial and cultural development 

spanning over two millennia rather than as recent offspring of fairly primitive 

kinship formations.’ 20 As Nafissi shows, Bücher’s attempt to encapsulate 

the ‘oikos’ economy of Rome and Greece as an autonomous development 

from its preceding simple clan society fails. Meyer substitutes instead a preexisting 

economy stretching across the Near East and Mediterranean. Meyer 

made the dramatic claim that ‘the seventh and sixth century of Greek history 

corresponds to the development of modernity in the fourteenth and fifteenth 

century after Christ; the fifth to the sixteenth.’ And he went on later to claim


that Athens ‘stands under the banner of capitalism just as much as England 

since the eighteenth century, Germany since the nineteenth.’ 21 

In ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’, Weber was forced to reconsider his 

own position that, as set forth in 1896, was close to Bücher’s. Weber had 

emphasized the predominant place of the ‘oikos’ and an economy based 

on slavery. Indeed Weber’s account of the decline of the Roman Empire 

depended on the centrality of slavery. While the civilization based on Athens 

depended on trade between city and countryside as well as the existence of 

international trade along the Mediterranean coast, the later Roman Empire 

shifted the economic centre of gravity inland where transport was difficult 

and trade limited. The huge geographical expansion of Roman rule was motivated 

by conquest and the demand for slaves for the emerging large estates 

(‘oikoi’). ‘Wars served as slave hunts and were followed by confiscation of 

lands; the lands were formed into domains, and leased by exploitation to 

wealthy contractors’ (AS, p. 395). ‘Thus the slave owner became the dominant 

figure in the economy of Antiquity, and a slave-labour system became 

the indispensable foundation of Roman society’ (AS, p. 396). There were, 

however, limits to the expansion of empire and its military capability. This 

led to the drying up of the supply of slaves and, in turn, led the (late) Roman 

Emperor, Diocletian, to issue bureaucratic ordinances forcing people to 

remain in their place of origin, so severe became the shortage of labour. At 

this point, the empire was already set upon the path of decline and the rural 

stultification of the Dark Ages. 

Meyer’s argument also related to Sombart’s articulation of capitalist 

profit as the defining feature of modern capitalism, as opposed to industrial 

workshops that existed in the medieval period but did not operate according 

to the principle of profit maximization (see Chapter 1). The same issue arose 

in Antiquity. Industrial workshops had operated within the ‘oikos’ and in the 

cities. Did this make the ancient economy capitalistic, especially when the 

existence of markets, trade, transportation and banking are noted? 

Weber notes that the question of using concepts drawn from later economic 

periods had been debated ‘with vigour and sometimes with passion 

during the last century’. ‘The starting point of this controversy was 

the theory of Rodbertus, according to whom all Antiquity was dominated 

by what he called an “oikos” economy’, one in which production centred 

around the household and the household was extended to include unfree 

workers. He argued that division of labour in Antiquity was essentially only 

specialization within the great slave households, and that commerce was 

only an occasional and secondary phenomenon, serving merely to dispose of 

the excess production of the great households. Hence, Rodbertus argued for 

the ‘autarky of the “oikos”; he regarded the great households of Antiquity as 

in principle economically self-sufficient’ (AS, pp. 42–3). 

There is slightly more to say about Rodbertus than Weber provides. He 

was a country squire, a conservative and favoured a version of state socialism. 

He held to a historically undifferentiated version of the whole of An-


tiquity in which, to quote him, ‘nowhere does buying and selling intervene, 

nowhere do goods change hands. Since the national dividend never changes 

hands, it nowhere splits up into various income categories as in modern 

times . . .’. 22 The intellectual significance of Rodbertus is not simply Bücher’s 

relationship to him, but Karl Marx’s adoption of some of Rodbertus’ principal 

ideas. In the ‘oikos’, the patriarch could decide who (slaves, retinue and 

family) got what. In the modern economy, surplus is distributed not through 

personal rule, but is divided up between rent, rent on property, interest 

(on capital) and profit, and a fixed constant, which went to wages. Despite 

improvements in technology and productivity, wages remain the same – at 

subsistence – while rents increase. Rodbertus argued for the (Prussian) state 

to intervene and reallocate a taxed portion of rent to the workers. Marx’s 

thinking about surplus value – how the capitalist class expropriates the value 

produced by the working class – is obviously proximate to Rodbertus’ thinking. 

This genealogy of ideas had implications for the ‘Kapitalismus’ debate 

at the end of the century. Bücher as well as Sombart were products of this 

genealogy, but as much through Rodbertus, who was no revolutionary, as 

through Marx. In other words, they participated in a labour theory of value 

and circulation without belonging to the Marxist camp. 

So, in acknowledging Rodbertus as a forerunner of Bücher in the ‘oikos’ 

dispute, Weber would have taken these implications as commonly understood. 

Weber continues his outline of the ‘oikos’ dispute: 

Karl Bücher accepted Rodbertus’ account of the oikos, but with a difference. 

His view may, I think, be interpreted – on the basis of his own 

statements – in this manner: he considered the oikos as an ‘ideal type’, 

denoting a kind of economic system which appeared in Antiquity with its 

basic features and characteristic consequences in a closer approximation 

to its ‘pure concept’ than anywhere else, without this oikos economy 

becoming universally dominant in Antiquity, either in time or space. 

One may add with confidence that even in those periods when the oikos 

was dominant this meant no more than a limitation on commerce and its 

role in meeting consumer needs. This limitation was, to be sure, strong 

and effective, and caused a corresponding economic and social degradation 

of those classes which would have otherwise carried on a more 

extensive trade. 

(AS, p. 43) 

Weber effectively saves Bücher’s generalization of the ‘oikos’ economy 

from Meyer’s criticisms through the device of the ideal type. And Meyer 

is criticized for suggesting that it was necessary to use the concepts of ‘factory’ 

and ‘factory worker’ to analyse Periclean Athens. Weber agrees with 

Meyer that capitalism existed in the ancient world. There were workshops, 

free and semi-free workers as well as slaves; there were banks and credit, 

and there was extensive trade and merchants. But capitalism in its modern


form did not exist. This leads Weber to conclude that capitalism did exist 

in the ancient world, ‘Where we find that property is an object of trade and 

is utilized by individuals for profit-making enterprise in a market economy, 

there we have capitalism.’ This is Weber’s generic definition of capitalism. 

But capitalism in the ancient world was entirely different from modern capitalism. 

‘We must avoid exaggeration. In particular it is necessary to show the 

specific peculiarities of the various types of capital goods, and the manner of 

their valorization, which determined the course of ancient economic history’ 

(AS, p. 51). 

The merchant and the owners of capital, whether in the form of land, 

workshops or treasure, were never in a position for a great many reasons to 

invest profit with the expectation of expanding production and increasing 

profit. Over some sixteen pages (AS, pp. 42–68), Weber elaborates the principal 

differences between ancient and modern capitalism. Factories did not 

exist in the industrial sense of size, continuity of operation and a technology 

reliant on fixed capital, division of labour and its concentration in the factory 

workshop. Treasure was not advanced as capital, but stayed within the palaces 

and temples – it was thesaurized. Capital in the form of ownership of slaves 

was a highly unstable mechanism for advancing a business, and the vagaries 

of supply added to this. There was no reliable cost accounting. Guilds in 

Antiquity were a state organization for performing public tasks, and nothing 

like the medieval independence of guild masters appeared. The cities were 

centres of consumption not production and, where free labour existed, it 

nowhere amounted to a proletariat defined through its productive role. 

To sum up, the most important hindrance to the development of capitalism 

in Antiquity arose from the political and economic characteristics 

of ancient society. The latter, to recapitulate, included: (1) the limits on 

market production imposed by the narrow bounds within which land 

transport of goods was economically feasible; (2) the inherently unstable 

structure and formation of capital; (3) the technical limits to the exploitation 

of slave labour in large enterprises and (4) the limited degree to 

which cost accounting was possible, caused primarily by the possibility 

of strict calculation in the use of slave labour. 

(AS, pp. 63–4) 

Weber’s long list of differentiating factors that marked out the ancient 

economy as different can be read the other way round: their absence signals 

what defines the nature of modern capitalism. Through this simple method 

of difference, Weber was addressing the ‘Kapitalismus’ debate as a nationaleconomist. 

Weber writes here very much as the national-economist, essentially reverting 

back to his teaching role in the 1890s. However, the point, of course, 

is that Weber had never left off being a national-economist. The academic


footprint of the 1890s contained the periodization of the ancient economy, 

the medieval economy and the modern national-economy. Bücher had 

unwisely turned this periodization into a series of necessary stages – from 

the ‘oikos’ economy, to the city economy, to the national-economy. Weber 

shared the periodization, as did most national-economists, but maintained 

that the dynamics and the characteristics of each period were far more complex. 

It was through the analysis of the differences between the ancient and 

the modern economy that the distinctiveness of modern capitalism was ascertained. 

Weber’s outlining of these differences creates the reference point 

for what were the characteristic features of modern capitalism. This was the 

same ‘Kapitalismus’ debate that preceded the writing of PESC. Did capitalism 

emerge in the fifteenth century with the accumulation of treasure and a 

new acquisitive instinct, as argued by Sombart, or was it a later development 

subsequent and intrinsic to the Puritan reformation, as argued by Weber? 

Through these comparative analyses, the distinctiveness of modern capitalism 

was to be established. 

Weber speaks of the ‘oikos’ economy of Bücher’s, as already noted, as an 

ideal type, and the ‘urban economy’ as it appeared ‘in a great many medieval 

cities’ as an ‘ideal type’ (AS, p. 48). By the standards of PESC and the 

‘Objectivity’ essay, this is misleading. There, the ideal type refers to cultural 

meanings – the spirit of capitalism and the vocational ethic. In ‘Agrarverhältnisse 

im Altertum’, capitalism as an entity or system is put forward as 

a theoretical model. In addition, what emerges from Weber’s discussion is 

the distinctiveness of a regime – the conditions of status inequality and the 

mechanisms through which economic needs are met. Within these regimes, 

the attitudes, reasons and motivations can be subjected to ideal typical treatment 

as a cultural heuristic. But Weber actually makes very few references 

to attitudinal dispositions of the vocational sort. The ‘moral qualities’ of 

slaves render them ‘amenable to exploitation’ but make them ‘most inefficient 

as workers in a large enterprise’ (AS, p. 55). ‘The ancient businessman 

remained no more than a “common tradesman” in his own eyes and in the 

eyes of his contemporaries.’ This contrasts with early modern times when 

the ‘rationalization and economization of life were furthered by the essentially 

religious ideas of “vocation” and the ethic derived from it, but nothing 

similar arose in Antiquity’ (AS, p. 67). 

It is an important switch of emphasis on Weber’s part to start referring to 

what are effectively definitions of different regimes as ideal types. ‘Agrarverhältnisse 

im Altertum’ undoubtedly represents a widening of scope as well as 

a more muscular way of handling the historical materials, but the ideal type 

was now being merged into history and its developmental sequences. But the 

ideal type, in its original formulation, distanced the investigator from the 

sheer facticity of history and privileged his or her own standpoint in terms of 

what was seen as worth studying and as conferring significance. Within the 

constrained framework of an encyclopaedia entry, it could perhaps be argued


that Weber was simply using the concept of the ideal type as a convenient 

way of handling an extraordinarily complex set of materials. But, when we 

examine Weber’s growing preoccupation with developmental history on a 

comparative basis, the ideal type appears to operate more as a modelling 

device than as a cultural heuristic. 

Developmental sequences comprise the end of Weber’s introduction to 

the ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’. Weber reports that little is known of 

the prehistoric period of the agrarian societies of the ancient world. ‘But 

one thing is clear: there are certain stages of organization, and these appear 

to have been repeated by all the peoples in Antiquity from the Seine to the 

Euphrates among whom urban centres developed’ (AS, p. 69). In summary 

form, these stages were: 

1 Walled settlements providing defence for essentially kinship-orientated 

groups. 

2 The fortress with more urban characteristics and ruled by a king. 

3 The aristocratic city state of the ‘classical’ age. This was a feudal nobility 

emancipated from kingly rule, possessing slaves and serfs, and where rank 

was determined by military criteria: ‘these cities were not administered 

by bureaucracies, a fact of decisive importance’. 

4 The bureaucratic city kingdom. This represents an alternative 

developmental route from stage 2. ‘If the king gained sufficient economic 

resources to become master of his retinue and army to the extent that 

he could bind them to his own person, then he was able to take a step of 

fundamental importance: create a bureaucracy entirely subordinate to 

himself and organized on hierarchical principles. With the aid of such a 

bureaucracy the king could govern his subjects directly and the city then 

became no more than the royal capital where he and his court resided’ 

(AS, p. 72). 

5 The authoritarian liturgical state. Here, the economic relationship of 

king to subjects underwent ‘rationalization’, becoming a tax and liturgy 

regime. Subjects were forced to pay taxes or to provide labour services 

directly to the court and state, the state ran monopolies for which 

subjects were forced to provide labour services, and there was a system 

of taxation backed by punishment. Outside these liturgical obligations, 

commerce was encouraged, because it offered another source of revenue. 

‘ “Enlightened despotism” of this sort generally developed in the ancient 

Near East directly out of the more primitive forms of the bureaucratic 

city kingdom, and indeed differed from the latter type only in its more 

rationalized organization’ (AS, p. 74). 

6 The hoplite ‘polis’ of the Mediterranean lands. Hoplites were independent 

farmers who owned their own land. They were soldier citizens, and they 

overthrew the aristocratic clans. 

7 The democratic citizen ‘polis’. Citizenship rights were no longer 

dependent on the ownership of land. ‘All citizens could become eligible


for office without regard to property qualifications.’ Laws were passed 

to create a stable social order where creditors were no longer allowed to 

reduce peasants to debt slavery. Weber refers to this as the amelioration 

of class conflict in the ancient world, although it was a tendency that 

‘never wholly triumphed’; equally, that conflict could intensify with land 

ownership being held by a wealthy elite. 

At one level, as Weber insists, these seven stages are just types that ‘seldom 

existed in complete isolation. They are “pure types”, concepts to be used in 

classifying individual states. They simply allow us to ask whether a particular 

state at a particular time more or less approximated to one or other these 

pure types.’ This, says Weber, is only an approximating exercise, ‘for the actual 

state structures in the most important phases of history are too complex 

to be comprehended by so simple a classification as the one used here’. This 

statement should be taken at face value. The types, which Weber fails to designate 

explicitly as ‘ideal types’, are organizing ideas or concepts to provide 

some kind of framework to a very far-reaching dictionary entry. 

As a developmental series, there is a clear impulse to move from simple 

kinship (stage 1) to higher stages. Weber’s developmental stages cannot be 

used as an argument for linear developments. Stages 6 and 7 are historically 

contingent upon circumstances, and the history of the later Roman Empire 

shows the complete reversal of an independent arms-bearing peasantry. In 

addition, there is the much commented upon bifurcation at stages 4 and 6. 

One leads to the authoritarian liturgy states of the Near East – Mesopotamia 

and Egypt – the other to some kind of (feudal) democratization of rule on 

the basis of independent property and reaching its high point in the Athenian 

‘polis’. This bifurcation in developmental paths is highly consequential for 

the history of the Occident and the Near East. 

The split is complicated by ‘the manifest and latent struggle between 

theocratic and secular-political forces’. Weber, at this point, wants to factor 

in ‘developed theology and educated priesthood’ which, through functional 

specialization (or ‘differentiation’ in the later terminology of modernization 

theory), had attained some degree of independence. The priesthood could 

act as a competing centre because it possessed three sources of power: economic 

– from its ownership of temple lands and income; religious – through 

the ability to offer salvation in cases of sacrilege (i.e. ritualistic ‘sins’ not ethical 

sinning); and literacy, which was either a monopoly of learning belonging 

to the priesthood or one held in competition with secular officials. 

Weber does not systematically follow through the permutations, making 

instead particular developmental paths contingent upon conflict between the 

various sources of power. 

Hence certain conflicts are characteristic of early Antiquity: temple 

priesthood versus military nobility and royal authority in bureaucratic 

monarchies; commoners (‘nichtadligen Bürger’) versus the monopoly of


legal knowledge enjoyed by noble priests in aristocratic states. All sorts 

of alliances occurred. These conflicts influenced social and economical 

developments, especially in periods of general secularization or restoration; 

the latter were usually due to usurpers striving for legitimacy. 

There were important differences in this respect between oriental and 

occidental civilizations, and these will be discussed below. 

(AS, p. 79) 

Weber, then, was entering into one of the great fault lines in world historiographies 

– the bifurcation between east and west – using a ‘simple’ classification 

of types with the role of the priesthood as determinative, but in 

an unspecified way. Contemporary historical sociology operates very much 

in the manner of Weber’s realist analysis of competing sources of power 

and their outcomes. 23 But, for Weber himself, it has to be noted that he had 

rapidly moved away from the causative role of religion in the period of early 

modernity in Europe and its ideal type methodology. 

The ideal type method in 1904 and 1905 had produced cultural heuristics 

– the religious nature of vocation, the spirit of capitalism – against which 

empirical reality could be assessed. If there was a closeness of fit (which of 

course could never be a verified certainty), then it could be said that certain 

ideas worked out in people’s behaviour may well have given the capitalist 

system its distinctive character. While this in itself was a scientific achievement 

of a high order, Weber was not able to assess just how consequential 

the religious derived spirit of capitalism was for the development of the 

whole system. In his qualifications of the extent of the thesis, Weber had to 

forgo an assessment of the emergence of capitalism as an entity. As he put it 

in his first reply to Rachfahl in 1910: 

Now just a few more remarks about the relationship of the ‘spirit’ of 

capitalism to capitalism as an economic system. 

Werner Sombart has made a study of this subject (Archiv, 

XXIX:689ff), 24 which in its broad agreement on all significance points, 

especially methodological, relieves me of the obligation to go into detail. 

Both the concepts of ‘capitalism’, and even more so, ‘spirit of capitalism’, 

can be construed as ‘ideal-typical’ constructs of thought. 

(PE Debate, p. 74) 

This absolved Weber from entering into the analysis of capitalism as an 

economic system. What Weber had supplied was an important cultural determinant 

in its development. But, if it was important, the next question is 

how important? 

The move into comparative studies offered one way of supplying an answer. 

Early Rome and Periclean Athens had capitalism but lacked any ‘spirit 

of capitalism’. J.S. Mill, who was well understood by German nationaleconomists, 

had offered a ‘method of difference’ as a way forward. The


historian might be in a position to operate a quasi-experimental method. If 

two historical situations were roughly similar, but differed in respect of one 

factor, then a causal linkage could be asserted if the crucial factor (spirit of 

capitalism) produced dynamic rational capitalism in one setting and, in the 

other setting, where it is absent, then no dynamic capitalism appears. By 

this experimental method, some sort of proof would be established. The 

closest Weber came to doing this was in his comparative study of Puritanism 

and Confucianism at the end of his study The Religion of China. 25 As an 

economic system, China was more advanced than Europe c. 1400, but Confucian 

mores and life conduct could not psychologically push the system into 

a higher gear. In Europe, there was sufficient economic development plus a 

spirit of capitalism that ‘kicked in’ in the seventeenth century. The causal 

inference, under Mill’s method of difference, is that the ‘spirit of capitalism’ 

is an effective cause. There are a great many objections that can be mounted 

against this way of proceeding, and the comparative historiography of China 

and Europe can hardly be said to endorse Weber’s argument in the conclusion 

of The Religion of China. All this being noted, it is possible to see how 

Weber would be drawn to a stronger comparative programme, even though 

it exceeds the ambitions of 1904–5. It would provide a further justification 

– or what would now be termed triangulation – of the Protestant ethic thesis. 

In PESC, Weber demonstrated a positive factor and, in China, that factor 

being missing, further support was offered to the thesis. 

As far as I know, J.S. Mill’s programme has never been successfully realized 

in the field of comparative historical sociology, and it is easy to understand 

why. Finding two historical situations that are alike, but in one respect 

or factor, is almost impossible. The similarity will only be proximate and, 

without complete knowledge of all the factors at work, the researcher can 

never know for sure whether just one factor has been isolated. For example, 

a very well-known argument for China’s slowness to emerge as a dynamic 

capitalist force was its aversion to expansion overseas. This is the result of 

fairly recent research, of which Weber whad no knowledge. Weber might 

think that Confucianism was a factor, but the crucial causal factor might 

have been naval policy. In a multicausal world, the sheer unknowability of 

the variability of factors at work reduces positivist ambitions to a heuristic. 

The intriguing question is why Weber was embarking upon a comparative 

method, even of his own devising. He had found the solution to causality 

in the methodological essays of 1904–5. Causal links are attributed after the 

event according to the evidence as structured and clarified by ideal typification. 

This is the best that can be achieved (one is tempted to say, period), and 

it was a position he was to reaffirm in 1918–20. 

The comparative role of towns 

The role of towns, trade and townspeople differs markedly between the 

ancient economy and the inland manorial regime of the European Middle


Ages. This is a developmental comparison that Weber sets forth in his ‘Agrarverhältnisse’ 

article and pursues in his writings on law and on the towns. In 

both historical situations, feudalism existed. A warrior stratum was maintained 

by grants of land, received rents or compulsory service from dependent 

subjects. And in both settings, there was a similarity of urban conditions 

– ownership of property, market activity, accumulation of property through 

trade, the acceptance of landless peasants as ‘guests’ in the towns, the obligation 

to townspeople to make payments to the city lord and a military stratification 

between foot soldiers and horsemen. ‘All these elements were present 

in the early stages of the medieval town just as they were in the early period 

of the ancient polis’ (AS, p. 337). 

The distinguishing difference was the relation between the cities and the 

countryside and their associated regimes. In the ancient ‘polis’, lordship and 

forms of rule remained in the towns – they remained predominantly sites of 

urban feudalism and controlled the surrounding countryside and its obligations. 

In the European (early) Middle Ages, feudalism or ‘Grundherrschaft’ 

was rural. The towns remained isolated enclaves of limited political and 

economic freedom within a political economy of manorial feudalism, where 

obligations to the feudal lord were paid mainly in kind in order to support a 

stratum of knights. The new foundations of towns in medieval Europe and 

the emergent town economy were dependent in political terms on the local 

lord (‘Grundherr’), but the town itself was not, as in ancient Greece, the site 

of political power. The townspeople were only of economic interest to rural 

lords. As long as rents and taxes and the profits of justice were forthcoming, 

the townspeople were allowed to organize their own courts, raise their own 

taxes and run their own administration. This enabled the two to develop a 

qualitatively different urban existence from that of the ancient city. ‘That the 

“Stadtbürgerschaft” had increasingly enlarged its autonomy within the ruling 

groups of the state (“staatlichen Verbände”) up until the fifteenth century 

while the Hellenistic and Roman cities had been absorbed into monarchical 

states, has its basis in the contrasting structure of the state in which both 

were embedded’ (AS, pp. 345–6). Across the ancient world, the internal life 

of the town was unfavourable to the continuous production enterprise. For 

example, the self-equipped hoplite army passed laws against the accumulation 

of property. This contrasted with Europe. Prior to their incorporation 

into the absolutist and bureaucratic states of the sixteenth century, there 

occurred a vital breathing space. ‘During both the early and high middle ages 

the self-developing city is given time for the unfolding of its own decisive 

characteristics: the main carrier of a money economy and connected with 

this administrative obligations, and the (in general) exclusion of the burghers 

from the surrounding hierarchy of the power-based relationships of the 

feudal and service regime’ (AS, p. 346). 

This same argument is repeated in Weber’s ‘The City’, which is usually 

taken in some way to be part of a larger work Economy and Society.


The special position of the medieval city in the history of political 

development does not, in the last analysis, derive from the essentially 

economic contrasts between the urban burghers and the non-urban 

strata and their economic life styles. The crucial element was, rather, the 

general position of the city within the total framework of the medieval 

political associations and estates. It is this aspect which differentiates the 

typical medieval city most sharply from the ancient city . . . 

(ES, pp. 1339–40) 

Weber continues that ‘The political situation of the medieval townsmen 

determined his path which was that of a homo economicus; whereas in Antiquity 

the polis preserved during its heyday its character as the technically 

most advanced military association: the ancient townsman was a homo politicus’ 

(ES, p. 1354). 

Economy and Society: initial drafts and plans 

While the strong developmental ‘logic’ of the differential paths of the ancient 

and medieval cities enter through ‘The City’ into the analysis of Economy 

and Society, the so-called ‘older part’ of that work is not designed primarily 

with this in mind. ‘The City’ works with a range of classificatory types not 

unlike, nor unconnected to, the seven stages outlined at the start of ‘Agrarverhältnisse’. 

Weber calls them types but, again, as in ‘Agrarverhältnisse’, 

they are devices for modelling complex material, and the culturally heuristic 

impulse is missing. The phrase ‘ideal type’ does not occur in ‘The City’. 

These classificatory models cut across historically contingent developmental 

paths. Weber is quite happy to classify the citizen democracies of the ancient 

and medieval city together. This, as we know, goes against their contrasting 

developmental paths. Therefore, it would seem permissible to regard ‘The 

City’ as a conceptual grid with rows cross-cutting different civilizations and 

columns as developmental paths; although, having said this, Weber gives 

priority to rows over columns, and we seem to have arrived at a new stage 

in his thinking about comparative history. 

‘The City’ also relates back to the lectures on national-economy (see 

p. 23). It sits quite well with §11 (the city economy and the origins of modern 

enterprise). §11 itself sits within a developmental sequence of §8 (the typical 

forerunners of the economy), §9 (the economic development of ancient 

coastal civilization), §10 (the agrarian basis of medieval inland civilization) 

and, following on, §12 (the origin of the modern economy). ‘The City’ opens 

with a very Weberian approach to national-economy. Its first section is titled 

‘Concepts and Categories of the City’. Sociologically, the city is defined as a 

‘settlement of closely spaced dwellings which form a colony so extensive that 

the reciprocal personal acquaintance of the inhabitants, elsewhere characteristic 

of the neighbourhood, is lacking.’ The city is defined in an economic


sense if its inhabitants live ‘primarily from commerce and trades rather than 

from agriculture’ and if the city is ‘a market center’ (ES, pp. 1212–13). Weber 

goes on to discuss the city’s relationship to the surrounding lordship as 

well as its relationship to agriculture. Cities are economically classified into 

consumer, producer and merchant cities. (Actually, this threefold distinction 

was first elaborated by Sombart in the second volume of his moderne 

Kapitalismus. Weber takes it out of its modern European context and applies 

it in a universal manner across civilizations and time periods.) 26 Weber also 

discusses the urban economy ‘as a stage of economic development’. 

The relation of the city as the carrier of the craft and trading activities to 

the countryside as the supplier of food forms one aspect of that complex 

of phenomena which had been called the ‘urban economy’ (Stadtwirtschaft), 

juxtaposed, as a special economic stage, to the ‘household economy’ 

(Eigenwirtschaft), on the one hand and the ‘national-economy’ 

(Volkswirtschaft) on the other . . . 

(ES, p.1218) 

This is a clear, but unfootnoted, reference to Bücher’s schema. Weber 

does not discuss the matter in terms of time and sequential stages, but in 

terms of contiguity. He analyses how the town economy seeps into the rural 

economy and how the density of settlement marks it out from the village 

economy. 

Throughout ‘The City’, there is a continuous concern with political 

forms: within the city itself, to the surrounding centres of power, and the 

role of ruling bodies within the towns in terms of the furtherance of their 

own interests as well as the regulation of economic activity. 

The attentive reader may well be suffering from overload at this point. 

It has just been argued that ‘The City’ is consistent with national-economy 

and Weber’s periodization of economic history. The theme of developmental 

history has been pointed out. And in ‘The City’, Weber seems intent 

on cross-relating the city economy to the relevant sociological and political 

forms, and the work opens with a flurry of ‘concepts and categories’. In 

which direction, it might well be asked, was Weber’s argument, which is 

quite obviously comparative and of some complexity, heading? I will delay 

my attempt to answer this question, for we have arrived at the ‘big bang’ 

phase of Weber’s career. 

Der Grundriss der Sozialökonomik 

The German editor of Die Stadt for the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe writes 

in the opening paragraph of his preface, ‘This volume contains Max Weber’s 

uncompleted study “The City” which was first published in the Archiv für 

Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in 1921 and then again as a chapter of 

Economy and Society in 1922.’ In the first paragraph of his introduction,


the same editor, Wilfried Nippel, writes, ‘Max Weber’s posthumously published 

and uncompleted treatise “The City” exists in a state of preparation 

that can be dated to the period between the end of 1913 and the middle of 

1914. It cannot be unambiguously decided for what context Weber wrote 

the study and, after its possible completion, how he would have wished to 

use it (MWG, I, 22-5, p. 1). 

When we push open the study door marked ‘Economy and Society. The 

Older Part’, a quite alarming number of texts with similar introductions 

awaits the reader. Alongside ‘The City’ are the texts on communal groups, 

the sociology of religion, the sociology of law, the sociology of rulership, 

the sociology of music and an article on the categories of interpretative sociology. 

There is a scholarly dispute about what should and should not be 

included in this list and even the naming of the texts is problematic. It is 

known that Weber started to rewrite the whole Economy and Society project 

in 1919, and he published it in four chapters in 1920 just before he died. The 

older, probably discarded, manuscripts were retrieved from desk drawers by 

his wife Marianne who had them published after his death. The strong inference 

is that Weber himself would not have published them, and certainly 

not in the state Marianne found them. They are an amazingly rich store of 

special ‘sociologies’ written from the historical and comparative viewpoint. 

After their publication in Germany, they have been translated into many 

languages, although rarely initially as a ‘complete’ work. Guenther Roth and 

Claus Wittich boldly put together a full set of translations of Weber’s final 

version, the so-called ‘Part One’, along with the texts of the earlier versions, 

the so-called ‘Part Two’. It was published as Economy and Society by Bedminster 

Press in 1968. Weber’s reputation in international social science was 

established and cemented by this scholarly ‘tour de force’. The main overall 

difference between the final version and the earlier texts is one between 

schematic abstraction and historically rich conceptualization. Many scholars 

and users have a greater fondness for the earlier versions, which are information 

and hypothesis rich, rather than the later final version, which for many 

are too dry and casuistic. Looking for an overall pattern for the earlier texts 

is considered by some an illegitimate activity as they are disparate and may 

be abandoned texts. Working out the ‘logic’ of the final version is no easy 

task either, but it can be legitimately presumed that there is rationale behind 

it. 

The period when Weber was writing the earlier versions of Economy and 

Society overlaps with the start of another project, ‘Economic Ethics of the 

World Religions’ – hence the phrase ‘big bang’. Professor Lepsius, a senior 

editor of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, reckons that Weber was writing 

up to four manuscripts at the same time during this period. Hence a dramatic 

expansion had occurred compared with the scholarly monograph of 

the Protestant ethic study. Against this statement, however, it has to be held 

in mind that the framework of the lectures on national-economy (1898) 

outlined a set of interrelating topics that, in its scope (though obviously not


content), rivalled the ambitions of Economy and Society. Weber had always 

thought on the large scale. 

When Marianne Weber published as much of Weber’s work as she could 

lay her hands on in the early 1920s, she was (successfully) securing his legacy. 

When the German editors of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe came to publish 

the early versions of Economy and Society, they were faced with a series of 

quite punishing dilemmas. If there was some discoverable plan or immanent 

textual unity, then obviously this should be respected. But if there was not, 

how should the texts be treated? Wolfgang Mommsen, a senior editor of the 

Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, comments: 

Marianne Weber’s assumption that the so-called older section of Economy 

and Society which she edited from Weber’s papers constituted part 

of one comprehensive project was obviously mistaken. In fact the earlier 

texts were little more than a heap of manuscripts, many of them incomplete, 

most without definite titles or no titles at all. 

Furthermore, there was no indication of how they might have been 

arranged for publication. They represent an earlier version of Weber’s 

sociology. 27 

The Max Weber Gesamtausgabe have made the decision to break up the 

first drafts into five subvolumes, under the running heading of ‘Wirtschaft 

und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftliche Ordnungen und 

Mächte. Nachlaß’ (‘Economy and Society. The Economy and the Orders and 

Powers of Society. Posthumous Work’). The five subvolumes are entitled: 

‘Gemeinschaften’, ‘Religiöse Gemeinschaften’, ‘Recht’, ‘Herrschaft’ and 

‘Die Stadt’ (‘Communities’, ‘Religious Communities’, ‘Law’, ‘Domination’ 

and ‘The City’). Within some of these subvolumes, for example ‘Herrschaft’, 

the continuity of chapter headings, which is presented in Part 2 of Economy 

and Society, is abandoned for freestanding chapters with their own editorial 

introduction. 

Against this decision, Hiroshi Orihara has argued that the first drafts 

were nearly completed and that there does exist an inherent textual unity. 

Max Weber repeatedly cross-referenced to the various components of ‘The 

Economy and the Orders and Powers of Society’ (as he had entitled his contribution 

in 1914), as in ‘this has been discussed above’ or ‘see the discussion 

on this below’. Orihara says there are 447 of these cross-references, all but 

six of which he has identified in the texts. These cross-references provide the 

basis for reconstructing the structure and the sequencing of ‘The Economy 

and the Orders and Powers of Society’. Orihara, therefore, sharply criticizes 

the editors of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, in their ‘Overview of the 

Text of Economy and Society’, for their decision to dismember the textual 

corpus. 28 

The matter is further complicated because Economy and Society is not 

a stand-alone project but part of a far wider programme, known as the


Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. Paul Siebeck was the publisher of Gustav 

von Schönberg’s Handbuch der politischen Ökonomie, and on the death of 

Schönberg he offered its editorship to Weber in August 1908. Weber agreed 

to this in January 1909 on the condition that, while he might be the lead 

editor, the project should be carried forwards as a joint project of all the academic 

contributors. Effectively, though, it was Weber, in consultation with 

Paul Siebeck, who determined the coverage and scope of the new edition of 

Handbuch der politischen Ökonomie. The national-economists Georg Bücher 

and Eugen von Philippovich played supporting editorial roles to Weber. By 

May 1910, Weber had produced an outline plan for an overall conspectus of 

national-economy with publisher’s contracts ready to go out to forty, mainly 

German, national-economists. 

There was a protracted and bitter dispute with the representatives of 

Schönberg’s estate as to whether it had residual rights in the new Handbuch. 

The previous four editions had come to be known as Schönberg’sche 

Handbuch. To emphasize the change of editors, the new Handbuch under 

Weber’s direction was called Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, and it was specifically 

stated in its preface (in June 1914) that the attempt to publish a fifth 

edition of Schoenberg’s Handbuch had failed and that the Grundriss der 

Sozialökonomik was a brand new departure. 29 

Social economics was Weber’s new way of approaching national-economy 

and, as already noted above, the discourse of political economy had already 

been displaced in Weber’s circle of national-economists. What Weber 

planned and intended by the term ‘social economics’ is a major intellectual 

endeavour that I can only indicate (in this book). Initially, it is easier to think 

about Grundriss der Sozialökonomik as an extensive exercise in nationaleconomy. 

Weber divided up the field of national-economy into five books: 

1 Economy and the science of economics. 

2 The specific elements of the modern capitalist economy. 

3 The individual areas of production in the modern market economy and 

the domestic economic policies of modern states. 

4 The international-economy and the foreign economy and social–political 

policy of the modern state. 

5 The social relations of modern capitalism and the domestic social policy 

of the modern state. 

This outline is recognizably similar in scope to the lecture course outline 

of 1898. There is less emphasis on the historical and more detail on the 

specific industries and regulatory problems of the modern economy. Weber 

had returned to his didactic task as a lecturer in national-economy, but this 

time drawing on the talents of specialist economists. The outline is a massive 

confirmation of Weber’s abiding interest in capitalism and its development 

and the corollary for its study, national-economy. It also confirms that


Weber’s essayistic treatment of the spirit of capitalism in PESC was built 

on a secure and continuing knowledge of just about everything that was 

then to be known about capitalism. Bücher was commissioned to write on 

the epochs and stages of the economy as well as trade; the Austrian von 

Wieser to write on price theory; Joseph Schumpeter to write on the history 

of economic doctrines; Werner Sombart to write on the principal character 

of modern capitalism as a historical phenomenon. Other authors wrote on 

the institutions of finance, transport, industry – their types and location, 

mining, agriculture, forestry, hunting and fishing – housing and insurance. 

The Grundriss der Sozialökonomik would provide the reader and the student 

with a comprehensive presentation of the modern capitalist economy. 

Weber put his own name down for a variety of projects. Just to list these 

entries, they comprise: economy and race; economy and society; the methodology 

of economics; the modern state and capitalism; modern communication 

and news services and the capitalist economy; the limits of capitalism 

in agriculture; obstacles and reflex effects in the development of the modern 

capitalism; agrarian capitalism and population grouping; capitalism and 

the middle class (‘Mittelstand’); social position of the working class; and 

monopolistic, communal and bureaucratic tendencies in capitalist development 

(with Alfred Weber). It seems to me unlikely that he would have gone 

through with all these entries, probably at the initial stages indicating his 

commitment to the project before finding other authors. But, on the other 

hand, there is no reason to doubt his expertise in all these areas. 

Much of the material under these headings found its way into what has 

been published as Economy and Society. In the Outline of 1910, the actual 

heading of ‘Economy and Society’ appeared in Book One under Weber’s 

name. It is worth giving the major sections and subsections of Book One. 

Its formatting has to be understood if the rationale of Economy and Society 

itself is to be grasped. The breakdown of the subject of social economics is 

handled systematically by Weber, and the sequencing of materials also has to 

be understood. 

Book One. Economy and Economic Science 

I Epochs and stages of the economy (Prof. K. Bücher) 

II Economic theory (value and price theory, distribution, exchange, etc.) 

(Prof. v. Wieser) 

III Economy, nature and society 

1 Need and consumption as conditions for and as parts of the economy 

(Dr Oldenberg) 

2 The natural conditions of the economy 

a Geographical conditions (Prof. Hettner) 

b Economy and population (Prof. Mombert); economy and race 

(Prof. Max Weber) 

3 The technological conditions of the economy


a Economy and technology (Prof. v. Gottl) 

b Labour and the division of labour (Prof. Herkner) 

4 Economy and society 

a Economy and law (1. principal relations, 2. stages in the 

development of the present situation) (Prof. Max Weber) 

b Economy and social groups (family and local groups, estates and 

classes, state) (Prof. Max Weber) 

c Economy and culture (critique of historical materialism) (Prof. 

Max Weber) 

IV Economic science 

1 The object and logical nature of (scientific) questioning 

(‘Fragestellungen’) (Prof. Max Weber) 

2 Epochs in the history of methods and general theory (Prof. 

Schumpeter) 

V Paths of development in economic and sociopolitical systems and ideals 

(Prof. v. Philippovich) 30 

In Parts I and II, the economy is defined, its development outlined and 

economic theory is introduced. By Part III, then, the economy is established 

in its own right, and the task is to cross-relate it to economic geography, 

technology and society. Society is handled by Weber according to a modest 

set of categories (law, social groups and whatever lies behind the critique 

of historical materialism). Wolfgang J. Mommsen has argued that, at this 

stage (1910–12), Weber’s principal concern is to cross-relate the economy 

to the main communal forms of society – kinship groups, neighbourhood, 

family. A probable example of this phase of Weber’s writing is reprinted 

as Chapter 3 of Roth and Wittich’s edition of Economy and Society. 31 The 

original German editors supplied, or interpolated, the chapter heading and 

section titles. 

If we read the opening section of this text, we can obtain a pretty good 

sense of what Weber was trying to achieve. It has to be remembered that, 

while the scope of the Grundriss was extensive, its individual entries were 

meant to be didactic and not weighed down by theory or statistics. Economy 

and Society adheres to an encyclopaedia format, and its organization of materials 

was meant to aid accessibility and easy comprehension. Weber starts 

by making things easy for the reader. He will not examine ‘the specific, often 

highly complex effects of the ways in which social groups satisfy their economic 

wants’. A systematic classification of social groups ‘according to the 

structure, content and means of social action – a task that belongs to general 

sociology’ will be abandoned. 

Only the relationship of the economy to ‘society’ – in our case the general 

structure of human groups – will be discussed here and not the 

relationship between the economic sphere and specific areas of culture 

– literature, art, science, etc. Contents and directions of social action


are discussed only insofar as they give rise to specific forms that are 

economically relevant. 

(ES, p. 356) 

The social groups he then discusses in relation to the economy are the 

household, the neighbourhood (farm, village, city street, slum – and, in the 

year 2006, it is pertinent to note there now exist a quarter of a million slums 

in the world) and kinship group. 

This already tells us a great deal about Economy and Society. It was not 

a general sociology. The basic perspective is how specific social groups meet 

their economic needs and, under that perspective, Weber sets out the basic 

organizational forms of social groups and how they operate. These are classificatory 

forms, not ideal types in the 1905 usage of that heuristic; likewise, 

there seems little to connect Economy and Society and the Grundriss to 

PESC. The materials Weber introduces are very historical – clearly predating 

modern capitalism – and this is slightly strange, as the general focus of 

the Grundriss is the modern economy. But it does demonstrate that Weber 

remained fairly committed to the periodization we have already seen in the 

outline of his lecture course and in Bücher’s stage theory. 

This is just a snapshot of what Weber must have been writing in the first 

phases of Economy and Society, but the pattern of what he is doing is clear, 

and it repeats through his other areas of interest – law and culture. So, on 

the legal and economic order, he writes that social economics ‘considers 

actual human activities as they are conditioned by the necessity to take into 

account the facts of economic life’ (ES, pp. 311–12). Weber then discusses 

the principal legal forms – legal norms, laws, customs and conventions – as 

a prelude to considering their interaction with economic life. In establishing 

the basic forms, whether they are communal or legal, Weber is unable to 

stop himself from entering into long definitional passages, where he pins 

down the different senses of law, convention and custom. The main task of 

Economy and Society would surely be to move to a discussion of law in relation 

to economy, for example how community law is related to the village 

economic activity in certain ways, or how merchants have recourse to city 

or to canon law. It is a pronounced feature that definitions become a thing 

in themselves for Weber, something he himself recognized when he referred 

ironically to his ‘casuistry’. This feature of Weber’s writings, to an extent, 

detracts from accessibility criteria and the overall pedagogic function of the 

Grundriss. 

When the first volume of the Grundriss to appear was published in 1914, 

it carried a new plan of the entire work (‘Einteilung des Gesamtwerkes’). 

It shows that Weber withdrew from some of his projected entries and had 

greatly expanded his contribution to Economy and Society. The plan is a 

crucial guide for the overall structure of Economy and Society, as Weber was 

writing it in the period before the First World War. Most of the texts that 

were published in the Roth and Wittich Economy and Society as ‘Part Two’


can be related to this plan. Economy and Society now occupied a third of 

Book One, as Section C. This section was split into two. 

C. Economy and Society 

I The economy and the orders and powers of society (Weber) 

II The developmental paths of economic and sociopolitical systems and 

ideals (Philippovich) 

Subsection II remained the same as in the outline of 1910, and it was to 

be written by Philippovich. Subsection One, in English the so-called Part 

Two of Economy and Society, is in fact called ‘The Economy and the Orders 

and Powers of Society’. Strictly speaking, this is the title of the older parts 

to the extent that they formed a unity. This indicates a bolder conception. 

The economy is to be related not just to legal and social forms (as in 1910), 

but society is conceived of as having orders and powers (‘gesellschaftlichen 

Ordnungen und Mächte’). Weber provides the following breakdown of topics 

under this heading. 

1 Categories of the orders of society. 

Economy and law in their principal relations. 

The economic relationships of groups (‘Verbände’) in general. 

2 Household, ‘oikos’ and enterprise. 

3 Neighbourhood group, kinship groups, local community. 

4 Ethnic relationships of community. 

5 Religious communities. 

Class conditioning of religions; the religions of civilization and economic 

mentality (‘Wirtschaftsgesinnung’). 

6 Formation of market relationships (‘Marktvergemeinschaftung’). 

7 The political group (‘Verband’). 

Developmental conditions of law. Estates (‘Stände’), classes, parties. The 

nation. 

8 Rulership (‘Herrschaft’): 

a Three types of legitimate rulership. 

b Political and hierocratic rulership. 

c Non-legitimate rulership. 

Typology of cities. 

d The development of the modern state. 

e Modern political parties. 

Because ‘Part 2’ of Economy and Society provides some of the most read 

and applied passages of sociology, and has done for decades – for example, 

the excerpts on nation, ethnic groups, class and status groups – it is important 

to realize that they do belong to an overall framework, the 1914 

Outline Plan. Like the section on law and social groups, these passages can


of course be read for their own sake as freestanding parts. Weber, in writing 

these sections, himself becomes absorbed in the development of his ideas 

– another of his ‘temperamental qualities’. Although he disclaims writing a 

general sociology, he certainly created a series of special sociologies that, in 

the American Economy and Society, extends over a 1000 pages. The overall 

plan makes clear the interrelation of the sections and, above all, that there is 

a continuous reference point in all these writings, the economy, even though 

that reference point may disappear for long stretches of the work. 

One reason for the increase in length at this stage was that Weber had 

been let down by one of his principal authors, Karl Bücher. Weber, as we 

have seen in the ‘Agrarverhältnisse’, had ‘saved’ Bücher by turning his stage 

theory of economic evolution into ideal types. The tripartite distinction between 

the ‘oikos’, city and modern economies was a pivot on which Weber’s 

own thinking as a national-economist turned. That is why Bücher was given 

‘pole position’ in Section One, Book One in the Grundriss. Unfortunately, 

Bücher had slowed up, he was ill and ageing, and he had belatedly delivered 

only twenty pages of dry economic reasoning. The Grundriss was already 

behind schedule, and Weber had to make good the difference himself in his 

section. Weber wrote to Paul Siebeck (30 December 1913) to explain and 

announce the reason for his own ballooning contribution. 

Because Bücher’s ‘Stages of Development’ is wholly insufficient, I have 

worked out a unified sociological theory and presentation, which places 

all the main forms of social groups (‘Gemeinschaftsformen’) in relation 

to the economy: from the family and household to the ‘enterprise’ (‘Betrieb’), 

to the clans, to ethnic groups, to religion (all main religions on 

earth comprising: a sociology of salvation doctrines and religious ethics, 

– what Troeltsch has done but now for all religions, but much shorter), 

finally a comprehensive sociological theory of rulership and the state 

(‘Staats- und Herrschafts-Lehre’). I should say that nothing like this has 

been done before, not even in outline. 32 

(The reference to Troeltsch was the latter’s The Social Teaching of the 

Christian Churches.) Weber also added a footnote to his letter to Siebeck. 

‘Later at some point I hope to provide you with a sociology of culture, its 

contents (art, literature, Weltanschauung) – not part of this work or only as 

a free-standing supplementary volume.’ This was a remarkable statement 

of his ambitions, creativity and, one should add, a mind that was looking 

around for new avenues of investigation. Weber never achieved this goal, 

although he did mention it again as an ambition around 1920. 

The extra historical material (sections 2 and 3 in the 1914 Plan) was 

inserted because Bücher had failed to deliver it. The deficiency Weber was 

in part making up for concerned Bücher’s notion of ‘primitivism’. Classical 

Mediterranean societies had achieved the social and economic forms of the 

‘oikos’ in its urban and rural forms. Something still remained to be said about


more basic communal and localist forms such as the household, neighbourhood 

and an earlier epoch of clans. Weber was able to draw upon previous 

work he had done in conjunction with the publication of Marianne Weber’s 

Wife and Mother in Relation to the Development of Law. 33 

Section 4 on ethnic communities appears to exist in a fairly fragmentary 

state, and it relates in part to household and family, through a discussion of 

racial intermarriage, and in part to ethnic communities and their relation to 

the nation. Section 6 would appear to be fundamental to the project of social 

economics as it purports to deal with the social nature of market relationships. 

And then we come to the fairly clearly defined sociologies of religion 

(section 5) and power and rulership (sections 7 and 8). 

An interpretative sociology 

Weber’s preoccupation with sociology dates from 1910, and it emerges out 

of his massive project on, and commitment to, social economics. We might 

even describe Weber as a reluctant sociologist. In December 1913, he wrote 

to his fellow Grundriss contributors to explain the name change from Handbuch 

der Politischen Oekonomie to Grundriss der Sozialökonomik and to update 

them on publication plans. Because of the non-submission of important 

contributions (a veiled reference to Bücher), Weber says he will make good 

the deficiency himself in the section on ‘Economy and Society’. His piece 

would be ‘a pretty comprehensive sociological discussion’ and, apart from 

the circumstances outlined ‘he would never have taken the task on’ (MWG, 

II, p. 427). The task that had fallen to him was to relate economy to the principal 

orders and powers of society. Here he required a sociology to handle 

the major social forms of human life. It is quite noticeable that Weber has 

no prior account or grand theory of society as an entity. He was still standing 

by his distaste for the ‘bad authors’ in sociology. What he required was a 

way of particularizing the nature of the social relationship as it existed, and 

as it changed, in a variety of settings: for example, the clan, the ‘oikos’, cities, 

political groups, structures of power, religious communities, etc. These 

elements became a grand design – the orders and powers of society – in the 

plan of 1914. And from this, we derive the grand sociologist, Max Weber, 

from the publication of Economy and Society. But it has to be understood 

that he is most directly concerned with the nature of social relationships as 

these exist in the various areas of social life: household, law, religion, politics, 

economy. 

1910 also marks his commitment to sociology by becoming a founder 

member of the German Sociological Society. This met for the first time in 

October 1910, providing a forum for those who wanted to discuss ‘the problems 

of living in modern society’, as Marianne Weber puts it in her biography. 

34 Its emphasis was on contemporary problems, and the first conference 

took as its themes technology and culture, race and society, the sociology 

of panic, economy and law, and legal science and sociology. The problems


of living in modern society, broadly conceived, relate to the ‘Kapitalismus’ 

problematic. For Weber, who was closely aligned with Simmel in the founding 

of the Society, the material, psychic and technological problems faced by 

the individual in contemporary science were treated as problems of modern 

culture. Lawrence Scaff argues that, at the first meeting, Weber ‘took it upon 

himself to identify the specific problems of modern culture as the relationship 

between the technologies and form of objective culture on the one hand 

and the subjective “conduct of life” on the other . . .’. Weber wanted culture 

to be made a thematic focus of the conference. 35 This picked up the theme 

outlined at the end of PESC, where Weber dramatizes the fate of the individual 

in the face of the giganticism of an impersonal economic order (PESC, 

pp. 181–3). Weber invested considerable effort and time in trying to get an 

inquiry of the press under way (although was ultimately unsuccessful in this). 

The press represented one of the major shapers of objective culture. Weber 

proposed the questions, ‘What does the press contribute to the formation 

of modern humanity?’ ‘What kinds of mass beliefs and hopes, of “feelings 

towards life” (Lebensgefühle) as one says today, of possible points of view 

will be destroyed or created anew?’ 36 The answers to these questions threw 

the emphasis on to how individuals were able to shape their lives and, hence, 

a concern with subjective culture. 

Scaff quotes an interesting remark from a letter of Simmel’s concerning 

the planning of the second conference of the German Sociological Society 

in 1912. 

In my opinion for meetings where discussion is expected one should 

avoid everything that can or even must lead to a quarrel over concepts 

and definitions. In sociology we have in this regard suffered to the point 

of suffocation, and a discussion about what folk, nation, or race ‘actually 

are’ would be deadly for our session . . .. What do members think 

of the theme, the relations of handicraft industry to individual spheres 

of culture, that is, to political organization, to art, to relationships with 

foreign countries, to the nature of the family, etc.? 37 

This statement could stand for Weber’s own view of sociology – that it 

would be a relational study. In Simmel’s example, he uses artisanal industry 

as a topic for study, and the relational questions become ones of its influence 

on art and politics and so on. These relationships could only be particularized 

and could not be contained by discussion of the nature of social groups. 

In Weber’s own intervention from the floor in the first conference, he discusses 

technology (‘Technik’). Weber discusses a series of possible relational 

links: technology and capitalism, technology and material determination, 

technology and art (and its formal values), technology and the modern urban 

sensibility. 38 Sociology then may be said to be the study of contemporary cultural 

problems in their relational connection; a study bearing a pronounced 

interdisciplinarity. There is little sense of Weber committing to a pure sociology 

as a freestanding discipline.


Weber resigned shortly after the second conference in 1912 following 

a heated conference debate on the permissibility of academics expressing 

normative viewpoints in the guise of scientific statements. Weber was committed 

to the Archiv’s stance, outlined in the introduction to the ‘Objectivity’ 

essay of 1904. Weber fought for the principle in another policy forum, the 

Verein für Sozialpolitik, in its 1909 conference in Vienna. Mixing science 

with value judgements, opined Weber, was ‘the work of the devil’. 39 There 

had to be a clear separation so that questions of scientific validity could be 

assessed unclouded by value judgements, which remained a separate sphere 

of public debate. Weber was particularly concerned that this principle was 

incorporated into the statutes of the German Sociological Society. Sociology 

was a fledgling science, and the mixing of normative prescriptions with 

scientific analysis had to be avoided. For example, in the study of the press, 

it would be only too easy to condemn the content of certain newspapers. 

What was important, however, was to analyse the growth of press media and 

show how it shaped the individual’s way of thinking regardless of normative 

content. Scientific comment here had to remain free from value judgements. 

Weber’s stance was written into the first paragraph of the German Sociological 

Society’s statutes. 

The aim is to promote sociological knowledge by the arrangement of 

purely scientific investigations and enquiries, by the publication and 

support of purely scientific works and by the organization of German 

sociology conferences to take place periodically. It will give equal space 

to all scientific directions and methods of sociology and will reject the 

representation of any practical (ethical, religious, political, aesthetic, 

etc.) goals. 40 

At the 1912 conference, Rudolf Goldscheid argued for a sociology based 

on the scientific study of biology. This, for Weber, was an example of hated 

monism, that physiological forces could extend their explanatory reach to 

parts of behaviour that properly belonged in the cultural sphere of meanings. 

Weber resigned in something of a rage that Statute 1 was not being observed. 

He unburdened himself in a letter to Roberto Michels. 

I resigned from the executive committee of the ‘sociologists’. In a struggle 

in permanence my nerves aren’t a match for such pesky insects as 

Herr Goldscheid – for his ‘services’ in good faith and his ‘idealism’ too! 

Now I am only still trying to organize the scientific activity as best I can. 

May these gentlemen, none of whom can stifle the impulse (for that’s 

what it is!) to importune the public with his subjective ‘valuations’, all 

infinitely uninteresting to me, and everyone of whom must otherwise 

still turn his lectures into hard cash (this does not occur in the Verein 

für Sozialpolitik) kindly stay in their own circle. I am absolutely fed up 

with appearing time and time again as a Don Quixote of an allegedly 

‘unfeasible’ principle and of provoking ‘embarrassing scenes’. 41


Like geographers who cannot read road maps in a car, one might observe 

that Weber was one of those sociologists who are not the most social animals. 

However, despite very obvious temperamental difficulties on Weber’s 

part, his joining and leaving the German Sociological Society is an episode 

that underlines his very specific expectations for sociology, as a science. It 

was to do with cultural meanings and social relationships. The ideal type was 

its main instrument of investigation, and this coloured Weber’s whole view 

of a science of society. Others, with more ‘realist’ or ‘monistic’ theoretical 

agendas, failed to understand and to agree with what they would have considered 

Weber’s eccentric purism. 

Weber’s first major dedicated exposition of sociology occurred in his article 

‘Some Categories of Interpretative Sociology’, which was published in 

the journal Logos in 1913. The fact that Weber chose to publish this text 

has detracted a little from the fact that it has very strong linkages to the 

manuscripts of the older parts of Economy and Society (which he did not 

publish). This is one of the reasons why the editors of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe 

chose not to include it in the volumes dedicated to the older parts 

of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. 42 Hiroshi Orihara has convincingly argued on 

the basis of explicit references in the text, which can be cross-referenced to 

other parts of Economy and Society, that it stands as a ‘head’ in relation to 

the ‘torso’ of the other texts. 43 This is a scholarly and technical dispute, but 

both sides acknowledge that ‘Some Categories of Interpretative Sociology’ is 

a highly significant text in Weber’s intellectual evolution – probably the most 

important essay since the 1904 ‘Objectivity’ essay. 

Weber, in his opening footnote, writes, ‘The second part of the essay 

is a fragment from an exposition written some time ago that was to have 

served as a methodological basis for substantive investigations, among which 

is a contribution (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft) to a forthcoming series of 

volumes and from which other parts will probably eventually be published 

elsewhere.’ 44 This sentence (which I have retranslated more precisely) reveals 

that the second part of the essay was indeed a methodological statement 

intended for the Grundriss and related directly to Economy and Society. The 

‘other parts’ that might be published elsewhere implies that pieces would be 

taken out of his writing of Economy and Society – with the inference that 

this writing could not be contained within howsoever Weber was planning 

his own contribution. Since the ‘Categories’ essay was published in 1913, it 

predates the plan of 1914, and so Weber was already thinking of off-loading 

material elsewhere. 

The first part of the essay recapitulates material, for the Logos readership, 

that Weber had been dealing with in his ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ since 1900. The 

central issue is how there can be an interpretative science of human behaviour. 

Logos was a philosophical journal closely connected to Heidelberg circles, 

and it took as its starting point culture both as an object of investigation 

and as a means of knowing the world – it was another expression of Baden 

neo-Kantianism. Weber’s task was, therefore, not so much to convince them 

of an interpretivist approach as the way to understanding as to show how


this should correctly proceed and to differentiate his method from other 

similar but not always correct approaches. In his opening footnote, Weber 

references this general field. The list comprises Simmel, Rickert, Tönnies, 

Vierkandt, Gottl, Husserl and Lask who, in their different ways, took the 

individual, meaning and its expression, subjectivity and psychology as their 

subject matter. 

It is not necessary to analyse the essay in detail. It is quite hard to follow 

all Weber’s arguments, the exposition of certain points could be fuller, 

and the justification of certain arguments is sometimes lacking. He revised it 

comprehensively after the war, and this included a whole set of terminological 

changes. The later version, to an extent a new text, remains a challenging 

document, but it does have a strict logical structure of exposition and 

informative explanatory sections. The 1913 ‘Categories’ essay is interesting 

for what it tells us about Weber’s view of methodology at a point when his 

horizons had widened – first with the Grundriss, second the comparative 

historical sociology of Economy and Society and, third, his writings on the 

economic ethics of world religions, which he had also started. It is in this 

wider context of intellectual interests that sociology makes its first major 

appearance. The interpretative approach is now called sociology whereas, 

previously, especially 1904–5, it was an approach that was applied to the 

cultural sciences (and sometimes the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’). 

Weber takes only a page to state the basic case for the role of understanding 

(‘Verstehen’). This is an even more brusque treatment than in the 

‘Objectivity’ essay where, as we have seen, Weber was less than fulsome in 

mentioning his methodological debts and sources (to Dilthey in particular). 

The first paragraph (of this not widely available essay in English), in its conciseness, 

is one of the most forward statements of ‘Verstehen’ to be found 

anywhere. 

Human behaviour (‘external’ or ‘internal’) exhibits both relational 

contexts (‘Zusammenhänge’) and regularities in its course, as do all occurrences. 

But what is unique to human behaviour – at least in its full 

sense – are contexts and regularities whose course can be intelligibly 

interpreted. An [intelligible] ‘understanding’ (‘Verständnis’) of human 

behaviour achieved through interpretation contains above all a specific 

quality of evidence (‘Evidenz’), which varies greatly in degree. That an 

interpretation possesses this evidence in especially high measure does 

not in itself prove anything about its empirical validity. For identical behaviour, 

in its external course and result, can be based on the most varied 

constellations of motives whose most intelligibly evident quality is not 

always the one actually in play. Rather, the ‘understanding’ (‘Verstehen’ 

– inverted commas in original German) of the context must always be 

controlled as far as possible by the usual methods of causal imputation 

(‘Zurechnung’) before an ever so evident interpretation becomes a valid 

‘intelligible explanation’. 

(GAWL, pp. 427–8, my translation; see also Cat, p. 151)


The observer thinks the motive for action in a particular context is selfevident 

or immediately understandable, but this then has to be checked. On 

further observation and consideration, the motive attributed may turn out to 

be wrong, and another is imputed in its place as more valid. 

Weber appears to preclude any discussion of hermeneutics, the art of 

interpretation, by simply saying it is evident and that validation belongs to 

causal attribution. But he then goes on to introduce a scale of interpretation. 

What is obviously evident is at the top of the scale. Instrumentally rational 

action – how best to achieve a goal – is an example of evident behaviour, as 

is our ability to understand behaviour motivated by emotion. Other forms 

of behaviour are less accessible to understanding, for example religious 

mysticism or that of small children. Abnormal behaviour is not in principle 

closed to understanding. Weber also cites here psychotic behaviour, a clear 

reference to Karl Jaspers’ interpretative method and approach to psychopathology. 

At the bottom end of the scale are behaviours that completely 

lack the quality of self-evidence – they are incomprehensible. ‘The object of 

the discussion, “Verstehen”, is ultimately also the reason why interpretative 

sociology . . . treats the single individual and his action as its basic unit, as 

its “atom”, if this questionable analogy is allowed here’ (Cat, p. 158). Weber 

continues that there is a threshold, below which the sociological study of 

meaningful behaviour gives way to other disciplines that treat the individual 

as a complex of ‘psychic, chemical and other processes’. Then there is a 

threshold above which the individual is treated. Action is comprehended ‘in 

the guise of a persistent structure, either of a material entity, or of a personified 

force leading a life of its own’. Jurisprudence will treat the ‘state’ as a 

legal personality. This is useful for jurisprudence because it ‘deals with the 

interpretation of objective meaning, i.e., with the normative content of legal 

propositions’. Interpretative sociology, however, deals with ‘certain kinds of 

joint human action’ and not a normatively conceived entity such as the state 

or the association, or – for the historian – entities such as feudalism. 

Sociology, then, sits between other disciplines such as law and sociobiology 

and treats the band of meaningful behaviour of people interacting 

with each other. Also, it does not deal with persistent structures, only joint 

behaviour of plural individuals. 

Weber clarifies an intellectual pitfall. It is the illusion that, because we 

understand something as self-evident, the nature of the explanation rests 

with psychology. Weber is averse to this, and it was the common criticism 

levelled at Dilthey that his interpretative method was merely psychological 

intuition. It is here that Weber distances himself from Simmel who, in his 

Problems in the History of Philosophy, asserted that we understood the motives 

of historical personalities because, at some deep level, which he called 

‘the soul’, there is a common psychological substratum of understanding. 

This was Simmel’s somewhat less than plausible transcendental basis for 

understanding the internal motives of historical actors. In its place, Weber


asserts the need for causal imputation through consideration of the empirically 

ascertainable facts of the situation. 

The essay picks up an increasing number of references to history, to religion, 

to the irrational basis of salvation beliefs, and to magic, to various 

types of economies, to racial and language communities and to law, power, 

coercion and rulership – signs of Weber’s increasing comparative scope. 

How does an interpretative sociology help in this enterprise? This is the ‘the 

sociological basis for the substantive studies’ of Economy and Society that 

Weber mentions in his opening footnote, and it occupies the second half of 

the essay. The essay is a sustained deliberation on the forms and formation of 

social action that sustain the more obviously sociological character of institutions 

and social structures. To use Weber’s own (‘inappropriate’) analogy, he 

is offering an account of the atomic basis of the orders and powers of society. 

This, he says, is the individual. I think it is worth insisting that this is not a 

claim for ‘methodological individualism’ – a phrase, incidentally, invented 

by Schumpeter not Weber. Individuals are particles that combine to create 

various sorts of social interaction, and the context of these interactions is 

saturated in meaning, to which ‘particles’ orient their behaviour. The reductionism, 

which is seen as a virtue of methodological individualism, is not a 

valid assumption for Weber’s ‘atomic’ account. Certainly, individuals are the 

only units (‘Einheiten’) that can, for Weber, be legitimately used in sociological 

analysis, but they exist in a state of indeterminacy and openness. The 

nature of the interactions is never structured according to clear boundaries, 

there is always a fluidity between types of interaction. Weber insists upon this 

because he wants to eliminate top-down sociological theories. The state or 

law or the organization is a nominal entity produced by types of interactions 

working with specific textures of meaning. Political science or jurisprudence 

or organizational theory may choose to treat these entities as real – or, in the 

terminology of legal theory, to concede to them legal personalities – but this 

is inadmissible for sociology. These nominal entities should not be assumed 

to be real or, as Weber sometimes expressed it: they should not be hypostatized; 

individual behaviour cannot be deduced from these high-level entities, 

nor can higher level structures be induced from individuals. 

What does remain a constant for Weber are interaction processes and 

contexts of meaning. This might seem a little perverse or anti-sociological. 

But, as we have seen in the last chapter with respect to J.S. Mill and Comte, 

once a methodology commits to either deductive or inductive (or variants 

thereof) accounts of individual and society, the justifying theoretical and 

epistemological scaffolding becomes extensive and vulnerable to some fairly 

basic objections – many of which were raised by Dilthey. The interaction 

processes in contexts of meaning do, however, result in regularities. Weber 

asserts this in the opening sentence of the essay, ‘human behaviour . . . exhibits 

both relational contexts and regularities’. 

In the ‘Categories’ essay, these regularities are shaped by three basic types


of interaction: (1) Individuals might chose to form communal or social links. 

The German term that Weber uses is ‘Gemeinschaftshandeln’. Literally, this 

means communal action, but what Weber is denoting by ‘Gemeinschaft’ 

lies semantically somewhere between the English ‘social’ and ‘communal’. 

(2) Individuals might choose to form associational links (‘Gesellschaftshandeln’). 

This behaviour is oriented to the assumption that some sort of order 

exists with a set of rules, which can be related to rationally. (3) Individuals 

might choose to forms links on the basis of coming to an agreement (‘Einverständnishandeln’). 

Individuals enter into or become part of these three 

types, which are fluid between each other, from opposed or complementary 

interests – this is the aspect of external behaviour. In their ‘internal’ aspect, 

a variety of motives may be operant. These belong to the sliding scale already 

mentioned: subjectively instrumental motives, motivation driven by 

emotions, irrational motives extending to the psychotic and non-meaningful 

behaviour based on sheer unthinking habit. 

This is, so to speak, a summary of Weber’s atomic theory of social interaction. 

It is so densely written that it can scarcely be reckoned to be a 

success. It is an extremely pregnant essay with a wealth of ideas and quite 

fundamental thinking – one that could be profitably reworked in a number 

of ways. As I said, Weber rewrote it when he drastically revised the older 

parts of Economy and Society after 1918. The main function and purpose 

of the essay is to present interpretative sociology as the undergirding theory 

to the substantive part of Economy and Society – the various sociologies of 

the economy, law, religion, power and the state. The orders and powers of 

society are inevitably going to be discussed, by Weber and others, as possessing 

qualities of structure, order, hierarchy and boundaries. This is inevitable 

because most people will think of society in this way and, secondly, for the 

sociologist, it becomes a necessary shorthand. That being said, Weber is insistent 

that the structuring qualities are interaction processes in relational 

contexts of meaning. Weber’s word for these power, order or institutional 

structures is ‘Gebilde’, which he often place in inverted commas. ‘Gebilde’ is 

a polyvalent word: its meanings include thing, object, construction, creation, 

pattern, shape, organization and figment (of imagination). Its ambivalence 

turns on something concrete yet something also being formed. For Weber, 

this indeterminacy is an inherent feature of structure. 

In the last part of this section, I will highlight the (few) examples that Weber 

presents to link interpretative sociology to the substantive sociologies. 

‘We shall speak of “social action” (“Gemeinschaftshandeln”) wherever human 

action is subjectively related in meaning to the behaviour of others. An 

unintended collision of two cyclists, for example, shall not be called social 

action.’ But in the resultant aftermath, whether amicable or not, a meaningful, 

and so social, relationship is established. Social action can be oriented 

in its entirety to meaning, as in the case of devotion to (religious) values. 

An obvious example of ‘association’ action is the voluntary association. It 

is ‘an associational action wherein all participants have rationally agreed on


an order defining the purpose and the methods of their joint action’ (Cat, p. 

163). Agreement between economic actors in the case of a cartel is another 

example of associational action. Supermarkets, for example, might form an 

ad hoc agreement to fix prices. In Weber’s day, the whole structure of production, 

pricing and sales was regulated by cartels with a permanent staff. The 

whole field of economic exchange throws up a range of examples of types 

of association. Some sort of permanent legal (and associational) order can 

guarantee the validity of exchange on the markets (with enforceable laws for 

breaches of agreements). Or, more minimally, economic actors may develop 

their own agreed rules for associating in exchanges. The associational nature 

of exchange does not generate, says Weber, enduring structures. Similarly, 

the history of the state originates in temporary associations, for example in 

military expeditions for booty and ad hoc defence associations that could 

cease to exist. 

A language community is an example of agreed action (‘Einverständnis’), 

‘ “as if ” those speaking were orienting their behaviour toward rationally 

agreed upon grammatical rules’ (Cat, p. 167). Weber introduces this example 

specifically to reject alternative explanations of a language community. ‘All 

analogies to the “organism” and to similar biological concepts are doomed 

to sterility.’ 

‘Domination as the most significant foundation of nearly all organizational 

action, whose analytical problematic begins here, is necessarily an 

object of separate consideration not to be explained here.’ This is an explicit 

reference to his (massive) sociology of ‘Herrschaft’ as he developed it in 

the early parts of Economy and Society. Its sociological analysis ‘depends 

decisively on the varying possible subjectively meaningful bases of that legitimacy 

agreement . . .’ (Cat, p. 177). Legitimacy was determinative for 

submission where naked power and coercion do not intervene. The varieties 

of legitimacy in his substantive sociology encompass the belief in tradition, 

the belief in the charismatic personality and the belief in rational legitimacy 

of an order of rules. 

Although these examples, in their sparseness, may not strike us as completely 

persuasive of the worth of the approach (an interpretative sociology), 

Weber is offering, in principle, that any part of the substantive sociologies 

can be traced back to some type of interaction, or multiplicity of types, and 

the particular meanings that context interactions. An organization, a social 

group, a religious sect, a rational mechanistic bureaucracy, a retinue and so 

on, these are all to be approached through Weber’s interpretative sociology. 

It is a frequent complaint that Weber failed to provide an adequate linkage 

between structural and substantive sociology – where wholesale rulerships 

and cultures take the stage – and his individualizing method. The ‘Categories’ 

essay supplies the answer to the complaint: the indeterminacy of interaction 

types and meanings underwrites more ‘structural’ sociology but refuses to 

confirm structures as entities in their own right.

6 The Sociology of Religion 

The period 1910 to the summer of 1914 stands as a period of exceptional 

productivity. Weber had put on hold his Protestantism studies, only returning 

to them in 1919 to revise them for their inclusion in his ‘Collected Essays 

in the Sociology of Religion’. In the last chapter, his move into an encyclopaedic 

charting of the principal relations of economy and society were 

outlined. Using an abbreviated version of the Outline Plan of 1914, I have 

listed the main headings of this in the right hand column of Figure 6.1. In 

the left hand column are listed his studies – actualised and planned – on the 

‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’. 

Feeding into this diagram are the ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ and the 

essay ‘Sociological Categories of Interpretative Sociology’, both of which 

were discussed in the last chapter. I have not entered them into the diagram. 

The ‘Categories’ essay is central to this expansive period of Weber’s writings. 

‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ precedes the period, but sets up the 

scaffolding for a comparative approach. It provided a three-way comparison 

between Rome, Greece and the Near East. The analysis of the Near East 

offered a linkage in the form of the bureaucratic liturgical state to the ideal 

type of patrimonialism, and was able to include Chinese structures of rulership. 

Religion, which had only be touched upon in terms of the economic 

functions of temple treasuries and the place of priests within the ruling elites, 

was to be expanded as a set of sociological categories and applied to China, 

India, the Near East and the traditions of Christianity in the Mediterranean 

and inland Europe. 

It is important to grasp the specific status of these texts and plans. There 

is a large discrepancy between what Weber intended and what was subsequently 

published. Weber planned to write works that he never got around 

to executing. And the converse is just as important: he wrote texts that were 

subsequently published but that he himself would not have published – and 

certainly not in the unrevised state in which they appeared after his death. 

This gives us three main categories of his texts and plans:

Collected Essays 

in the Sociology of 

Religion 

Prefatory Remarks 3 

The Protestant 

Ethic and the Spirit 

of Capitalism 3 

Protestant Sects 

and Spirit of Capitalism 

3 

EEWR 


Confucianism 3 

Intermediate 

Reflection 3 

Hinduism and 

Buddhism 3 

Ancient Judaism 3 

Mesopotamia, Eygpt, 

Persia 1 

European Bürgertum 1 

Talmudic Judaism 1 

Islam 1 

Oriental Christianity 1 

Occidental 

Christianity 1 

Figure 6.1 Publication plans. 

The 

Sociology 

of Religion 2 

Versions of Economy and Society for 

Grundriss der Sozialökonomik 

Outline Plan of 1914 

Economy and the Orders and Powers 

of Society 

1. Categories of the orders of society 2 

2. Household, Oikos, and Enterprise 2 

3. Neighbourhood group, kinship 

groups, local community 2 

4. Ethnic relationships of community 2 

5. Religious communities 2 

6. Formation of market relationships 2 

7. The political group (‘Verband’) 

Developmental conditions of law 

Estates (‘Stände’), classes, parties 

The nation 2 

8. Rulership (‘Herrschaft’): 

a) Three types of legitimate rulership 2 

b) Political and hierocratic rulership 2 

c) Non-legitimate rulership 2 

Typology of cities 

d) The development of the modern 

state 1 

e) Modern political parties 1 

Economy and Society. Final Version 

(1920) 

Basic Sociological Concepts 3 

Basic Sociological Concepts of 

Economizing 3 

Sociology of Domination 3 

Classes and Status Groups 3


1 Planned but unrealized texts. 

2 Texts that were written but due to be revised, or not published at all, yet 

were published after his death. 

3 Texts that were written and brought to publication by Weber himself. 

Each of these categories is registered in superscript in Figure 6.1. 

Moving to the columns, on the right is ‘The Economy and the Orders and 

Powers of Society’. What has to be held in mind at this point is that it was 

essentially a commissioned work for the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. As 

Weber was the lead editor for the Grundriss, he had considerable leeway to 

adapt his own contribution. We can see in his relationship, and correspondence, 

with his publisher (Siebeck) that the specifications of his contribution 

underwent a number of changes. There still remains, however, a tension 

between the encyclopaedia format of ‘The Economy and Orders and Powers 

of Society’ (hereafter EOPS), including the requirement that it relate to the 

overall architecture of the Grundriss, and the historical themes and ideal 

types that belonged distinctively to Weber’s own plans. (One of Weber’s 

major headaches here was inflation. In pursuing a number of not necessarily 

compatible goals, Weber tended to overwrite his contribution. This is one of 

the reasons why he needed to revise the manuscripts of the ‘older part’, and 

so these texts carry the superscript 2.) 

The column on the left is headed ‘Collected Essays in the Sociology of 

Religion’. The contents carry the superscript 1 and 3. The studies on Confucianism, 

on Hinduism and Buddhism and on Ancient Judaism are among the 

most famous and respected essays Weber wrote and, as such, do not require 

much additional comment here. Weber published them first in the Archiv 

and then revised them – the Confucian study considerably – for publication 

in his Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (‘Collected Essays in the 

Sociology of Religion’). What stands out in the list are the titles bearing 

superscript 3 – the texts he planned but never wrote. 

Between the two columns stands the work known in English as The 

Sociology of Religion and, in German, as Religiöse Gemeinschaften. Typen 

religiöser Vergemeinschaftung (‘Religious Communities. Types of Religious 

Sociation’). Strictly speaking, it belongs in the right hand column and is 

the same as no. 5, as the title indicates. But Weber extracted whole sections 

from it and used them in the works in the left hand column, in particular the 

‘Introduction’ to ‘The Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ and the ‘Intermediate 

Reflection’ essays. Marianne Weber published the old manuscript 

of The Sociology of Religion in its entirety after Weber’s death, even though 

bits had already been published and the manuscript was unfinished. Weber 

would have had to rework the manuscript had he chosen to publish it in the 

revised Economy and Society, which he worked on in the last two years of 

his life. The Sociology of Religion, to give it its English book title translation, 

stands at the centre of the matrix. 

It is quite hard to come to grips with this period of Weber’s creativity, 

because of the sheer scale and depth of his researches. (Also, it should be

The Sociology of Religion 159 

noted, I have omitted from the diagram his study on the sociology of music, 

which Weber deliberately abandoned because of doubts about its value; 

also his study, on The City, which most probably belongs within this period, 

standing somewhere between the ‘Agrarverhältnisse’ and the manuscripts for 

‘The Economy and the Orders and Powers of Society’.) Some economy of 

mental effort might be had if the upper part of the right hand column is 

ignored on the grounds that Weber intended to revise those chapters. This is 

an unconvincing move for various reasons. The chapters have all been published, 

some as freestanding books – especially in translation – so some effort 

must be made to understand the original context. The right hand column 

operates as a counterweight to the studies on the world religions (in the left 

hand column). Then, finally, one has to be able to understand the rationale 

for Weber’s late and uncompleted revision of the chapters in the right hand 

column. The final revision was a very intellectually assertive exercise, and it 

goes to the heart of how Weber thought modernity should be studied. The 

phase of 1910–14 had not quite found the right balance and method. 

The interrelation between the left hand and right hand columns can be 

grasped if the correspondence between Weber and his publisher is followed. 

This has become available with the publication of most of the relevant volumes 

in the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe. As noted in the previous chapter, 

Weber wrote (in December 1913) to Paul Siebeck about the progress (or lack 

of it) of the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. 

Because Bücher’s ‘Stages of Development’ is wholly insufficient, I have 

worked out a unified sociological theory and presentation, which places 

all the main forms of social groups (‘Gemeinschaftsformen’) in relation 

to the economy: from the family and household to the ‘enterprise’ (‘Betrieb’), 

to the clans, to ethnic groups, to religion (all main religions on 

earth comprising: a sociology of salvation doctrines and religious ethics, 

– what Troeltsch has done but now for all religions, but much shorter), 

finally a comprehensive sociological theory of rulership and the state 

(‘Staats- und Herrschafts-Lehre’). I should say that nothing like this has 

been done before, not even in outline. 1 

Weber continued that in a fortnight he would send a table of contents. 

This has not been found, but the Outline Plan of 1914, which is reproduced 

in abbreviated form in the right hand column (see p. 145 for full outline), 

corresponds to what Weber lists in the above letter. Item 5 of the Outline 

Plan of 1914 ‘Religiöse Gemeinschaften’ also includes ‘The Class Determination 

of Religions. The Religions of Civilization and Economic Mentality’. 

Schmidt-Glintzer’s comments that this indicates the insertion of Weber’s 

comparative research on religion into the plans for the Grundriss. Weber’s 

analysis would provide a critical analysis of both sides of the argument on 

determination – does class determine religion? does religion determine class? 

– and the analysis would involve material taken from the main religions of 

civilization.


Schmidt-Glintzer also comments that we cannot establish any chronological 

or substantive sequencing of the materials in both right and left columns. 

In the period 1910–14, Weber was writing for both the ‘Economic Ethics’ 

project and for his contribution to the Grundriss. 2 

The correspondence on the ‘Economic Ethics of World Religions’ is informative. 

Although these essays started to appear in October 1915 in the 

Archiv, it appears that they belong to the same period of composition as the 

Sociology of Religion. Weber volunteered for service duties the day after war 

was declared in August 1914, and he only turned back to academic work in 

the summer of 1915, and then only partially. He was not fully released from 

his hospital administrative post until the end of September. The Grundriss 

project was placed on hold until the war was over. Siebeck’s were starved of 

copy. Weber wrote to the publisher on 12 June 1915. 

I would be prepared to give the Archiv a series of essays on the ‘Economic 

Ethics of World Religions’ which have sat here since the start of 

the war and only need to be read through for style – preliminary work 

and elucidation for the systematic sociology of religion in ‘G. d. S. Ö’. 

They will have to appear as they are – with almost no footnotes, since 

at the moment I can’t do any work whatsoever on them. They comprise 

Confucianism (China), Hinduism and Buddhism (India), Judaism, Islam, 

Christianity. I flatter myself that these essays, which bring to bear the 

general application of the methods of the essay ‘The Prot. Ethic and 

Spirit of Capitalism’, will likewise provide a strong contrast to the relevant 

volumes. They can be published separately later along with that 

essay, if you wish. But not now, since in their present form they are only 

appropriate as journal essays. As always I offer them first to the Archiv. If 

that doesn’t suit – that is if you and Jaffé only want war-time issues, then 

I won’t take offence and on this occasion perhaps try another journal. 

The essays are quite long. Some 4 essays of 4–5 Bogen. It will be good 

for the G. d. S. Ö. if they were published soon, at least some of them. 

For the publication in the G. d. S. Ö. will have to be more limited and 

‘systematic’. I’ve spoken to Dr Lederer about this. Please send this letter 

to Jaffé if you wish. 

(MWG, I/19, pp. 35–6) 

It should be noted that Weber was offering his publisher studies on Islam 

and Christianity. While these were never published, the implication of the 

letter is that they were to hand. More still was to be offered. When the first 

instalment on Ancient Judaism was published in the Archiv in October 1917, 

its opening footnotes read, ‘The following presentation is published omitting 

the debates on Egyptian, Babylonian and Persian circumstances. This will be 

added in a future collection and revised publication (including references for 

China and enlarged) together with older and some still unpublished essays.’ 3 

On 24 May 1917, Weber wrote to his publisher, ‘The revision and expansion


of the first essays for the Gesamtausgabe (if you wish the “Collected Essays” 

together with Kapitalismus and Protestantismus) will happen after the war. 

This could be three medium sized volumes if collection extended to study 

on Christianity.’ 

After the war, in August 1919, Weber informed his wife of his publishing 

schedule. ‘I’m now getting to work on “Protestant Ethic” in preparation 

for printing. Then, the “Economic Ethics”. After that the Sociology . . . I 

work slowly on the “Protestant Ethic” edition and other articles and will see 

through the other things.’ 

And on 11 September 1919, he wrote to Siebeck, 

The Preliminary Remarks (Vorbemerkung) is not yet written, it will follow 

soon after the manuscript of the revised ‘Spirit of Capitalism’ is 

ready. ‘Church and Sects’ will follow in 8 days. 

Then the essays of ‘Economic Ethics of World Religions’ would have 

followed. China (Confucianism) is already partly enlarged, but needs a 

few weeks extra work. India is ready for printing as it is, after proofreading. 

Then an essay needs to be inserted, which is not yet written 

(but is in my head) over the general reasons of occidental separate 

development. Then follows Judaism (just has to be corrected). 

Of ‘Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft’ (GSÖ) I could send the start, but its 

continuation has still and unconditionally to be thoroughly revised. 

(MWG, I/19, p. 44) 

For the ‘Collected Essays in Religion’, he wrote out the following advert, 

which was received by the publisher on 24 September 1919: 

Almost all the essays collected together have appeared in the Archiv für 

Sozialpolitik und Sozialwissenschaft but are now not only checked but 

enlarged through considerable insertions and the adding of material. At 

the start is the much discussed essay on ‘The Protestant Ethic and the 

Spirit of Capitalism’. Then, following a sketch on the ‘The Protestant 

Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism’ (revision of an essay from the Christliche 

Welt), the essays on the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ 

enlarged with a short presentation of the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and 

Zoroastrian religious ethics, but in particular through a short sketch – on 

the origins of the social distinctiveness of the Occident – of the development 

of the European Bürgertum in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. 

The presentation of Judaism stretches back to the beginning of the Maccabaean 

period. A third volume will contain the presentation of early 

Christianity, of Talmudic Judaism, of Islam and of Oriental Christianity, 

a final volume on the Christianity of the Occident. The overall subject 

concerns the question: What are the grounds for the economic and social 

distinctiveness (‘Eigenart’) of the Occident, as it has originated and, 

in particular, how it connects with the development of religious ethics. 4


The various items in both columns can be checked against these letters. 

Very broadly speaking, the Economic Ethics of the World Religions in the 

left-hand column is concerned with the developmental history of whole civilizations. 

The right hand column with the first drafts (EOPS) and their later 

revision as Economy and Society were intended as Weber’s contribution to 

the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik and, in that respect, would follow a more 

systematic format. Even though Weber did not meet his publication plans 

for EEWR, the inference is that these belonged to the period before 1914. 

The letter of 12 June 1915 indicates that Weber did not rigidly separate the 

two projects: the EEWR studies were preliminary studies for the Grundriss, 

almost implying that they were working papers. He allowed the Archiv to 

publish them as a wartime contingency, but they had to be brought up to 

proper publishing standard for the publication of the ‘Collected Essays in 

the Sociology of Religion’ in 1920. The Grundriss commanded priority in 

Weber’s mind. He wrote to Siebeck, his publisher, in February 1917, ‘If only 

the war would end then I could return to my Grundriss volume. But within 

myself it is just not possible and I prefer to pursue the articles on the Relig. 

Sociology further. But my desire is for the other.’ 5 

The exact relationship of these two contemporaneous projects has been 

a source of some fascination to Weber specialists. Friedrich Tenbruck, in a 

seminal article, argued that Weber’s main insights were contained in the 

studies for EEWR. Tenbruck was writing at a time when cultural analysis 

was not yet fashionable, and the full thrust of Weber’s arguments were not 

fully appreciated (not least because of the vagaries of translation). 6 Tenbruck 

picked up on the simple but very powerful idea that worldviews, provided 

by religion and culture, structure people’s actions at the level of perception 

and the interpretation of the meaning of the world. This contrasted with 

Economy and Society where the main determinants appear to be socioeconomic 

and political in nature. This set up a fairly stark debate between some 

sort of materialist/power analysis versus the role of cultural determination. 

Tenbruck himself inclined to a version of cultural conservatism and clearly 

felt that culture and civilization had to be assessed in terms of fundamental 

values. In this respect, a post-1945 civilization based on American values 

– material well-being and political democracy – seemed ill-equipped to ask 

the deeper, more Tolstoyan questions of the purpose of the conduct of life 

and the underlying nature of society. Only by grasping in a comparative 

manner the way in which cultures underwrote civilizations could some critical 

purchase be applied to a contemporary diagnosis. Tenbruck questioned 

whether modernity and progress could be so glibly equated, although at 

times his position verged towards an anti-modernity. While Weber on many 

occasions struck the pessimistic chord (usually most plangently), it would 

have been wrong for Tenbruck to term Weber an anti-modernist. The Grundriss 

was a wholesale document for the modernization of the German-speaking 

world by making available the most up-to-date social science knowledge. 

But Tenbruck did draw attention to a very Weberian theme. Modernity was 

not a given, it was the product of a historical and cultural determination, and


this was a proper object of critical discourse. Even as his letters to Siebeck 

above show, Weber wished to advert to the singularity and distinctiveness of 

the Occident. Belonging to modernity meant knowing about its constitution 

and, through civilizational analysis, its alternatives. 7 

Johannes Winckelmann, the German editor of the fifth edition of Wirtschaft 

und Gesellschaft, unsurprisingly defended its claims as Weber’s main 

work. Weber, as we have just seen, certainly saw it as his main priority. There 

is also, however, the undeniable point that Weber never finished it. Weber 

was not prepared to let it be published in its pre-1914 state – it had to 

be ‘unconditionally’ revised. But he revised in full only three chapters of a 

work that in 1914 was to contain eight chapters. Wolfgang Schluchter was 

the first scholar to outline meticulously the chronology of both projects, 

and he was able to show a high degree of interdependence between them. 8 

Schluchter also worked his way through the conceptual arguments of both 

projects and was able to re-engineer a schematic presentation of all the main 

ideas and concepts that belonged to both projects. One perhaps unwanted 

consequence of this reconstruction was to bring the dry systematic character 

of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft to the much more free-flowing and, at times, 

more passionately written studies on the world religions. The two projects 

might be related, but they belonged to two different intellectual styles within 

Weber’s thinking. There is no standardized Weber analysis but, instead, a 

multiplicity of styles and formats. 

The Sociology of Religion certainly gave Schluchter a substantial pretext, 

for it can be seen from the diagram to be part of both projects, thus furnishing 

arguments of interdependence. The Sociology of Religion is a brilliant, freely 

formulated text. It was also left unfinished, would not have been published 

without major revision by Weber and is, on first acquaintance, bewildering 

to follow. In what follows, I draw attention to some of its oddities and weaknesses 

rather than simply assuming that its textual status is an unproblematic 

basis for interpretation. 

The Sociology of Religion was having to meet and satisfy quite a number 

of challenging demands. In the Grundriss, Weber’s specific task was to follow 

the series of enduring institutions – household, neighbourhood, ethnic community, 

religious groups, market association, the political group, law, social 

stratification and the major types of rulership – and to show the various lines 

of co-determination of these institutions with the economy. This was the task 

of social economics and the rationale of the Grundriss itself. And, to perform 

this task, Weber had developed his ‘Categories of Interpretative Sociology’ 

to analyse more exactly the nature of the social interactions involved. The 

Sociology of Religion became a special sociology, like those of law and rulership. 

Like them, it became a book-length treatment. Partly, this was because 

Weber could not resist the legalistic casuistry of minute conceptual definition 

and accompanying explanations and examples; partly, because he was increasingly 

drawn into a comparative orbit beyond the circle of occidental 

history. 

The Sociology of Religion, in going beyond its original basis, gave birth to


the studies in the world religions. All the titles, both realized and planned, 

in the left hand column are mentioned, discussed and analysed in the Sociology 

of Religion. Whole sections in EEWR are lifted straight out of the text 

of the Sociology of Religion – in the ‘Introduction’, ‘Confucianism’ and the 

‘Intermediate Reflection’ 9 – and hence there is some justification in thinking 

that it served as an outline sketch for thinking about other religions and 

civilizations and their development. And, in being pulled in this direction, 

it became a less systematic treatise on the relation of religion, economy and 

basic institutions. 

Debates over religion in ‘Religionswissenschaft’ 

The editor of the Sociology of Religion for the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, 

Hans Kippenberg, has reconstructed the debates and the sources on which 

Weber drew. Kippenberg’s work is a major scholarly intervention, because 

it shows how dependent Weber was on the new scientific study of religion 

when it came to dealing with the subject in comparative perspective. Because 

the Sociology of Religion has no footnotes, nor any kind of introductory 

literature review of current debates, it has been assumed that all the 

concepts were Weber’s own. This is quite misleading, and it should also be 

remembered that Weber, while being highly original, was also a very reactive 

author. Also, there has been a tendency to assimilate his Sociology of Religion 

with his other writings. But examining his sources, and the major debates 

that were involved, a different picture emerges. Many of the major concepts 

that he took from ‘Religionswissenschaft’ were in themselves unresolved and 

still open. Despite the brilliance of some of his writing, The Sociology of Religion 

should be regarded as an exploratory work. In going comparative, Weber 

had logged into a new set of problems – and without properly escaping 

the issues raised by the critical debates over PESC. Much of the exposition 

of sources in this section is taken from Kippenberg’s ‘Einleitung’ to Religiöse 

Gemeinschaften in the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe. 

The major scriptural sources of the main world religions were being 

translated and commented upon by European scholars in this period. The 

German discipline of ‘Religionswissenschaft’ was developing an objective 

study of religion without prioritizing the revelatory superiority of Christianity. 

In particular, it was establishing the historical provenance of sacred texts 

– when they were written and under what societal circumstances. Much of 

the conceptual structure and terminology of the Sociology of Religion were 

taken directly from this academic context with which Weber had obviously 

been staying in close contact. The study of religion in Germany was guided 

by neo-Kantian methodology, and Rickert and Windelband were influential. 

At the first conference of the German Sociology Society in October 1910, 

an afternoon of debate was given over to religion. Troeltsch gave the opening 

paper on ‘Stoic–Christian Natural Law and Profane Natural Law’ and, 

in the subsequent (stenographically recorded) debate, Ferdinand Tönnies,


Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Martin Buber and Hermann Kantorowicz were 

contributors. Then there was the Eranos club in Heidelberg to which Weber 

belonged. From 1904 to 1908, a small group of professors would meet on a 

monthly basis in semester time to give papers on religion and society, treated 

historically and comparatively. 

The conceptual train of Weber’s argument in The Sociology of Religion 

can be aligned alongside contemporary approaches. Reduced to a conceptual 

skeleton, Weber argues that no definition of religion can be provided other 

than that it revolves around various attempts – religion, magic, frenzy, cults, 

totemism, etc. – to utilize, by coercion or by pleading, extraordinary powers 

for protection against nature or human foes. These attempts most usually 

concern goals in this world – prosperity, health, security – whereas developed 

religions tend to concern other-worldly goals such as immortality, the soul, 

nirvana and so on. What Weber wishes to explain is how the more frequent 

naturalistic state of ‘religion’, in which this-worldly goals are thought about 

as being deliverable by natural objects, is transformed into religions that are 

capable of devising abstract gods whose worship and attendance is oriented 

to godly purposes, not human needs in this world. For this to occur, personal 

bearers (charismatics, magicians) and ways of delivering extraordinary powers 

(frenzy, cultic rites) have, as religious action, to detach themselves from 

earthly ends. As Kippenberg summarizes Weber’s argument, 

The sequence of magician–priest–prophet involves transferring the principle 

of religious social action from magic to that of cult, and of cult to 

that of ethics. The failure of the non-specialist magician worked in favour 

of the priests. On the orders of the political group, the priests did not 

wish to compel the gods but to influence them through the cult. It was 

they who conceive the world as a permanent and meaningfully ordered 

cosmos. They make the believers themselves responsible for misfortune 

in so far as they have disregarded the divine order. Prophets gave this 

declaration an ethical turn and integrated ‘the relation of human beings 

to the world on ultimate and unified value-positions’. Around these are 

formed communities based on an ethic. The following distinction then 

becomes important: the prophet of the Near East, where the conception 

of a personal transcendental god predominates, is seen as the bringer of 

the word of god and a preacher of an ethic of obedience. The prophet 

in India, by contrast, where the idea of a divine cosmic order predominates, 

follows an exemplary life of flight from the world as the way 

to holiness – as in the example of Buddha. Prophetic communities can 

only become permanent, if the priests establish doctrine as binding and 

through preaching and the cure of the soul they have an effect upon the 

conduct of life of the laity. 10 

Once the idea of an ordered and divine cosmos has been established, 

which is no easy task and Weber is hesitant in his argumentation here, a


second phase of the text starts. This is a discussion, in historical comparative 

terms, of the triangle of priests, prophets and laity. Societies are composed of 

negatively and positively social strata, and this affects their choice of religion 

and conduct of life. The laity are an independent agent in the take up of religious 

views of the world propagandized by priests and prophets. This section 

was reused and expanded in the ‘Introduction’ Weber wrote for EEWR. 

The third phase of the text concerns the relation of priests and intellectuals 

in constructing pictures of a meaningfully ordered cosmos. It is built on the 

premise that religion stands in opposition to the other orders of the world. 

Weber reused this section in the ‘Intermediate Reflection’ of EEWR. 

The Sociology of Religion is a work that does not explain itself, and it 

pays to turn to its academic hinterland for clarification. One large question 

was how to analyse primitive societies. The anthropology of Edward 

Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer was evolutionary, and was influenced 

by Auguste Comte’s law of three stages of how people thought about 

the world: from theological and the idiom of spirits, to metaphysical terms 

and, finally, to positivist terms and science. It was Frazer who, through his 

collection of data on folklore and ethnology, argued that magic and cultic 

practices, such as sacrifice, were used as a source of power over the natural 

world. In archaic societies, kings would control the weather – the rain maker 

– through the practice of magical rites and, for Frazer, this was the origin of 

political power. Tylor argued that the move from magic to religion was part 

of the evolution of culture, which he defined not in the normative sense of a 

superior civilization but, as Adam Kuper notes, in the German sense. 

Culture in this usage, included not only the products of élite civilization, 

but the whole gamut of learnt skills, habits, modes of communication 

and beliefs which went to make up a particular way of life, and it was 

the proper object of anthropological study. Cultures progressed along 

uniform lines, either as a result of borrowing or by independent inventions 

which took similar forms at particular levels of development. 11 

Frazer’s major book, The Golden Bough, was first published in 1890, and 

Tylor’s Primitive Culture in 1871. Hans Kippenberg points out that the criticisms 

of their work by Robert Marett had been republished in 1909 in the 

Archiv für Religionswissenschaft. Magic, for Tylor, represented a primitive 

form of belief in which objects were thought to possess spirits that exercised 

superempirical power. This was primitive mythic thinking. Marett argued 

that thinking about the natural world proceeded not through myths, but 

through the use of symbols where users were aware of the ‘as if ’ status of 

symbolic knowledge. Early man could distinguish the symbolization from 

the real, whereas the attribution of myth to archaic societies imposed a false 

credulity. Marett, then, was providing early man with rational capacities in 

a world that lacked scientific explanation. In place of magic (animism – the


belief in spirits), Marett advanced the idea of preanimism. He also rejected 

the evolutionary account of change in Tylor and Frazer. 

Weber, of course, followed Marett in rejecting an evolutionary theory of 

religion. But many of the specific ideas in the debates are in evidence in the 

Sociology of Religion. Frazer’s linking of power and magic and cultic rites 

provides Weber with his starting point. ‘It is primarily, though not exclusively, 

these extraordinary powers that have been designated by such special terms 

as “mana”, “orenda”, and the Iranian “maga” (the term from which our 

word “magic” is derived). We shall henceforth employ the term “charisma” 

for such extraordinary powers’ (SocRel, p. 2). The Melanesian term ‘mana’ 

and the Iroquois term ‘orenda’ described the attributes of power, supernatural, 

out of the ordinary that attached to people or to things. Tylor’s idea of 

‘survivals’ – magic and rite in the early modern world – is an evolutionary 

survival in the sense that rocks contain fossil ‘survivals’ from earlier aeons. 

Weber rejected the evolutionary method but repeatedly stressed that magic 

and rite are never eliminated by developed religions. 

To this day, no decision of church councils, differentiating the ‘worship’ 

of God from the ‘adoration’ of the icons of saints . . . has succeeded in 

deterring a south European peasant from spitting on the statue of a saint 

when he holds it responsible that a favour he sought did not materialize, 

even though the customary procedures were performed. 

(SocRel, p. 2) 

Frazer’s idea that Christianity was originally a cultic practice is a notion 

that Weber frequently alludes to. Eating together – commensality – is an 

early and strong form of social bonding based on the magical qualifications 

of the participants; Christianity was based on extending cultic meals beyond 

restricted ethnic and kinship boundaries. Weber actually pinpoints the 

growth of Christianity to Antioch when the apostle Peter tells Paul that he 

must eat with the uncircumcised, i.e. the ritualistically separate non-Jewish. 

Edwin Rohde’s book on frenzy (‘Rausch’) was also influential. Weber frequently 

notes that one way of calling up supernatural forces was through the 

route of ecstatic visions, voices, possession, which could be artificially stimulated 

through drugs, alcohol, overeating meat, dancing, music and sexual 

orgies. Weber often uses the term orgy, but it is less the sexual content as the 

creation of a state of frenzy through arousal. 

Weber steers well clear of any one unifying theory whether evolutionary, 

or totemism, or primitive ‘Rausch’. The whole opening section of the 

Sociology of Religion reflects Weber’s reluctance to embrace any one theory, 

yet also to advance the claim of a range of practices as the manipulation 

of the superempirical for this-worldly and everyday purposes. To this day, 

anthropologists have shied away from committing to any one theory of 

magic, religion, rite, cult, totemism and taboo. No one theory can account


for so many disparate phenomena, and the boundaries of what differentiates 

religion from magic, and both from social behaviour, have proved hard to 

define. As the anthropologist Maurice Bloch has observed: ‘Anthropologists 

who specialize in the study of preliterate societies have always been faced 

with the difficult problem of defining what kind of phenomena can be called 

religious.’ 12 

Weber faced a dilemma not too dissimilar from the controversy over 

Bücher’s theory of evolution. Weber is dealing with three stages: (1) primitive 

practices – cults, taboos, totemism; (2) magic; and (3) religion. The 

stages overlap and have no necessity of succession on an evolutionary basis. 

He does not deploy the methodology of ideal type in order to say that these 

stages are a means of classification, as he did when defending Bücher in 

‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’. Indeed, the ideal type does not feature at 

all. He does refer to ‘pure types’, for example of priests, magicians and types 

of prophets. But pure types relate to practitioners or bearers, not to a periodization. 

To an extent, he handles the problem by keeping the discussion 

to examples and case studies. When he talks about religions or magic or 

cults, he particularizes it to empirical data taken from history, ethnology and 

anthropology. Nevertheless, the thrust of The Sociology of Religion remains 

to outline the properties of the main world religions, which are markedly 

different in their internal dynamics when compared with magic and preanimism. 

Weber writes, 

Transitions from pre-animistic naturalism to symbolism were altogether 

variable as regards specific details. When the primitive tears out the heart 

of a slain foe, or wrenches the sexual organs from the body of his victim, 

or extracts the brain from the skull and then mounts the skull in his 

home or esteems it as the most precious of bridal presents, or eats part 

of the bodies of slain foes or the bodies of especially powerful animals 

– he really believes he is coming into possession, in a naturalistic fashion, 

of the various powers attributed to these physical organs. 


A war dance at first is simply a heroic frenzy prior to battle – it is naturalistic 

and tries to evoke greater powers over the enemies. But a transition 

occurs when the patterns of a war dance become fixed through magical manipulation: 

‘mimetically anticipates victory and seeks to insure it by magical 

means’. Likewise, animals can be sacrificed but according to fixed rites. This 

is the threshold of the move to symbolism. By eating a sacrificed animal, the 

participants see themselves as being bonded together because ‘the soul of 

the animal has passed into them’. This can be termed mythological thinking 

but, as Weber notes, the actual processes of transition from naturalism to 

symbolism are varied and complex (SocRel, p. 9). 

The symbolism of rites and of magical practices is retained in religion,


which is more obviously concerned with belief and dogma. Weber notes 

that controversy is often sparked by a change to symbolism rather than to 

doctrine. A schism was caused in the seventeenth century in the Russian 

Orthodox Church over how many horizontal bars the cross should have. 

Weber has a similar problem in his discussion of gods. As with the concept 

of religion, which Weber refused to define, he expounds instead the large 

number of forms in which they are conceived. Gods may be naturalistic – in 

the Vedas, fire is god – they may be impersonal – ‘numina’ in Rome – or they 

may be personalized as in the Greek gods. ‘The gods frequently constituted 

an unordered miscellany of accidental entities held together fortuitously by 

the cult, and this condition was by no means confined to periods of meager 

social development’ (SocRel, p. 10). Weber points out that the sociological 

factors in the ‘choice’ of gods is by no means obvious. One would expect 

agrarian societies to honour chthonic deities – i.e. gods rooted in the earth 

such as the ‘Mother Earth’ cult – ‘but such parallelism is not always direct’ 

and, here, Weber enters into an inconclusive account of heavenly versus 

earthly (tellurian) gods. However, Weber does offer a limited formulation 

of the dynamics of god formation. ‘Both the increasing objective significance 

of typical components and types of conduct and subjective reflection about 

them [gods] lead to objective specialization among the gods’ (SocRel, p. 14). 

Some gods, by virtue of abstraction (Brahma) or priority (Janus), achieve 

supremacy over other gods. God formation is closely related to the need of 

the social group. Each group, whether household, clan or prince, requires 

its own god, for this unifies its members ‘into a strongly cohesive group’ 

(SocRel, p. 15). The political dynamics of a patrimonial leader being lord 

over other households leads to a situation in which his special god becomes 

superior over other domestic gods. Taken another step, the patrimonial ruler 

becomes the high priest, as in the case of the Chinese emperor and the Roman 

ruler (‘princeps’). In the case of a confederation of clans, an oath may 

be taken to a god who then makes the federation sacred; the example Weber 

gives is of Jews with Midianites. The god – in this case Yahweh – imposes a 

contractual obligation on the peoples of Israel and ‘from this, various ritual, 

canonical, and ethical obligations which were binding upon the human partner 

were presumed to flow’ (SocRel, p. 16). In contrast, the Greek ‘polis’ 

did not allow the formation of an overarching priesthood, but remained a 

personal association of ‘confrères with cultic associations related to tribe, 

clan and household gods’. Weber comments that this marked the ‘polis’ out 

as a group body (‘Verband’) rather than an institution (‘Anstalt’), like the 

modern state. 

In the next section of the Sociology of Religion, a stronger argument 

emerges. The endpoint of his discussion is monotheistic, salvation world 

religions, which is how Protestant Christianity is reconceptualized. First, 

the internal and external factors affecting the development of religion from 

local, to universal and, finally, to world status have to be outlined. Factors 

intrinsic to religion include consistency, and religions that are tied to stellar


and planetary regularities achieve well. Monolatry, the worship of one god 

instead of many, and an ethical dimension also contribute. External factors 

consist of a religion being taken up by a dominant ruler. Judaism scores 

well on both sets of factors – Yahweh is occasioned through political federation 

and Yahweh also comes to demand ethical behaviour of his followers. 

Weber also suggests that one way of distinguishing sorcery from religion is 

whether priests and lay people attempt to coerce a spirit or divinity. Prayer, 

and religion, is an entreaty to a higher lord, whereas sorcery is a matter 

of routines and practices as devices to compel an extraordinary power to 

favour the practitioner. The common theme in both is to do something in 

order to get something back, and the overlaps between magic and religion in 

this respect are apparent. Silent prayer would count as religion, prayer beads 

or machines or prayer strips as magic. 

Weber’s own concept rationalization appears at this juncture. Sorting out 

a mass of gods into some kind of pantheon is an example of rationalization, 

or ‘ratio’ – a word he sometimes prefers. There is at work in religion 

‘a special evolutionary process’ . . . , ‘there is an ever-broadening rational 

systematization of the concept of god and of the thinking concerning the 

possible relationships of the divine’ (SocRel, p. 27). There can also be ‘primitive 

rationalism’ – sorcery is a straightforward request for something. The 

end goal of religion, in contrast, is successively ‘irrationalized’ (a term Weber 

himself puts in quotation marks). The Puritan prays and behaves for otherworldly 

purposes, not daring to be venal enough to ask for good fortune. 

Judged comparatively, this is irrational and departs from the common reason 

for religion – to invoke out-of-the-ordinary powers to ensure good fortune. 

Rationalization, as ‘ratio’, is a mental or ‘geistlich’ phenomenon; hence, factors 

of rationalization intrinsic to religion as an intellectual product can be 

seen to drive it forwards. This is not, however, an inevitable process, because 

any number of contingent external circumstances can intervene to stop rationalization 

processes within religion. The most common is the demand 

of the laity for the retention of magical elements – ‘an accessible and tangible 

religious object’ rather than an abstract concept such as a monotheistic 

other-worldly god (SocRel, p. 25). There are, says Weber, very few consistent 

monotheistic religions: Judaism, Islam and Protestant Christianity. ‘The 

Hindu and Christian forms of the sole or supreme deity are theological concealments 

of the fact that an important and unique religious interest, namely 

in salvation through the incarnation of a divinity, stands in the way of strict 

monotheism’ (SocRel, p. 20). Elsewhere, Weber refers to Christ as a magician 

– useful for popularity, but not wholly consistent with the Abrahamic 

conception of god. 

In the next section, Weber attempts or, rather, feels his way towards the 

distinction between magicians and priests. The exercise is not completely 

successful for, as Weber admits, the magical and the religious can rarely be 

absolutely separated; also, Weber is unable to pin down exactly what marks 

a transition point from magic to religion. Obviously, he was conscious that


evolutionary manoeuvres were illegitimate. Weber’s theory of transition is 

that they were rare and historically contingent, yet were in some way part 

of a process of rationalization whose dynamics Weber tries to specify. Those 

dynamics turn on the inability of magicians to rationalize belief in spirits 

into a ‘rational’ system of ethics and beliefs, which was an accomplishment 

achieved (in rare cases) by priests. Priests, in this reading, are a permanent 

enterprise (‘Betrieb’), whereas magicians are more of an occasional pursuit. 

This is bound up with how to explain a move from trying to compel a divinity 

through sorcery and trying to influence a god through entreaty. 

Another, and compatible, reading of this section of the text is its orientation 

to EOPS. Here, an extensive array of examples is outlined in the consideration 

of the role of gods in relation to, first, the social order and, second, 

the economy. He makes a principled statement about the requirements of the 

social order under conditions of: (1) large settled pacified political groupings 

for legislation; (2) the increased need of a rational comprehension of an 

external, permanent and orderly cosmos, and this relates to the (agricultural) 

needs for meteorology; (3) with increased human interaction, a dependence 

on conventional rules and that people observe these rules; and (4) a growth 

in the dependence of trust in the given word – between friends, vassals and 

lords, officials, actors in economic exchange and so on (SocRel, pp. 35–6). 

Weber does not say it, but this was the condition, historically, of settled 

agrarian societies from China to Europe. Weber here states an a priori case 

for the strengthening of the basis of order in societies based on increasing 

interdependence. Therefore, in Weber’s argument, there was a predilection 

to attach the ethical systems of human interaction to cosmic accounts of 

obligations; calling up extraordinary power now extends to the social order 

itself. 

Underlying these empirical observations is a neo-Kantian predilection 

to link meaning and order (‘Sinn’ and ‘Ordnung’), a characteristic missing 

from the ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’, where external, structural factors 

prevail in Weber’s analysis. 

For the ancient Greeks, it was the idea that the gods to which they turned 

were in themselves ‘subject to some social and moral order’ – that order 

was ultimately predetermined by the fates (‘moira’). Confucianism and Brahmanism 

were cases of theocratic strata upholding the social order to which 

is imparted cosmic authority and an ethical–rational character. In Hindu 

rites, a fixed order of religious ceremony, together with a fixed order of the 

cosmos, led to a fixed sense of human activity. This leads Weber to note that 

the important role of ethics could be supplied equally by magical practices 

alongside obedience to a religious law. Taboos are proscriptive, with evil 

consequences following their transgression. Totemism, the alleged powers of 

animal and natural objects, has a role in creating strong kinship bonds and 

kinship patterns. Taboos, when extended to dietary restrictions, define the 

inner group of those who eat together, and also add strength to caste systems. 

Moving the argument on to the economic consequences, a caste order


leads to an immutable occupational system and a traditionalist economic 

ethic. The ‘feng shui’ system of spirits restricted the development of trade in 

China (although Weber predicts that the railway system would undermine 

both the caste system in India and the belief in spirits in China). Ascetic 

Protestantism stands out uniquely in giving ethical support to ‘economic 

rationalism’ (SocRel, p. 42). 

This brings Weber up against the problem of how ethical religions can develop 

out of the more predominant mode of magic-based prohibitions – how 

‘the belief in spirits became rationalized into belief in gods’, the move from 

coercive magic to prayer as entreaty (SocRel, p. 43), i.e. how does Weber 

initiate the developmental path of religion that would culminate, much later, 

in Protestant Christianity, which adhered so strongly to an ethical transcendental 

god and abhorred any vestige of magic? To answer this – it has to be 

said, at this stage, tentatively – he goes back to early developments in Judaism. 

The Old Testament or Hebrew Bible has a well-developed sense of good 

and evil as religiously buttressed. The question becomes one of returning to 

before good and evil and, here, Weber appears to offer an intermediate situation 

pitched between magic and religion. In magic, it is rational to ask and 

propitiate a god for victory over one’s enemies. In this sense, salvation is the 

literal sense of being saved from one’s enemies. ‘In the Old Testament, the 

idea of “salvation”, pregnant with consequences, still has the elementary rational 

meaning of liberation from concrete ills’ (SocRel, p. 44). Propitiating 

a god is a form of piety, which Weber defines here as ‘behaviour acceptable 

to a god’. ‘In its earliest stages, the religious ethic consistently shares another 

characteristic with magical worship, in that it is frequently composed of a 

complex of heterogeneous prescriptions and prohibitions, derived from the 

most diverse motives and occasions . . . any infraction of an ethic constitutes 

sin.’ It was the Israeli prophets, such as Isaiah, who convinced the believers 

in Yahweh that misfortune was the result of the people’s sin. Sin at this 

point amounts to annoying a god who punishes his believers, and it does not 

have a metaphysical sense. Behaving correctly may be more important than 

believing properly. (Incidental to this, as Kippenberg notes, was Julius Wellhausen’s 

scholarship that had established that the first five books of the Old 

Testament did not belong to the earliest history of Israel and Judaea. ‘In the 

beginning’ was not metaphysical belief and the awesome word of god instituted 

by Moses, but a collection of tribes pursuing magic and cultic gods. 13 ) 

Holiness and piety tend to be associated with goodness, sin with evil. Even 

at this point, however, ‘The conceptions of sin and piety as integral powers, 

envisaged as rather like material substances, still remained within the circle 

of magical notions. At this stage, the nature of the “good” or “evil” of the 

acting person is construed after the fashion of a poison, a healing antidote, 

or a bodily temperature.’ 

It is a long way from the notion that the person who acts with goodness 

has received into himself a special soul of divine provenience . . . So


too, it is a far cry from the conception of sin as a poison in the body of 

the malefactor, which must be treated by magical means, to the conception 

of an evil demon which enters into possession of him, and on to 

the culminating conception of the diabolical power of the radical evil, 

with which the evildoer must struggle lest he succumb to its dangerous 

power. 


The culmination of good and evil as something sublimated from its origins 

in this-worldly salvation and punishment is, says Weber, a road few ethics 

travel. Confucianism lacked a concept of radical evil, as did the ethics 

of Greek and Rome. Certain developments and contingencies are required. 

‘Prophets and priests are the twin bearers of the systematization and rationalization 

of religious ethics.’ 

At this stage in my exposition of Weber’s Sociology of Religion, enough 

has probably been said to demonstrate the text’s failure to fit the systematic 

criteria required for the Grundriss, but enough to show the many ways in 

which ‘religion’ might contribute to the developmental paths of different 

civilizations. The different world religions can be analysed to establish what 

is distinctive to them and, conceptually, Weber has the means to achieve 

this. Different notions of divinity, different ways of attaining salvation, the 

role allotted to priests and prophets – these are the analytical tools for distinguishing 

between the world religions. And in Chinese civilization, where 

magic prevailed in the relationship between ruler and people, this created 

a strong harmonious order with an aversion to change. Weber imports the 

same uncertainties of process into the separate studies of EEWR. Preanimistic 

or naturalistic understandings of nature are taken to be a stage common 

to all the world civilizations; the question then becomes one of trying to explain 

the major transformation process required to become a religion based 

on written doctrine and abstract belief, and how typical forms of conduct are 

generated that contribute to a particular social order. In one sense, Weber 

does not require a theory of the dynamics of transition, because he is content 

to write the studies as developmental narratives. How Christianity or Judaism 

developed becomes a theme in its own right; and we can see from the 

volumes he planned that he was quite happy to extend the narrative over 

different periods of Christianity and Judaism. 

His method rested on an internal–external distinction. The science of 

religion (‘Religionswissenschaft’) in Germany provided an elaborate set of 

concepts for analysing the internal dynamics of religions. The debates over 

Frazer and Tylor have been mentioned. To this should be added Tiele’s analysis 

of India and China as being transcendental impersonal rational world orders, 

and the Near East embracing a concept of transcendental personal god. 

Tiele also distinguished between local, universal and world religions. When 

Weber dove-tailed Troeltsch’s Christianity-based split between mysticism 

and asceticism (the latter’s contribution at the German Sociology Society


conference) with Tiele’s bifurcation, he had the basis of his own comparative 

developmental accounts: the mystical inclined to an impersonal transcendentalism 

of Indian religions, and the ascetic to a personal transcendental 

god of the Occident. Further conceptual advances were made by Hermann 

Siebeck, who advanced the concept of divine salvation (‘Erlösung’) as a way 

of denying the power of malificence and evil in the world; the believer looks 

beyond the world to the only real truth for him or her – salvation in another 

world. At this point, religion offered a new capacity of detachment – not 

only from evil but from social communities. In ‘Types of Religion’, Fabricius 

showed how a study of experiential piety could be related to life in the 

world. Piety was a behavioural attitude to the world and did not involve 

the difficulties of defining the essence of religion. By studying this attitude 

empirically, three types could be induced: conforming to the world (‘weltförmig’); 

fleeing the world (‘weltflüchtig’); and the overcoming the world 

(‘weltüberwindend’). Respectively, conformity resulted in morality based 

on custom (‘Sittlichkeit’); world flight led through asceticism to Christianity, 

and through mysticism to Buddhism. Christianity stood out as the only 

religion able to move to an active relationship to the world despite its otherworldly 

and world-denying beliefs. Troeltsch had handled the same issue in 

his distinction between different religious attitudes to profane natural law. 

The latter is the social order as it is and how it is governed. The strictly 

Christian attitude would see only a divine order, and that the social order 

on earth should be a reflection of this. In the Stoic tradition, however, there 

was a recognition that some compromise has to be made between heavenly 

and earthly orders. Under Christianity in the west, it was the Church that 

effected this compromise. It is not too hard to see the Puritans as a variant 

awaiting to happen: an asceticizing movement emerging within a Christian 

culture that was already heavily compromised with the orders of the world. 

When Weber returns to the theme of Puritanism, which he does in his comparison 

of Puritanism with Confucianism at the end of the China study of 

EEWR, 14 the panoply of ‘religionswissenschaftliche’ concepts are used. This 

can be judged if the concepts not deployed in PESC (1904–5) are picked out: 

disenchantment (which derives from the Chinese spirit-imbued magic garden), 

practical attitude to the world, rejection of the world, contemplation, 

hystericizing asceticism, pneumatic spiritual gifts, man as an instrument of 

god versus a vessel of the holy spirit, accommodation to the world, mastery 

of the world, ethical rationalization, transcendentally ordered rational ethic 

of Puritanism, and theodicy problem. 

What is striking about the literature of ‘Religionswissenschaft’ is how 

much of importance had appeared in the collection edited by Paul Hinneberg, 

Die Kultur der Gegenwart (1906) and in Die Religion in Geschichte 

und Gegenwart published in five volumes by Siebeck from 1909 to 1913. 

While the interrelating of economic behaviour to Puritan doctrine had been 

Weber’s own discovery in 1904–5, the study of religion on a comparative 

basis was an achievement within the academic community independent of


Weber. The question may be asked to what extent Weber was therefore a 

(willing) prisoner of tenets of German historicism that characterized the 

German academic study of religion. German ‘historicism’ is a fairly striking 

description, and is used by Hans Kippenberg to describe the approach of 

‘Religionswissenschaft’. It is composed of the following features. 

Theory and classification are part of the attempt to make scientific sense 

of the vast variety of religious phenomena and willingness to debate and 

change concepts in the light of evidence presented. Theory excluded evolutionism, 

but did allow that developments in religions could be a product 

of internal dynamics. Weber went as far as anyone in this respect when he 

spoke of inherent logics (‘Eigengesetzlichkeit’). Priests frequently push doctrine 

forward. For example, the relatively simple idea of Christian salvation 

could develop its own logic towards predestination in the hands of reformist 

thinkers, such as Jean Calvin. This intellectual rationalization occurs because 

priests at times attempt to achieve consistency of doctrine. If a god is all 

powerful and all knowing, it would therefore follow that he would know all 

events in the past, present and future and exactly which persons were to be 

saved. Whether and under what conditions the laity would wish to follow 

the consistency of this argument in everyday life stands as a separate variable 

in Weber’s analysis. 

Theory was offset by the more normally accepted sense of German historicism 

– an insistence on evidence, historical facts, philological skills in the 

reading and dating of sacred texts. The Indian Vedas, Zoroastrian Arvesta, 

Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform were being deciphered 

and translated. The importance of documents and evidence did not extend 

to the insistence on the uniqueness of each culture studied, a feature of early 

nineteenth-century historicism associated with Herder, for whom different 

cultures were ‘equal in necessity, equal in originality, equal in value, equal in 

happiness’. Analytically, as the categories of preanimism, magic and religion 

show, similarities could be demonstrated across cultures. Weber explicitly 

refers to the preanimistic or naturalistic phenomena found in early phases of 

all the Abrahamic religions as well as in Buddhism and Confucianism. Preanimist 

cultic behaviour was a characteristic of early humankind, period. Herder’s 

historicism saw culture as an emanation of popular spirit (‘Volksseele’) 

that was a living and growing entity. Weber had firmly rebutted such ideas in 

his Roscher and Knies essays. 

Weber was dependent on secondary sources for his studies on world religions, 

and so on other scholars’ translations and interpretations of texts. 

Hence, he was dependent on a slightly more controversial feature of German 

historicism, hermeneutics. As I have argued in Chapter 4 that hermeneutics 

was c. 1900 an essential part of philology and the establishment of the correct 

interpretation, there is no need to get too excited about this feature. 

The case of Julius Wellhausen is a case in point. Was his breakthrough in 

the dating of the books of the Old Testament reliant on philology or hermeneutics? 

One would say both, so it would be mistaken at this date (c. 1900)


to separate the knowledge of languages from the interpretation of meaning. 

But, because Weber was not able to work with primary sources to the same 

degree that he did in the Protestant ethic studies, the emphasis on meaning 

and its interpretation (‘Sinndeutung’) could not be turned into the methodological 

question of causation in quite the same way. In the ‘Objectivity’ 

essay, Weber was able to distance himself from the neo-Kantian position 

of Rickert by tying interpretation of meaning to the attribution of causes 

through empirical investigation. Such a forensic approach to meaning can 

only operate if the investigator has primary access to empirical materials. 

Weber is remarkably acute in his assessment of the books and articles he was 

reading on the world religions and, for example, is only too well aware of 

the biases in the writings of missionaries. But to argue the long prehistory 

of the cult in Sinai and Judaea, he was dependent on Wellhausen and other 

scholars and their knowledge of Hebrew and other languages of the Near 

East. Weber is far closer to the neo-Kantian emphasis on ‘Sinndeutung’ in 

EEWR than he might have wished to be and, as will be noted shortly, his 

‘Introduction’ to the EEWR offers another version of causation. 

Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart took Rickert as its methodological 

mentor, describing his approach: ‘The justification of historical science 

in its autonomy and uniqueness is the purpose of his work . . . a theory 

of knowledge for history should attain and safeguard the particular right of 

the science of history.’ 15 A scientific study of religion would be especially 

interested in a methodology that insisted on the separation of ‘Sein’ and 

‘Sollen’, of what is and what ought to be. The empirical study of religions 

could operate according to academic rules of evidence, verification and falsification, 

and it would not be expected to make value judgements about the 

substance of religion – that Buddha was better than Christ. Doctrinal theology, 

as the exegesis of Christian thought as taken-for-granted revelation, was 

duty bound to make such judgements, explicitly or implicitly. But the neo- 

Kantian separation of the realm of values from the concrete empirical world 

meant that the pressure to ‘prove’ a set of religious values as more true or 

valuable than another set was removed. Values were non-real for Rickert. It 

was open to philosophy to prioritize and systematize values, and that is what 

Rickert outlined in his 1913 essay ‘System der Werten’. Equally, it would be 

open to a philosophy of religion to debate the virtues of predestination over 

nirvana but, epistemologically, this sort of question would not be settled by 

a scientific treatment of the empirical. Philosophical questions and scientific 

questions belong to different orders with their own criteria of validity. 

This falls far short of the requirements of a sociology of religion, because 

it is exactly how values impact upon human action and how internal religious 

values interact with external sociological factors that is its practical subject 

matter. No satisfactory sociological answer is forthcoming from Rickert 

– and this is one of the reasons why Weber, in his ‘Objectivity’ essay, pushes 

on beyond values to causation. But, for the scientific study of religion concerned 

predominantly with the internal dynamics of religious behaviour, the


interpretation of meaning through Rickert worked very well. It was assumed 

that there was a subjective side to religious ideas, feelings and actions accessible 

to and comprehensible by the academic inquirer. For example, Hermann 

Siebeck (in his Lehrbuch der Religionsphilosophie) 16 interpreted what he 

called the ‘natural religion’ of early man as the belief that gods were able to 

ward off external evil. People’s beliefs or values can be made sense of within 

their context, and this would extend without limit to magic, totemism, cult 

rituals or the salvationist contortions of Calvinist predestination. Siebeck 

had a concept of the objective – scriptures, doctrines, rites and so on. But the 

assumption was made that the inquirer, through intellectual imagination or 

re-creation, could envisage the perspective of all forms of religion. We have 

seen above how Weber thinks it possible to understand the ‘rationality’ of 

the head hunter or the magician, and to paraphrase him on Caesar, one does 

not have to be a Bornean headhunter to understand cannibalism. 

Whether and how this assumption can be justified was discussed in Chapter 

4 (in relation to the ‘transcendental presupposition’). Its use for archaic 

societies and early man stands apart from English and French anthropological 

traditions. Evans-Pritchard criticized Weber for his ‘intellectualism’. 17 By 

this, he meant that making sense of early kinship-based societies could proceed 

through mental re-creation alone. In the field, the anthropologist uses 

special theories and ways of gathering data (ethnography). In part, Evans- 

Pritchard’s criticism is directed at the ‘armchair’ theorist; in part, for not 

recognizing that kinship patterns explain the functioning of society and that 

religion is integrated into kinship. Comparing Durkheim’s theory of the role 

of the sacred and profane with Troeltsch’s account of sacred and profane 

natural law shows that, in the French tradition, religion performs a societal 

function, and it can only do this by existing as a reality in its own right. Here, 

the subjective is not an understandable attitude to a body of doctrine, rites 

and ceremonies. Instead, the objective is the primary reality, which structures 

and codes the subjective attitudes of the community. The sacred and profane, 

for Durkheim, was a demarcation line specifying, with great strictness, actions 

that could and could not be performed. Practices such as totemism and 

taboo specified a whole range of rules that structured the patterning of kinship 

and sense of community. The sacred and profane were fundamental categories 

of thought that underlay the structuring of early societies. Troeltsch’s 

argument on Stoic and Christian attitudes to the earthly social and political 

order is that the early Christians believed only in a perfect divine order and 

that earthly existence was worthless by comparison. Political power and law 

on earth had to be a direct reflection of the divine order, allowing no possibility 

for sin and evil. The German subjectivist approach tended to account 

for actions as flowing from beliefs. The Stoics had a greater acceptance of the 

imperfection of the world; therefore, their communities were open to the 

claims of political rulers. The Christians were absolutists and therefore chose 

to form sects apart from society. The Durkheimian response would be along 

the lines that the apartness of Christian sects was the primary sociological


fact that was policed through a strict separation of sacred and profane in all 

areas of life, especially kinship. 

It has been argued, for example by Donald Macrae, that Durkheim was the 

beneficiary and enthusiastic reader of contemporary ethnography, whereas 

Max Weber lay outside the English and French anthropological traditions. 18 

Hence, he failed to appreciate the separateness and the extent of difference 

of early societies from other known historical societies. ‘Verstehen’ and imaginative 

re-creation could not be applied at a distance to what, for the anthropologist, 

would be a field study and expect to produce viable sociology. 

Hans Kippenberg’s recent edition of the text qualifies this viewpoint. The debate 

on animism and preanimism was informed by recent ethnography. The 

work of Franz Boas, the pioneer of modern twentieth-century anthropology, 

and other ethnology was feeding into the German ‘Religionswissenschaft’. 

Marett had assessed the respective claims of Durkheim against the British 

approach in anthropology. 19 The international debate did not go unnoticed 

in Germany. Their choice of approach was deliberate not uninformed. 

Weber followed the strong tendency in German ‘Religionswissenschaft’ 

not to integrate religion as a functional disposition within society, but to 

treat it as a sphere in its own right – moreover, one in fundamental opposition 

to the other spheres of society. Tiele had argued that religions expand 

the number of their believers by escaping the chains of family, tribe, people 

and government. As religions expand beyond the narrower boundaries of 

institutions, they undergo a corresponding internal development. Natural 

religions, confined to clans, have magic at their core; prophetic religions 

represent another internal developmental stage – they attack magic and develop 

ethical religion, and so become first national religions and then world 

religions. These stages have their counterpart in Weber’s less determinative 

transitions from magic to ethics and from ritual to prophecy. The rise of 

world religions involves a kind of emancipation from the closed institutions 

that would hold them back. In addition, the emergence of the ethical and 

other-worldly ideas of salvation directed behaviour to oppose the world. 

Taken to its extreme, in Buddhism and Christianity, the believer fled or 

turned away from the world and its orders. In Weber, magic is adapted to 

the world, in its instrumentalist guise – and hence is more integrationist; 

salvation religions represent an ‘irrationalization’ where the salvation goal 

lies beyond the world. 

A similar argument was deployed by Hermann Siebeck in his engagement 

with Tiele’s theories. Religion was a cultural factor alongside other factors 

such as language and custom, morality and law, family and state, school and 

education, art and science. But, unlike the spheres of (Hegelian) civil society, 

religion, in seeking to judge worldly life, stands apart. Religion perceives, 

unlike the other spheres, that cultural life is not unified but divided. And we 

have already considered Troeltsch’s exposition on sacred and profane natural 

law, which is an elaboration of the same position. Mysticism, which for 

Weber stands predominantly for eastern religion, and asceticism are attitudes 

that represent a discomfort with the world as it is.


Windelband introduced the concept of antinomic orders – an idea used 

to great effect by Weber in his ‘Intermediate Reflection’ essay. As a neo- 

Kantian, he restated the –ultimately irrational – divide between the world 

as it is and how it should be (‘Sollen und Sein’), and between the normative 

and the natural law. Human consciousness is marked by both the normative 

and the resistance to norms (‘Norm und Normwidrige’). These are all antinomic 

spheres of existence, clashing against each other. Holiness or salvation 

(‘heilige’) is a transcendental concept operant in the cognitive, ethical 

and aesthetic spheres. Salvationism is everywhere and yet in opposition to 

all other worldly orders. 20 

What can be provisionally concluded from this discussion is that German 

sources had an internalist account of religious behaviour, placing an 

emphasis on the discovery of meaning within its context. Weber adds to this 

an insistence on external factors of economics and power. This does not 

create a unified theory because the internal and external belong to different 

dimensions. Unlike functionalist analyses in the French and British tradition, 

which can integrate theory as flowing from one standpoint, Weber leaves the 

exact linkage between the external and internal causation unresolved. Elective 

affinity stands in lieu of such integration, but it is not apparent whether 

this is a metaphor or a substantive theory of causation (see discussion below, 

p. 190). Also, culture exists as a set of meaningful values, constructive of 

order, but not functionally harmonious. 

Thanks to Hans Kippenberg’s scholarly introduction to MWG’s Religiöse 

Gemeinschaften, Weber’s close relationship and dependence on ‘Religionsswissenschaft’ 

becomes evident. In conclusion, I develop some points that 

come out of this discussion. 

1. Actions, inner and outer states 

Weber’s sociological approach to religion is clearly signalled in his ‘Categories 

of Interpretative Sociology’ essay. While he is about to draw deeply from 

the new sources in the German academic study of religion, he also makes 

the subject his own and goes beyond previous work. He writes, ‘in the sociological 

analysis of understandable relationships, rationally interpretable 

behavior very often constitutes the most appropriate “ideal type”: sociology 

begins, as does history, by interpreting “pragmatically”, that is, on the 

basis of rationally understandable contexts of action.’ All types of religious 

phenomena, then, are to be placed in context, and it is assumed that the 

pragmatic reasons for actions are interpretable. The exotic and far distant in 

time or geography in principle do not resist interpretation for Weber. Interpretative 

sociology, 

because of its specific focus is not simply any kind of ‘inner state’ or 

outer behavior whatever, but rather, action. And to us, ‘action’ (‘Handeln’) 

(including intentional omission and acquiescence) is always intelligible 

behaviour toward objects, behaviour whose ‘actual’ or ‘intended’


subjective meaning may be more or less clear to the actor, whether 

consciously noted or not. Buddhist contemplation and Christian asceticism 

are, for the actors, subjectively related to ‘inner’ objects; the 

rational economic transaction of a person with material goods is related 

to ‘outer’ objects. 21 

This is a crucial statement of method. The science of religion may certainly 

be concerned with religious ideas, but its sociology takes as its subject 

matter action. Action is revealed in the empirical world and, in principle, 

capturable by data-gathering methods, whether history, ethnology or sociology. 

Methods such as Simmel’s intuition through psychology are by implication 

dismissed. Actions are preceded by subjective meanings that are 

interpretable, not through facile intuition of some inner state, but through 

the pragmatic assessment of action within its situation. This involves a retrospective 

attribution of causes for action. Action, by definition, is oriented 

to an object. There is a hint of Husserl in this statement. 22 Intentionality 

for Husserl was a mental state of feeling, wishing, believing, fearing, which 

should be studied not through a psychology of motives but because they had 

an object. For Weber, an object is the materialization of intended meaning. 

This is also the same argument of Rickert’s that values in themselves were 

not real and had to be attached to some empirical referent. ‘Kulturgüter’ embodied 

values. ‘Heilsgüter’, one of Weber’s genuinely puzzling terms, now 

begins to make sense. Salvation values – clearly part of the mental states of 

believers of certain world religions – can only be studied in the sociology of 

religion as objects of desire. 23 

In the ‘Intermediate Reflection’ essay, Weber summarizes the full intellectual 

scaffolding of his world religions project. It is a terminology of ends, 

means, routes, pathways. Take religious salvation, which, in non-Weberian 

hands, looms as a metaphysical property subject to doctrinal exegesis. With 

Weber, it becomes a desired end, a salvation good (‘Heilsgut’); it is offered 

by someone (prophet or god) who is a saviour (‘Heiland’); there are means 

for its attainment – magical rituals and ascetic or mystical ways of life (‘Lebensführung’). 

Although all these processes stem from internal mental states, 

they have an external empirical reference because mental states of belief 

are realized through actions – the cult dinner, the officiating magician, the 

prophet at the king’s court, the prophet in the countryside excluded from 

court, the church priest and the institutionalization of the distribution of 

grace (godly favour) and, above all – and this is Weber’s sociological masterstroke 

– the actual conduct of believers in their daily lives: conduct of life. 

These are the experiential regularities of life itself. They form patterns and 

are noted by observers. They contribute to a historical record, to historical 

data. Take monks, who are one of the best examples of conduct of life or 

lifestyle – Weber uses both terms more or less interchangeably. The Indian 

wandering mendicant monk living only on what people give him or picking 

berries follows a style of life. In crude terms, this is determined by his beliefs.


Weber insists that the beliefs have to be interpreted through a framework of 

objects. From what is he fleeing (the world as a distraction) and to what salvation 

object is he oriented (a oneness with the universe) defines more precisely 

the pattern of behaviour. It is a pity that Weber never wrote a study on 

monasticism which, in some Christian versions, produced highly disciplined 

conduct. Flight from the world, salvation objects and means of attainment in 

part structure the conduct of life. In addition, techniques and rules are employed, 

as external means, to achieve conformity to a style of life. Internal 

goals and external techniques meet in the routinization of conduct. Franciscans 

broke the twenty-four hours of the day into religious duties – praying, 

singing, processing, fasting, not talking, reading, copying, labouring. This 

acted as an external discipline and, in the medieval idea of salvation, the 

monk worshipped each minute of existence as an affirmation of the divine. 

The case of Puritan asceticism was discussed previously. Worldly asceticism 

was disciplined through the rigour of work and the removal of idleness on a 

daily basis. The ideational spur to the conduct of life was the notion that, at 

any point, the Puritan might die and be called to judgement, not in a state of 

grace. This, it will be recalled, drove Bunyan close to psychosis. Interpretation 

inquires into the internal objects to which belief is directed. Its analysis 

requires an intellectual framework of magic and other religious phenomena 

– and this was elaborated by Weber in Sociology of Religion. Causal attribution 

is the investigation of empirical regularities, working ‘back’ so to speak 

(retrodiction) to infer internal mental states. In his EEWR studies, Weber has 

often to generalize this, dependent as he was on secondary sources. 

2. Meaning and intellectuals 

A common expectation of all the various and sometimes competing approaches 

to the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ in the nineteenth-century Germanophone 

world was the emphasis placed on meaning. There was an obligation 

on the academic not only to interpret the world, but also to convey the 

significance of an interpretation to the reader. Historicism meant not only 

a commitment to historical context, but to relay this in terms that were 

meaningful for the audience. The ‘bad’ old evolutionists such as Hegel and 

later Roscher and Knies did this by running the past into the present. Spirit 

(‘Geist’), whose substance was located in history, comes to unfold its potential 

in the present – as in, for example, the rather dubious anecdote that 

Napoleon was Reason on horseback. It is interesting to note that two of 

the MWG editors – Kippenberg in Religiöse Gemeinschaften and Schmidt- 

Glintzer in Konfuzianismus – do not dismiss Hegel in their introductions. 

Hegel had included the religions of India and China in his philosophy of 

history as a way of understanding the different realizations of religious spirit 

in history. It was Hegel’s method that made him completely unacceptable to 

Weber. But Hegel’s widespread diffusion in German thought derived from 

what was then accepted as a credible narrative of meaning.


Dilthey and Rickert turned this obligation to convey meaning into a methodological 

device. With Rickert, it was selection through values; indeed, 

determination by the contemporary ‘communis opinio’ of cultural values. 

Weber’s methodology gives an explicit role to the academic as interlocutor 

between cultures. Weber’s Sociology of Religion is self-consciously aware of 

the problems of intellectualizing non-intellectual cultures – in the debate 

over animism and naturalism. But, in his ‘Introduction’ to EEWR and in 

his ‘Intermediate Reflection’, he delivers interpretations of religious action 

as not just what they meant to historical actors but also what they might 

mean to a contemporary audience. Meaning, in this latter aspect, in Weber’s 

hands, is a kind of value-added interpretation. 

He imbues his discussion of magic with a tinge of romanticism. He constructs 

a universal of humankind’s search for supernatural powers. In many 

cultures, this idea is expressed in folklore – the idea of harnessing spirits 

for practical purposes. Gad Yair and Michaela Soyer point out in German 

folklore the prevalence of the Golem myth and the Dr Faustus story. 24 The 

‘high’ religions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Abraham saturate the world 

with meaning. These ideational structures of meaning were created by religious 

intellectuals – prophets and priests. 

The modern capitalistic world is devoid of meaning, following on the historic 

consequences of Puritanism’s exclusion of magic from the world. This 

is the move from magic garden to iron cage, and is appropriately termed 

the disenchantment of the world (‘Entzauberung’). One consequence of the 

banishment of superempirical meaning is the fate of intellectuals. Prior to 

the modern, scientific world, they had a twofold task. First, to create rational 

structures of meaning and, by this, Weber is referring to some ability 

to make magical or religious ideas interrelate with some approximation of 

consistency. As often as not, this ‘consistency’ involves covering up lack of 

consistency, and the early church councils had to work hard to integrate an 

Abrahamic god, which met all the necessary requirements of belief, ethics 

and behaviour, with a charismatic magician and with a spirit life. Secondly, 

to make this meaningful to lay believers. 

The task of intellectuals has predominantly been to take the possession 

of religious salvation (‘Heilbesitz’) and to refine it into the belief in ‘redemption’. 

[. . .] But redemption only achieved a specific ‘worldview’ 

(‘Weltbild’) 25 and the stance taken to the world. [. . .] What redemption 

could and wished to signify in terms of its meaning and its psychological 

quality has depended on that worldview and stance. 

It is the worldview that has directed ‘from what’ and ‘to what’ one 

would be ‘saved’ and, let us not forget, could be saved: whether from a 

political and social slavery to a messianic realm in this world; or from 

the defilement of ritual uncleanliness or from the impurity of being 

imprisoned within the body to the purity of body, soul and beauty and 

a purely spiritual existence; or from the eternal and senseless play of


human passions and desires to the calm peace of the pure sight of the 

divine; or from radical evil and the servitude of sin to the eternally free 

goodness in the arms of a fatherly god; or from the submission to the 

astrologically conceived determination of the constellation of the stars 

to the dignity of freedom and the partaking in the substance of a hidden 

divinity; or from mortality expressed in the constraints of suffering, 

privation and death and the threat of punishment in hell to an eternal bliss 

in an earthly or future existence in paradise; or from the cycle of rebirth 

and its pitiless revenge of living out time to the eternal peace; or from 

the senselessness of worry and contingency to a dreamless sleep. There 

are still plenty more possibilities. What stands hidden behind all of these 

examples is a position and stance towards something that was perceived 

as specifically ‘meaningless’ in the world. This resulted in the demand 

that the fabric of the world in its totality be in some wise a meaningful 

‘cosmos’, or rather, that it could or should be. This longing, which is 

the nucleus of religious rationalism, has been invariably carried by the 

intellectual strata. The directions and the results of this metaphysical 

need, and also the extent of its efficacy, have varied greatly. 

(EW, p. 69) 

The content of religious ideas is the work of intellectuals, and it is the 

work of academics in the study of the science of religion to demonstrate how 

these structures of meaning operated. In the modern disenchanted world, 

the role of the intellectual becomes problematic. One of the key features of 

all the above instances of magic and religion is that they offer a theodicy. By 

this, Weber means a superempirical justification of why there exists an inequality 

in the human condition: why do some people have beauty and some 

ill-health, why do whole strata live in poverty while others are wealthy? The 

consequences do not follow from human worth, as goodness rarely translates 

into good fortune and evil often rewards well. An example of a secular 

theodicy is meritocracy – that everyone’s status in society is due to ability 

and hard work. (Although this does not explain or justify the distribution 

of ability or the capacity to work.) All cultures have various cosmologically 

derived answers to this universal feature of societies. A universal problem 

requires a pragmatic solution. This is how Weber treats the religious construction 

of intellectuals. 

One prominent secular theodicy in Weber’s day was Marxism. It offered 

a scientific explanation for a social situation of extreme stratification, drawn 

from classical economics, and it offered the eschatology of utopia of a free 

and classless society. For Weber, Marxism was best understood through the 

categories of the sociology of religion as by political economy. Another new 

role of the contemporary intellectual was to re-enchant the world. At the 

end of the nineteenth century, art was seen as the substitute for religion, 

where the salvation benefits were derived from aesthetic and emotional sensibility. 

Symbolist artistic currents in Europe and America fed this demand.


Figures from this movement, such as the poet and magus Stefan George, 

irritated Weber, because he saw them as false charismatics. Had Weber been 

slightly more value neutral – as it was not for him to judge charismatic power 

except through the behaviour of George’s followers – he could have allotted 

a larger role to re-enchanters. The phenomena would seem to be predictable 

in the face of disenchantment. 26 

Part of Weber’s irritation was his role as an intellectual. The essential 

message, stemming from his Protestant ethic studies, was that the world 

could no longer be regarded as a meaningful cosmos underpinning ideas 

of progress, coherence, justice and ethics. Secularization, knowledge and 

science were driving out the illusionary ideas of a meaningfully ordered cosmos. 

Modernity, in its embrace of industry and cities, was turning away from 

the long era in agrarian settlements of gods and spirits. Weber’s message as 

an intellectual was not to look for meaning beyond the empirical. Weber was 

slightly premature here in that he failed to anticipate the era of nationalism 

and the role of the intellectuals as ideologists of national consciousness and 

nation state modernization. He was not unaware of nationalists, but they 

also seem to have irritated him. 

His intellectual message drew on the German tradition of religion standing 

in opposition and in conflict to the world. The ‘Intermediate Reflection’ 

essay is a disquisition on this theme: that where salvation ethics have created 

supra-institutional communities of believers, then there must be conflict with 

the powers and orders of society. The true believer places faith higher than 

family bonds; the realm of economic necessity detracts from the search for 

a transcendental salvation; the order of power and politics is a reflection of 

the corruption of humankind and is essentially flawed and beyond reform; 

aesthetics and sexuality have to be rejected as dangerous competitors to religious 

deliverance; and knowledge and its intellectualist demands remain 

an enemy of communicative consciousness with a god. Following on from 

disenchantment and cosmic meaning, these value spheres, as Weber terms 

them, have no necessary connection with each other. In modern life, there is 

no transcendent unity underlying what you believe in, how you earn your living, 

what your politics are, what your aesthetic tastes are and how you make 

love. 27 It might be thought that science, education and knowledge could provide 

new underpinnings. Weber, in his intellectual’s role and giver of truth 

– in his lectures on science and politics to wartime students – declared that 

science cannot in itself generate the values by which we could lead our lives. 

How we lead our lives is a somewhat portentous theme and, here, Weber 

was looking to the Russian intellectuals Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, whom he 

thought had gone furthest in probing the issue of meaning in the modern 

world. In Dostoyevsky, in a world of ethical irrationality, the analysis points 

to a realism shorn of illusions. 28 With Tolstoy, it becomes the basic question 

of life – how should it be led and, hence, his famous question – how it is to 

be lived (somewhat overshadowed by Lenin’s ‘what is to be done?’). 29 Weber 

did not extend the question ‘how should we live?’ to ‘how should we live


together?’ as the project of politics. Weber here never squared his intellectual 

objections to the illusion of political community and brotherhood with his 

rational obligation to participate in politics as a responsible citizen. (Weber’s 

analysis of power is taken up in Chapter 8.) 

3. Historical determination 

In the EEWR, Weber is unable to deploy causal attribution as the deciphering 

of possible motives in relation to the situational context. He is dealing 

on a more wholesale scale with world religions, and he does not have access 

to primary sources and detailed situational information as he did in PESC. 

Whole social strata stand in as sociological actors, and the concept of carriers 

(‘Träger’) becomes the empirical referent of religious goals. Different 

forms of religion have their own characteristic sociological proponents: the 

magician or sorcerer is the practitioner of magic, the priest officiates over 

the cult, and the prophet is the bringer of ethics. In the wider social structure 

seen comparatively, 

If one wishes to characterize succinctly, in a formula so to speak, the 

types representative of the various classes that were primary carriers 

or propagators of the so-called world religions, they would be the following: 

In Confucianism, the world-organizing bureaucrat; in Hinduism, 

the world-ordering magician; in Buddhism, the mendicant monk 

wandering through the world; in Islam, the warrior seeking to conquer 

the world; in Judaism, the wandering trader; and in Christianity, the 

itinerant journeyman. To be sure, all these types must not be taken as exponents 

of their own occupational or material class interests, but rather 

as the ideological carriers of the kind of ethical or salvation doctrine 

which most readily conformed to their social position. 

(SocRel, pp. 131–2) 

This same exposition is taken into the ‘Introduction’ to EEWR and expanded. 

Weber has an obligation in his ‘Introduction’ to outline his main 

ideas to the reader, as it is a preface to the studies on the world religions. 

He cannot afford to be as discursive and exploratory as the Sociology of 

Religion. He has to establish how religions as sets of meanings and values 

can be thought of as exercising causal efficacy in the face of the material 

necessities of the world. As a national-economist writing in the Archiv für 

Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, his subject was economic ethics. 

No economic ethic has ever been determined solely by religion. It is evident 

that economic ethics possess to a high degree a lawlike autonomy 

(‘Eigengesetzlichkeit’) closely determined by economic geography and 

historical conditions in contrast to the attitudes of human beings to the 

world as determined by religious or other ‘inner’ factors of a similar


nature to religion. But it is true to say that among the determinants of an 

economic ethic – and these determinants it should be noted are multiple 

– belongs the religious definition of conduct of life. 

Weber goes on to note that religious-determined life conduct is strongly 

influenced by ‘geographical, political, social and national factors’ (EW, p. 

56). This produces the diagram in Figure 6.2. 

Weber points out that it would be a ‘never-ending task’ to detail all the 

interactions involved in this model. He simplifies the problem to the conduct 

of life and some of their typical carriers. ‘What is presented here is merely 

an attempt to bring to light only those social strata which, in giving direction 

to the conduct of life, have most strongly influenced the practical ethic of 

the relevant religion . . .’ (EW, p. 56). This is a simple and robust model, 

and it allows Weber to make any number of comparisons across civilizations. 

The internal sources of action and religion have their own structure, 

their law-like character. This is the intellectual or rationalist character of 

salvation ideas or magical ceremonies or cultic rites. External factors are 

analysed according to the normal methods of the social sciences. Conduct 

of life is an observable regularity of actual behaviour and can be tied to a 

particular social stratum. Weber himself identifies the Confucian official, the 

Brahman, the Buddhist wandering monk, the Christian journeyman and the 

Islamic warrior as key strata decisive for the developmental path of those 

civilizations. Needless to say, other strata with other beliefs and external 

determinants and, therefore, with different conduct of life can be identified 

and their historical efficacy assessed. This then becomes a matter of academic 

debate. So, in the case of Islam as being carried by feudalistic warrior 

castes, there have been numerous challenges to Weber’s interpretation. The 

town-based Islamic merchants, for instance, could equally be seen as decisive 

for the course of Islamic societies. 30 Weber could have been mistaken in his 

identification. But this does not affect the soundness of the model, only the 

empirical evidence and its interpretation. (In principle, the academic debate 

could be as intensive as the Protestant ethic debate. This is slightly alarming 

– for a sociologist! – as the major determining forces can become engulfed 

in disputes over historical detail. But this has to be allowed – especially by 

Weber’s own methodology of scientific progress. A specialist will arrive and 

overturn previous assumptions, and the lines of the debate will have to be 

redrawn. Something like this occurred in the subsequent Protestant ethic 

Religious definitions (internal factors) 

Politics, geography, nations etc. (external factors) 

Figure 6.2 Determination of economic ethics. 

Conduct of life Economic ethics


debates, in which Weber’s devout Calvinists were shown to be Erasmist 

humanists escaping economic persecution in the enforcement of Catholic 

dogma in the sixteenth century. Continuing in this vein, the whole of the 

world religions project could be redrawn, although whether in the strong 

Weberian brush-strokes seems unlikely.) 

‘Various efforts have been made to interpret the interrelationship between 

a religious ethic and the interest position of its carriers, so that the former 

appears only as a “function” of the latter.’ Weber disputes the Marxist case 

here, and also Nietzsche’s theory of ‘ressentiment’ – that religion is an expression 

of the impotent and the oppressed. His model brings to fruition the 

statement made in his 1898 Lecture Course that similar economic conditions 

give rise to entirely different cultures, and also to the subheading in the 1914 

Outline ‘The Class Determination of Religions’. Karl Marx’s assertion that 

religion is epiphenomenal to class and that religion is ‘the sigh of the oppressed 

creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of the soulless 

conditions. It is the opium of the people . . .’ was not directly confronted. 31 

It is debatable whether Marx’s writings on religion at that time formed a 

corpus worthy of academic attention. Instead, Weber, through his linking of 

economic mentality with religiously determined life conduct, demonstrates 

that the patterning and pathways of religious thought as they were constituted 

in people’s actions and behaviour were extremely complex, and had 

developmental consequences. Rhetorical asides to opium are no more than 

literary flourishes compared with the actual use of opium in cultic practices. 

It might be thought that Weber is inverting Marxism in his terminology of 

salvation goods (‘Heilsgüter’) – as if religions sell salvation as a commodity. 

There is certainly something of the language of commerce and nationaleconomy 

in Weber’s usage. He was clearly aware that religions have to be 

marketed in order for them to have a mass appeal. ‘Religions promise and 

offer different salvation goods (‘Heilsgüter’) . . .’ (EW, p. 66). By this, Weber 

is indicating that, in comparative terms, salvation can be of this world or 

other-worldly, and different salvation paths are offered to the masses. It is an 

empirical matter for investigation. This also recalls Rickert’s comment that 

cultural values (‘Kulturgüter’) have no validity until realized in empirical 

reality. Weber’s usage, then, has a historical, empirical and (non-Marxist) 

materialist quality. A corollary of this is that his usage cannot be taken for 

being idealistic. While the German tradition had, to an extent, studied the 

content of religious ideas, Weber rendered them as ends of actions, objectified 

in social processes. This makes it harder (but not impossible) to mount 

a Marxian critique of Weber as an ‘idealist’ opposed to ‘materialism’. 

The role of intellectuals – priests, prophets and sorcerers – has already 

been mentioned in the construction of salvation goods and pathways – a 

process, Weber says, that attains its own inherent autonomy (‘Eigengesetzlichkeit’). 

To this, Weber adds a cognitive component. ‘But redemption only 

achieved a specific meaning when it became the expression of a systematically 

rationalized “worldview” (“Weltbild”) [Weber’s quotes] and the stance


taken to the world.’ ‘It is the worldview that has directed “from what” and 

“for what” one would be “saved” and, let us not forget, could be saved . . .’. 

Weber does not define what a worldview is – neither does he say where he 

got the term from. It most probably derives from Dilthey’s ambitions for 

philosophy. ‘If ’, Dilthey wrote, ‘we are to bear illness, death or banishment, 

a special frame of mind is needed in life. Most people receive this from 

religion; once dogmas have been discredited the educated classes need a 

substitute which is based on religious or philosophic reflection.’ 32 This is 

quite close to being a secular theodicy. Individuals, in their lives, are faced by 

adversity, injustice and the workings of forces beyond their ken. Philosophy, 

for Dilthey, should be able to articulate a vision of the age in which people 

live, and provides guides for action. Weber uses the term ‘Weltbild’ in place 

of Dilthey’s ‘Weltanschauung’ (view of the world, literally). Both terms are 

often given the same translation: ‘worldview’. Weber did not share Dilthey’s 

philosophical ambitions, and ‘Weltbild’ is a more neutral term. It is the notion 

of a framing device through which the world is viewed and made sense 

of. It is informed by values – religious or magical and, in the modern world, 

art rather then philosophy. In this framing sense, it would now be reckoned 

to have a cognitive aspect – although Weber did not himself explore 

the perceptual qualities of worldviews. (More is said about this in the next 

chapter.) 

In his revision, in 1919–20, of the ‘Introduction’ to EEWR, Weber inserted 

a sentence between the two sentences on worldviews, quoted above. 

‘It is interests (material and ideal), and not ideas, that have directly governed 

the actions of human beings. But the “worldviews” that have been created by 

ideas have very often, like switchmen, decided the lines on which the dynamic 

of interest has propelled behaviour.’ A switchman is, or rather was, the person 

who pulled the large metal lever to change the points on a railway track. 

It is a striking image and encapsulates Weber’s thinking about the paths or 

tracks that developmental history follows. Take the late medieval European 

economy. Economically, this was building up considerable forward drive in 

terms of trading, money transactions, property rights, institutional changes, 

etc. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this was as much a south European 

as a northern European phenomenon. The Reformation intervenes, 

the path of development bifurcates between a new level of dynamism and 

stagnation. The switchman, for Weber, is Puritanism. Or take, at the same 

time, China and Europe. China had considerable economic advantages over 

Europe, but one track (Confucianism and the maintenance of harmony) is 

the slow or delayed train, while the other (switched by Puritanism) is the 

path of world-overcoming and capitalistic expansion. 

It is only a sentence and not a methodological statement of causal verification 

in comparative history. Weber’s methodology specifies the empirically 

attested attribution of motive and reasons to individual behaviour. Individuals 

as a mass of the similarly acting constitute a social stratum, so causation 

may be generalized to the group. That, as we shall see, is as far as Weber


wants to proceed. But subsequent and recent work in comparative sociology, 

very much in the Weberian mould, has been far more preoccupied in coming 

up with an integrated theory of material and ideal factors. This is guided by 

the idea of factorial analysis – that somehow, in a multicausal situation, the 

various causative factors can be weighed against each other. 

Weber did not have such an encompassing ambition. Turning points in 

developmental history were what mattered and could be empirically isolated 

and noted, e.g. the Christian apostle Peter at Antioch or Judaic legacy. 

Everything else remained history, intensively and extensively infinite in 

extent. There are material and ideal interests, not factors. Interests can be 

made sense of by the social scientist, and they have both consequences and 

meaning. Weber’s final position on this in his ‘Preliminary Remarks’ to the 

‘Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion’ was to say that outcomes are 

the result of a concatenation of circumstances. In the examination of those 

forces, the obligation is to grasp the significance and meaning of historical 

development. Explanation resides in meaning, not in correct factorial analysis. 

The meaning that Weber draws out of occidental development is the 

imprint of rationalism. History may contain blind forces, but the switchman 

is not blind – he sees, or rather searches for, nirvana, a hidden god, paradise, 

earthly perfection, earthly satisfactions – and he prescribes the way of life 

or conduct for achieving these goals. The role of sociology is to go beyond 

events and to grasp types of social action displayed by social groups and 

social strata, and to understand their meaning and significance. 

It is a mistake, therefore, to exaggerate the comparative ambitions of the 

studies in the world religions. It does look as though Weber wants to isolate 

the factor that accounts for the rise of the west by a process of elimination: 

the west had this crucial factor that the Orient lacked. In one sense the simple 

answer is western rationalism, but then this gives way to a more complex 

set of questions. For Weber, it is a concatenation of circumstances, or if one 

likes, an accident. But knowing how it came about and what ideal interests 

were implicated in its emergence is important and something that can be 

comprehended, and the accident is not without significance. 

To say history in its developmental outcome is an accident is perhaps 

too strong a term. Conduct of life is a subjectively intended orientation in 

a situation and capable of sociological explanation; equally external factors 

such as economic and political forces and the environment of economic geography 

exert a discernible determination. How these two aspects interact, 

which they will do continuously, and what joint outcome is produced would 

be better termed fortuitous. In German, fortuitous and accidental is the same 

word: ‘zufällig’. Fortuitous is better because it implies that things happen for 

a reason or reasons. In Weber’s historical sociology, outcomes happen for 

reasons – motivational states and the pattern of external determination. But 

how they interact and combine is hard to predict. 

Weber has an interesting discussion of this issue in his ‘Categories’ essay. 

The problem of fitting subjective motivation with the external play of forces


would be solved if somehow intended meanings were ‘objectively right’ in 

the situation. But this is rarely the case. Weber outlines two possibilities, both 

of which illustrate the perversity of outcomes. ‘On the one hand, there is behaviour 

that seems wholly irrational but has an unperceived (“disavowed”) 

yet relatively extensive rationality; it is “understandable” because of that rationality.’ 

Weber does not provide the example that this statement requires, 

although he could well have had a Freudian-type explanation in mind. 

‘On the other hand, there is the fact, substantiated hundreds of times (especially 

in cultural history), that phenomena apparently directly conditioned 

by instrumental rationality actually originated historically through wholly 

irrational motives; and subsequently, because changing conditions nurtured 

in them a high degree of technical “correct rationality”, they survived as 

“adaptations” and occasionally became universal’ (Categories, pp. 155–6). 

This takes us back to the Protestant ethic. The Puritans’ rational, sober and 

systematic attitude to work appears to conform to the criteria of instrumental 

rationality: action that achieves its goal in the most effective and 

efficient manner. Benjamin Franklin, in his advice on how to get on in the 

world, offers an instrumentalist view of managing oneself. In PESC, Weber 

suggests a continuity between Franklin and Puritanism, as Franklin’s father 

was a Calvinist. Franklin Sr’s conduct of life was formed from an irrational 

motivation – predestinarian beliefs. Franklin Jr is brought up with the same 

mental outlook, and his behaviour will, as America’s nascent capitalism gets 

under way, be ‘adaptive’. W.G. Runciman has recently demonstrated how 

this can be underpinned by modern evolutionary theory. 33 Calvinism represents 

a cultural gene, or meme, to follow Dawkins. It does not necessarily fit 

well with the economy of early modernity but, over time and with capitalist 

development, it came to be highly adaptive in an economic world that demands 

a dedication to labour. 

Weber himself was highly averse to evolutionary theory – for its monist, 

Hegelian and Comtean drawbacks – so the evolutionist concept of adaptation 

goes into inverted commas. Modern evolutionary theory, however, 

has a theory of change based on selectionism. There is no logic in history 

as in Hegel or Comte. Cultural forms, further down the historical road, 

prove to be adaptive to changing circumstances. This is a more theoretically 

reasoned account of historical change, for it seeks to explain fortuitous 

outcomes. In his ‘Prefatory Remarks’, Weber falls back on the concatenation 

of circumstances, i.e. it was a fortuitous set of conditions. Runciman draws 

an important contrast between ‘selectionism’ and ‘elective affinity’. 34 The 

causal model in the former holds that a cultural attitude is empirically verified 

and is taken as a given rather than its causative effects being derived as 

immediately following. A cultural meme can lie, so to speak, ‘dormant’ for 

generations (although it does exist handed down over generations) before, 

under favourable circumstances, releasing its causal impact. For Weber, elective 

affinity is a coming together of circumstance and a culturally determined 

form of life conduct; the relational link displays what Weber terms ‘causal 

adequacy’, the one supporting the other. Culture (‘Kultur’), for Weber, is


always live rather than dormant, and does not exist as a rotating flywheel in 

neutral, so to speak, waiting its engagement with history. Culture embedded 

into life conduct is fate or destiny, and it is either realized or frustrated. 

4. Value spheres and modernization 

Runciman’s use of selectionism is a fairly recent development in social theory. 

In the decades approximately 1955–85, neo-evolutionary sociological 

theories provided the basis for explaining modernization. Their key idea is 

differentiation. Modern societies are inherently complex and, to reach such 

a level, a process of differentiation has to take place. In Talcott Parsons’ 

hands – by far the most influential theorist of the second half of the twentieth 

century in this respect – this differentiation proceeds according to the 

AGIL (adaptation, goal attainment, integration, latency function) schema. 

Parsons conceptualized modern industrial societies as a system that has differentiated 

subsystems: politics, economy, social institutions and culture. 

Each of these performs subfunctions that are integrated into an overall system. 

Politics is concerned with adapting the system to a changing environment, 

what Habermas was to rephrase as the steering mechanism of society. 

The economic subsystem is instrumentalist in achieving economic goals. The 

social subsystem organizes actors into role positions that fit them for the 

various institutions within a society – the family, the workplace, etc. Culture 

is a kind of coding mechanism that integrates system maintenance with individual 

behaviour in the subsystems. 

Parsons did not regard his social system theory as antithetical to Weber’s 

legacy. Parsons was a Weber scholar and translator of his work. It is not 

unreasonable to read Economy and Society as an account of fairly simple 

social institutions such as the clan, the neighbourhood and the household 

together with their relationship to cults and magic and how they are transformed 

under conditions of salvation religions, the rise of rationality and the 

emergence of contract and exchange relationships. This could be deemed 

as a move from simple to complex societies, and as an elaboration of Tönnies’ 

communal groups bound by ties of blood and kinship to associational 

forms bound through rational association – the move from ‘Gemeinschaft’ 

to ‘Gesellschaft’. Secondly, the ‘Intermediate Reflection’ essay would certainly 

seem to describe a process of differentiation even if Weber did not 

use this term. The early or archaic societies, in which clan, neighbourhood 

and household predominate, did not distinguish social relationships of kin, 

politics, economics, religion/magic and art. Weber says they have a primitive 

(‘urwüchsig) natural attitude to the world. Only with the advent of salvation 

religions can a process of differentiation emerge. Religion as an autonomous 

value sphere stands in opposition to the values spheres of kinship, economy, 

politics and art. Thirdly, with his concept of ‘Eigengesetzlichkeit’ as well as 

rationalization, Weber would appear to permit autonomous mechanisms of 

development.


Hence, in Parsons’ thinking, why not overcome Weber’s aversion to evolutionary 

thinking and introduce differentiation as a process–concept in the 

way that Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim did? The move from simple 

to complex must involve phases of differentiation, and the task for Parsonian 

historical sociology is to show how increased differentiation makes complexity 

possible. Rainer M. Lepsius has recently suggested a similar manoeuvre at 

the level of institutions. 35 The actual terms that Weber uses in the ‘Intermediate 

Reflection’ essay are value spheres and life orders (of religion, economy, 

politics, culture, art and sexuality). If these are treated as equivalent to institutions, 

then a Weberian analysis can be built on institutional differentiation, 

each with their own ideal and material interests. These moves place Weber’s 

sociology far more in accord with the preoccupations of late twentieth-century 

sociologists. As it stands, Weber’s sociology is overly restrictive; for instance, 

not only does it not have a concept of societal differentiation, neither 

does it have a concept of role. Theories of role explain how the individual 

is able to operate across a range of institutional contexts –family, work, culture, 

politics – with some element of integration. 

Weber’s historical sociology is actually quite recalcitrant to such manoeuvres. 

In order to update Weber, cardinal emphases have to be removed. 

Weber’s value spheres are denominated by values held by individuals. The 

individual occupies the central circle of a series of overlapping circles. The 

respective values of family, friendship, work, politics, culture and religion 

are all different, but the individual as a ‘personality’ experiences all these 

values – in their harmonies and in their conflicts. This is what gives his or her 

existence meanings. The human being is a thinking, feeling, wishing, affectual 

person, confronted with the various orders of the world. Weber refuses 

to turn the actual person into the abstract individual of ‘homo sociologicus’. 

Value spheres are immediate to the individual, and they are not mediated 

by role playing. The antinomic stresses of values in conflict – brotherhood 

versus power for example – are parts of the conditions of existence. Parsons’ 

subsystems create second-order spheres of values mediated by cultural 

pattern variables and roles. With Weber, existence, values and action are 

the stuff of the human or cultural sciences, and the precondition of their 

possibility. The scientist is part of the social world, he or she relates through 

values to other societies and cultures and, through academic study, draws out 

the significance of human existence. This position owes much to the German 

heritage, much of which has been referred to, and it also places blocks on 

the refinement of theories of society and societal change. One cannot move 

away from the base material of human existence – affectual and instrumental 

mental states in the face of the exigencies of the world. One might complain 

of want of further refinement in Weber but, equally, one might wish to recall 

Weber’s judgement on religious intellectuals – overelaborate accounts of the 

meaning of the cosmos (society) tend to alienate the laity (public).

7 Going beyond Weber 

The last chapter established that, although meaning and causation in Weber’s 

historical sociology are not to be separated, the idea that all the factors 

behind developmental paths could be assessed and weighed is never 

entertained by Weber. Equally, he dismissed evolutionary theories and would 

probably have rejected neo-evolutionary theories of system differentiation. 

The developmental pathways of different civilizations can be shown to possess 

a narrative of meaning (cyclical in India, harmony in China and rationalism 

in the west). This is not of itself determinative of outcomes and directionality. 

Outcomes are the fortuitous coming together of internal views of 

the world and a variety of external forces. Some outcomes, which structure 

future patterns of history, survive, and it would seem to be possible from 

Weber’s stance to allow an account based on new forms, or reforms, as being 

adapted to the environment – not by design but by fortuitous endurance. 

History is not one damned thing after another, to paraphrase the playwright 

Alan Bennett. It displays meaning, and the historian forges a value relationship 

between the contemporary reader and the past. PESC established that a 

way of everyday life formed by Calvinism was both causative of capitalistic 

modernity and significant for understanding the nature of modern society. 

Origins determined the means–end mentality of modernity. In the EEWR, 

a wider historical picture is drawn, in which certain key strata carried a 

worldview that was causative for particular developments – itinerant artisans 

for early Christianity, Calvinistic rising middle classes in the sixteenth and 

seventeenth centuries – in the course of the long historical development of 

the Occident. 

In this chapter, I want to examine some of the implications of Weber’s 

expansion from the specialist, almost case study, approach of PESC to the 

wide-ranging comparative approach of EEWR and, finally, to the summation 

of his thinking on the distinctiveness of the west, in terms of rationalism, 

from other civilizations or cultures. The expansion in the scope of Weber’s 

thinking should not be deliberated over as if it was a planned or preconceived 

strategy. Rather, it is perhaps better thought of as an efflorescence 

in Weber’s remarkable capacity to develop an original thesis in a variety


of different contexts. The original explanandum was how to explain the 

origins of capitalistic modernity, and that is what he is still trying to explain 

in his final summation – his ‘Prefatory Remarks’ to the ‘Collected Essays in 

the Sociology of Religion’. There is no one complete answer to the original 

question, although what does stay constant in his approach is the insistence 

that causation and meaning remain interlinked. That said, the causation–meaning 

linkage looks very different if Calvinism alone is being studied 

or if whole stretches of the development of western Christianity are being 

studied. To argue that the nature of western modernity originates in the 

fairly narrow particularism of Calvinism and certain Puritan sects, and then 

to go on to argue that western modernity is the outcome of a rationalistic 

tendency that is expressed over centuries, is to produce two different accounts 

of the causation–meaning linkage. Weber himself would have seen 

both accounts as compatible. He never abandoned or revised the essential 

explanatory thrust of PESC when he came to republish it in 1920. What I 

will argue in this chapter is that, if the scope of the argument is widened, 

the causal arguments also change, and this has implications for the place 

allotted to the interpretation of meaning. I raise the stakes in comparative 

sociology by introducing two post-Weberian theories that demonstrate with 

greater clarity how expanding the causal field leads to different assessments 

of meaning. The first of these theories was put forward by the Canadian economic 

historian Harold Innis, who showed that the capabilities of political 

and salvation messages are determined by the technology of communication. 

The accessibility and diffusion of messages, and so of meaning, are dependent 

on technology. The second theorist is Karl Jaspers, who reconfigured the 

era of the world religions as the ‘axial age’. Religions present a new modality 

of thought and a larger cradle of civilization, within which it is conceivable 

that more than one modernity could have emerged. This idea has been pursued 

by S.N. Eisenstadt, who argues for ‘multiple modernities’. 

Weber’s argument in PESC, 1904–5, is what I will call a singularity argument. 

A unique ‘chemical’ bonding – an elective affinity – occurred between 

a rising middle class and a Calvinist-influenced conduct of life. Something 

singular happened, and the Calvinist worldview became constitutive of modernity, 

and there is an inescapable component of modernity that always carries 

the singularity of its origins. Weber’s contribution rests on this assertion. 

Modern capitalism ‘worked’ in a way that no other previous capitalisms had 

been capable of by concentrating not on the ends of production and wealth 

but solely on the means. Weber’s Puritans are narrow-minded. Wearing the 

blinkers of other-worldly salvation, their lives were organized to accumulate 

wealth as a confirmation and sign of their election and to deny previous 

notions of Christian brotherhood and ethics to fellow human beings. PESC 

is full of suggestions as to how this particularistic attitude entered into politics, 

society and science. Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan discipline of his 

soldiers won the English Civil War and, in marking a decisive stage in the 

centralization of the English state, it represented a superior sort of military

Going beyond Weber 195 

violence. The Puritan soldier–saint cared little for his own life or for the lives 

of others – so justifying some of the more spectacular of Cromwell’s brutalities. 

The rights of man originated not in a free-thinking Enlightenment but 

in the absolute conviction that no authority should intervene between God 

and the individual’s textual and prayerful communing with the deity. Liberty, 

as Weber was fond of pointing out to his German contemporaries, was established 

through regicide, and this was inseparable from religious radicalism. 

Puritanism, in Weber’s vivid phrase, descended like a hoar frost on Merrie 

England and, to this day, is inseparable from a certain gloominess, all of 

which can be traced back to the Puritan’s almost complete devaluation of the 

body as a worthless and corrupt vessel. And in Weber’s hands, science, while 

an instrument of enormous emancipation, is driven by a sober, systematic 

and empiricist outlook and is remorseless in its progress, so amounting to a 

form of disenchantment. The origins of modernity are features intrinsic to 

modernity, however overlaid they might have become through subsequent 

influences. 

There is a subargument to the singular creation of modernity. Although 

the fortuitous nature of historical development is acknowledged by Weber, 

at least in his 1913 ‘Categories’ essay and in his discussion of why particular 

worldviews take hold, there is a strong sense of agency in the Protestant 

ethic studies of 1904–5. The Puritans meant to change the world according 

to their religious ideas, and they were historically consequential in achieving 

this. Singularity, therefore, is determinative of future developments. 

Johannes Weiss has drawn attention to a paradox in this position. 1 Puritan 

doctrine and its interpretation introduced something new. Metaphysics and 

mankind’s relation to the world had never before come up with such an 

imaginative permutation (redemption, grace and its attainment). This was 

causative in changing the development of history in an irreversible way. The 

movement of the Reformation had produced a spontaneous innovation that 

thereafter proved irreversible in the texture of human society and its mentality. 

This is not a determinative law at the general level of society, but a determination 

at the level of agency. Singularity attaches to innovation, agency, 

cause and meaning. Karl Popper has insisted, as a normative imperative, on 

the openness of history and, like Weber, that there are no laws formulable 

within the generality of society. Weiss points out that the (Weberian) converse 

of this position is that social groups can intervene decisively in human 

history. Human agency can be determinative in an irreversible manner. To 

take a contemporary example, human rights as both discourse and practice 

may have the capacity to transform what were/are dictatorial regimes. Human 

rights, as a form of human agency, would then effect and determine an 

irreversible change. 

The notion of singularity contains another paradox. The western selfimage 

of modernity emphasizes its universalist characteristics: law, science, 

politics and economics all conform to criteria that go beyond the means–end 

rationality. Law operates according to high-level criteria such as justice and


equity; science and education are seen as the emancipation of humankind 

over nature as well as self-understanding; politics is seen as deliberative, 

democratic and a process of reconciling opposed interests; and economics as 

overcoming poverty and the rational allocation of resources. Weber’s notoriety 

as a theorist of modernity is to render all these goods, defined by a sense 

of higher purpose, as compromised by a darker side. Justice takes second 

place to the administration of law and bureaucratic imperatives; likewise, 

politics, which also can never escape what Weber terms the pragma of power 

– there is a logic to the exercise of power irrespective of its inclusive and 

benign intentions; knowledge leads to disillusion and not to joyous emancipation; 

and the mechanisms of wealth creation impose a new serfdom on 

human personality and its autonomous expression. 

Weber is (in)famous for drawing attention to these antinomies. In the 

singularity argument, what claims to be universalist is in fact the effectiveness 

of diffusion, and what is diffused may be effective because of the 

particularism of its origins. Modern rational capitalism originates from the 

deliberately blinkered conduct of life of Puritan groups. Because economic 

behaviour is divorced from wider questions of the ends to which economic 

activity should be put, it is so successful. Singular ideas and practices succeed 

by virtue of their extensive diffusion and not necessarily by virtue of 

intrinsically universal criteria. To give a contemporary example, a make of 

software might achieve global dominance through successful marketing and 

support, not because it is the best written software adjudged by universalist 

criteria such as design, economy, task fulfilment and generative capacity. By 

this argument, the singular breakthrough to modernity contains within it 

shortcomings traceable to the point of origination. 

Modernity is a singular and, in part, vitiating event. This is not a happy 

place to leave the argument. If Weber has got the causation wrong or exaggerated 

it (as I think he did), we can vacate it; also it is not a wholly convincing 

argument to say that the circumstances of origination are determinative 

for future situations. Changes in the causal model can produce more benign 

outcomes. 

The bias of communication 

In this section, I will discuss the economic historian, Harold Innis. His work 

impacts upon Weber’s concept of worldview and suggests that Weber was 

right to stress its importance, but that he remained unaware of the dimensions 

of its operation. Innis made no direct comment about Weber. He established 

his reputation with the Fur Trade in Canada and The Cod Fisheries. 2 

Although these studies appeared specialist and seemingly localist in emphasis, 

Innis was able to show the penetrative effects of commodity trading on 

the development of a society. Also, the localism is misleading. The main 

fur trading company in Canada was the Hudson Bay Company, a capitalist 

concern whose headquarters were in London. The company was effectively


run from London through a continuous supply of trading reports from the 

bases on and around Hudson Bay. And from Hudson Bay itself, there existed 

precarious lines of communications to the trappers of the interior. That this 

business was conducted as a capitalistic enterprise was taken for granted by 

Innis. The novel question for Innis was how did it operate, and this led him 

to consider not just the extensiveness of trading routes but the lines of communication 

themselves as an enabling precondition. Hence, the question is 

not one of where did capitalism come from and develop into (which, in a 

sense, was the German ‘Fragestellung’ of Marx, Rodbertus, Bücher, Sombart 

and Weber), but how was it enabled through the media of communication? 

Harold Innis, in Empire and Communications (first edition, Oxford, 

1950), put forward the bold hypothesis that the political systems of empires 

and kingdoms were conditioned by their medium of communication. Where 

writing is restricted to the media of clay and parchment, i.e. durable but 

heavy media, then an emphasis is placed on time, hierarchy and decentralization. 

The materials of writing themselves place a cognitive emphasis on 

the permanence of what is written and place physical limitations on the 

transmission of written material. When writing moves to the less durable 

materials of papyrus and paper, political systems gain an extension over 

space and experience a reduction in hierarchy and an increase in centralization. 

Writing in durable media such as stone (lithographs) and clay, such as 

the monuments of dynasties, seeks to emphasize the everlasting longevity of 

rulership. Examples of this type are Sumerian civilization c. 3000 bc and the 

Old Kingdom of Egypt c. 2700 bc. Papyrus is produced in restricted areas 

under centralized control to meet the demands of a centralized bureaucratic 

administration, and is limited to the smooth waters of navigation because 

of its fragile state. Roman rulership is the major example of a political system 

based on papyrus as a means of communication. Innis points out that 

both papyrus and parchment are accompanied by the monopolization of 

knowledge by rulers and priests. The political systems of the Near East and 

the Mediterranean world of antiquity were profoundly affected by the emergence 

of papyrus and the associated development of alphabets. 

Innis presents a model of what Robert Bellah terms archaic kingdoms. 3 

Their political capacities of rulership are determined by the availability of 

media of communication. The historical record is more ambiguous in classifying 

centralized versus decentralized rulership in terms of light versus heavy 

media of communication. What is important in modelling is not historical 

veracity but providing ways of thinking and being able to understand the 

limitations of rulership in eras of restricted means of communication. Weber 

would have designated the Innis thesis an ideal type. What he would 

not have appreciated, however, is that the meaningful content of messages 

– which for Weber is the primary datum – is itself determined by its medium. 

Marshall McLuhan, at one point a junior colleague of Innis at the University 

of Toronto, rather overemphasized the point through his aphorism, ‘the 

medium is the message’. One modality of change in archaic kingdoms is the


switch from stone and clay to papyrus. A change in technology alters the 

content of messages. 

In late medieval Europe, to which I now turn, the major switch is from 

parchment to paper. A series of events – the importing of paper from China, 

its manufacture in Europe, the breaking of monopolies of paper production 

– and the parallel history of printing (the movement of small workshops from 

Gutenberg in 1450 across Europe, the switch from manuscript uncials to the 

roman, gothic and italic fonts, and the evasion of censorship) – underwrite 

the key developments in early modernity: vernacular languages, the breaking 

of religious and priestly monopolies, the formation of recognizably modern 

polities, the formation of self-regulating political communities – albeit only 

fleetingly in Scotland, Geneva, England and the Low Countries – and the 

ability to transmit financial information and financial assets as a basis for the 

formation of markets. Paper, quickly followed by the introduction of printing, 

allowed a massive leap in extension over a number of fields: political 

administration, economic markets, religious and humanistic sensibility and 

learning – both literature and science. 

This suggests that explanations of modernity should be sought in emergent 

universalisms taking the place of static particularisms. As Tenbruck 

emphasized, world religions for Weber represent a cognitive leap forward 

in the movement to more universalizing worldviews. What Innis brings to 

the debate, however, is an argument rooted in the materiality of knowledge 

transmission. Obviously, he has to acknowledge, like Comte and Weber, the 

crucial move from magic to religions of the world based on sacred revelation. 

In Weber’s view, magic has no inherent logic because it is based on things 

or objects: stars, rivers, stones, patterns, mysteries and their divination. 

For Innis, with the advent of writing, ‘man is provided with transpersonal 

memory’. ‘Men were given an artificially extended and verifiable memory of 

objects and events not present to sight and recollection.’ 4 

It is instructive to reassemble Weber’s PESC along the lines of Innis’ argument, 

not least because it provides a way of seeing how Weber assembled his 

own argument. In what follows, my own argumentation is schematic. I use 

Innis’ hypothesis as a heuristic in order to probe the threads of Weber’s own 

arguments in PESC. 

Weber’s periodization can be construed as follows: 

1 medieval monasticism as orders of a world-escaping asceticism; 

2 Calvinism and the Puritan sects where the monkish attitude is released 

into the world as inner-worldly asceticism. 

In the next section, I develop a number of points through the expedient 

of inserting Innis’ hypothesis into the above periodization. Accordingly, the 

two periods become: 

1 Monasticism, most notably Benedictine monasticism, is a form of 

asceticism whose most important accomplishment is the production of


hand-written manuscripts. These writings are devoted to a particular 

conception of time. Just as the pyramids stood for the conceit that the 

dynasts live forever, so the copying of the religious texts becomes a 

way of asserting that the word of God is eternal. Enormous amounts 

of intellectual, human and economic capital are poured into copying 

the sacred texts in a variety of fairly complex manuscript styles. The 

earliest existing Bibles are the wealth equivalents of medieval cathedrals 

– the Codex Argenteus (in Carolina Redivina in Uppsala) and the 

Codex Amiatinus, which was produced in Jarrow in Northumbria. 

The latter took the skins of over 1500 calves and required numerous 

copyists – strong men pushing the quill across the vellum for six hours 

a day and dependent on the intellectual resources of the ‘armarium’ 

and ‘scriptorium’. It was Cassiodorus in his Institutiones divinarum 

lectionum who created, in ad 531 in his monastic foundation at 

Vivarium, a scheme of study for monks and provided an account of the 

methods and techniques of transcription. Innis notes that Cassiodorus 

completed the work of St Benedict ‘by making the writing of books and 

the preservation of authors a sacred duty and an act of piety’. 5 It was as 

a result of these developments that the Codex Amiatinus emerged from 

Jarrow around ad 700. 

While it is quite correct to attribute to this monastic labour the 

transmission of the Bible, the early church fathers and classical authors 

of Greece and Rome, indeed the preservation of literacy and the alphabet 

itself, seen as a medium, the monastic manuscript was highly restricted. 

Manuscript Bibles were the monuments of the ‘Dark Ages’ and, in this 

sense, they were meant to be revered rather than read. Transmission 

was confined to the perpetual task of copying; also, what was copied 

and what was read were subject to tight control and censorship. 

Hand-written script encourages conservatism as well as conservation. 

Extension over space – the potentiality within a rationalized alphabet 

– was limited by the huge resource that went into writing and the sheer 

weight of parchment (the Codex Amiatinus weighs over 70 lbs, consists 

of 1030 folios, is ten inches thick and measures 14 by 20 inches). These 

manuscripts were monuments of the word and, in this respect, they 

memorialized sacred revelation over time – for all time. The monastic 

escape from the world signified not only a break with the rest of the 

world spatially but an entirely different conception of time. While the 

secular world was defined by its (worthless) transience, the monastic 

world was based on the illusion that time, through the memorialization 

of the word, would be eternal. 

With the transfer of Abbot Alcuin from York to Aachen in ad 781, 

Charlemagne became the first medieval ruler to realize the potentiality 

of the vector of space. The Carolingian miniscule (rationalized at 

Corbie in Northumbria) and parchment became, as capitularies, the 

medium of political administration in Europe’s first medieval empire. 

Patrimonialism is not solely defined by dependency relationships within


the ‘Herrschaftsverband’, but also through its media of communication. 

Writing comes out of the cloister, but only as the new medium that gives 

extension to political rulership. Within the cloister and the cathedral, 

the latent power of extension within a reasonably rationalized form 

of writing remains deliberately confined. Political time is temporality 

and marked by contingency. Monastic time, other than the daily round, 

never moves. 

2 Weber prefaces his account of the Puritan movement with the pathbreaking 

role of Luther in triggering the Reformation. For Innis, a crucial 

episode was Erasmus’ version of the Greek Testament in 1516, printed 

by the Basle printer John Froben. Erasmus’ desire was that the scriptures 

be translated into every language, ‘that the husbandman should say them 

to himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum them 

to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveller should beguile with them 

the weariness of his journey’. 6 Innis quotes approvingly Mark Pattison’s 

remark that this ‘contributed more to the liberation of the human mind 

from the thraldom of the clergy than all the uproar and rage of Luther’s 

many pamphlets’. 7 Innis would place the stress on the emergence of 

printed Bibles and pamphlets. What is significant about Luther’s 95 

theses pinned to the church door at Wittenberg in 1517 is that they 

were quickly printed and widely distributed. Like the Internet, the new 

medium of paper and printing for a while evaded censorship and made 

information available to a new audience. 

The move from asceticism in the monastery and the cathedral cloister 

to an asceticism pursued in the world, by the Puritans, is the move from a 

parchment-based scripture to a paper-based press. Both remain sacred, but 

the medium, let us say, enables the message. Parchment does not travel, it is 

not meant to, it stays within the monastic house. The Tyndale Bible (1525) 

belongs to a new medium: paper, print, vernacular language. It is one of the 

first ‘handy’ Bibles, in its octavo format literally fitting into the palm of a 

man’s hand. It marked the breaking of a large number of monopolies: paper 

production, the control of printing presses, the monopoly of the Church and 

monasteries over the sacred scriptures and the breaking of Latin and Greek 

‘codes’ through translation into vernacular languages. The Tyndale Bible is 

contemporary with the Luther Bible of 1522, the Czech Bible of 1488, the 

Dutch Bible of 1526, the French Bible of 1530, the Swedish Bible of 1541, 

the Finnish New Testament of 1548 and the Danish Bible of 1550. 

The pietistic attitude of the Puritan to the text only becomes possible 

when the text itself is placed in a transmittable medium. Bibles, prayer 

books, sermons, etc. become permanently accessible to a newly literate society. 

These few books are learnt by heart, are the constant companion of 

religious groups and form the bases of the fanaticism of the conventicles. 

To know your Bible, in one’s vernacular language, makes possible literacy 

and defines its limits. Everything is to be found within the book – morality,


practical guidance, faith obviously, but also politics and economics or householding. 

The Bible took popular culture from orality to literacy. The Bible 

was the iPod of its day, thumbed and pored over by its enthusiastic users. It 

is of course a complex history with countless setbacks lasting over more than 

two hundred years. But its basis was paper, the printing press and written 

vernacular languages. 

Of the new literacy generated by the printed English Bible, Adam Nicolson 

has recently written: ‘This increasingly word-orientated section of the 

population was the seed-bed in which the highly intellectual, questioning 

and quizzing form of religion we know as Puritanism has its beginnings. A 

puritan ate and drank the word of God. That word was his world.’ 8 And of 

the King James Bible, he writes: ‘If you think of the King James Bible as the 

greatest creation of the seventeenth century, a culture drenched in the word 

rather than the image, it is easy to see it as England’s equivalent of the great 

baroque cathedral it never built, an enormous and magnificent verbal artifice, 

its huge structures embracing all four million Englishmen, its orderliness and 

richness a kind of national shrine built only of words.’ 9 Panegyric aside, the 

established medium of print becomes the cognitive and material basis for the 

differentiation process of the increasing separation of Church, state, morality 

and learning that enables the development of modernity in Europe. 

Obviously the ‘rewrite’ I have suggested above – that monastic asceticism 

be regarded in terms of the vector of time, that the new Puritan sensibility 

be thought of as an extension over space – gives us a different book from 

PESC. Weber does not seem to have given serious attention to the medium 

of transmission. He more or less takes the extreme textuality of ascetic Protestantism 

as a given without comment. In his treatment of Methodism, Weber 

establishes the centrality of a revived Puritanism for the new industrial 

working classes. But it only takes a slight nudge to move his whole treatment 

of the role of revivalist religion into a movement of mass literacy. Methodism 

was not only methodical with its rotas of preaching, but also positively 

industrial in its attitude to printing the sacred texts, their dissemination and 

the insistence on literacy. If the word is to be made known to the unlettered 

working class, literacy as well as preaching is essential. And Weber’s whole 

argument in Chapter 4 on Calvinism and the Puritan sects is to demonstrate 

the intensity of belief translated into practical ethics. Overall, he weights his 

argument towards the psychology of belief: the factors that intensified and 

sustained belief as a continuous practice. But if we reweight the argument, 

it is the profound literacy and textuality of the Puritan divines that might be 

considered the medium of instruction. Jean Calvin’s huge influence can be 

seen in the translation of the Bible into French by his kinsman Pierre Robert 

Olivétan, and the near simultaneous publication of his own Institution de 

la religion chrétienne (1540) in both Latin and French; Latin to influence 

the traditional authorities of Church, state and schoolmen, French to appeal 

to the new mass constituency. Likewise, as Weber himself reprises his 

arguments at the start of Chapter 5, practical ethics take their literal cues


from Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory (for English Puritans), Spener’s 

Theologische Bedenken (German Pietists) and Barclay’s Apology for Baptists 

(PESC, p. 156). Gangolf Hübinger has pointed out to me that Weber may 

well have been reluctant to explore the world of print because it was taken 

up by Karl Lamprecht, whose work he detested, as a research theme. 

The materiality of the medium of communication ensures that ideas cannot 

be treated as free-floating suppositions loosely connected to the materiality 

of power and interests. It was this critique that Weber struggled 

with, continuously and angrily, as his answers to the critiques of Rachfahl, 

Fischer and Sombart demonstrate. Weber vehemently protested that his interpretation 

was not a one-sided idealist account that challenged the equally 

one-sided materialist–marxist account for the rise of western capitalism. But, 

until he came up with a satisfactory methodological way of treating ideas 

sociologically, which the neo-Kantian perspective of 1904 did not offer, 

then his thesis was always a legitimate object of attack from the materialist 

viewpoint. The weaknesses were not rectified until the ‘Einleitung’ essay 

of 1914, which advanced the concept of ideal interests as the equivalent of 

material interests. By this device, Weber ensured that ideas were no longer 

philosophical and theological notions, but objects of competition and power 

and so embedded within social structure. 10 With Innis, we encounter the 

materiality of the media themselves, an approach completely different from 

Weber’s solution. 

Innis himself did not deal directly with the question of how modernity 

originated but, clearly, he would have reserved a large role for the new medium 

of paper, press and vernacular that gave a hitherto immense extension 

to politics, religion, economics, learning, literature and science. Once the 

extension of paper and print is seeded into these separate fields, then an 

internal dynamic can proceed within each field. In those civilizations which 

either never develop writing as a medium extendable to the majority of 

a society’s population or suppress and censor paper and press, then this 

would effectively bar the development of anything recognizable as modernity. 

‘Limited supplies of satisfactory writing material in India strengthened 

the monopoly of the oral tradition held by the Brahmans . . .’, ‘The bias of 

paper as a medium was evident in China with its bureaucratic administration 

developed in relation to the demands of space.’ But, given the complexity 

of Chinese characters, printing was easily controlled as a government 

monopoly (p. 139). ‘In areas dominated by Mohammedanism’, Innis notes 

‘abhorrence of the image delayed the introduction of printing’ (p. 165). 11 

In Innis’ discussion of the bias of communication in early modernity – as 

the emergence of the printing press and paper as the new extendable medium 

– there is also a concern with the content of these writings. This content 

can be characterized as humanistic: primarily Erasmus’ intent that Everyman 

should be able to read and learn the scriptures in their own language and that 

this would form the basis of a new pedagogy free of the scholasticism of the 

medieval schoolmen, but also embracing the claim that reason and nature


were not incompatible; that induction and experiment were the new mode 

of science replacing the Aristotelian worldview; that philosophy would proceed 

by the example of Descartes – his Meditations, a book to be read from 

beginning to end without the countless and repetitive recourse to holy writ 

and scholastics; the philosophical anthropology of Montaigne that discussed 

the human, quotidian condition in a language accessible to ‘l’homme moyen 

sensuel’; that political community could be thought about in an increasingly 

secular and rational manner as in Machiavelli, Pufendorf and Althusius. 

This last paragraph raises issues of content and meaning. It is part of the 

standard history of humanism as contributory to the development of key features 

of western civilization and modernity. Science, education, philosophy, 

everyday life and its understanding, and politics belong to the print revolution 

and the emergence of a literate and humanistic sensibility. The ability 

to communicate, and to break the monopoly of writing, is causative for a 

decisive stage in European history. Although the stern rigours of Puritanism 

and the reactionary features of the counter-Reformation would slow and 

alter the humanist breakthrough, the decisive development lay in the vast 

increase in communicative capacity. 

Innis does not address the matter of Puritan conduct of life on economic 

behaviour and, for Weber, the decisive changes in the economies of northwest 

Europe. Trevor-Roper has, however, put forward an argument that accommodates 

the economic side of the question. Like Innis, he places emphasis 

on the expansion of humanist knowledge, and he argues that this outlook 

characterized the economically sophisticated merchants of southern Europe 

and leading Italian cities. 12 In the counter-Reformation, the Papacy insisted 

on strict doctrinal purity and was intolerant of humanism. As a result, there 

was a middle class migration northwards to the more tolerant societies of 

Holland and England, which were also Protestant. The economic migrants 

adopted Calvinism as their religion, but practised it in a tolerant undogmatic 

way. It was Erasmian Christian humanism that determined their conduct of 

life, and their leading economic role derived from the advances in banking, 

finance, industry and trade that marked out some of the Italian and south 

German cities. This is not the place to rehearse and argue the details of the 

argument – not an easy one: how Calvinist were certain Calvinists? 

What Innis’ approach reveals is that worldviews require not just carriers 

in a sociological sense of social groups, but that the cognitive aspects of 

worldviews require a technology for their dissemination and that the interaction 

between medium and message creates the revolutionary effect. Weber 

would not have denied the historical facts concerning the breaking of the 

monopoly of writing. It was a given in his argument but, as such, neutral 

in its implication. It would also be open to him to retort that Puritan ideas 

displaced Erasmian ideas, and the former were the ultimate beneficiaries 

of the print revolution. The point to note from this is that an alteration in 

the causal origins and mechanisms results in different meanings being highlighted 

whose historical significance carries a different message.


Multiple modernities 

Karl Jaspers, a younger colleague and friend of Weber’s in Heidelberg, introduced 

the concept of the axial age in his book The Origin and Goal of 

History, first published in 1949. This offered a schematic overview of the 

development of civilizations throughout history and prehistory – from the 

origins of humankind to its future in one global world. As a philosopher, 

writing for a lay audience, his intention was to indicate that humankind 

belonged together from its earliest origins to its future purpose. He was 

pleading for common human consciousness in the light of the known past 

and, as such, he can be considered an early proponent of the global age. 

Jaspers sketched out four levels of civilization: (1) prehistory; (2) the ancient 

high civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus and Hwang-ho; (3) the 

axial age in the east and west and China and India; and (4) the scientific and 

technological age in Europe, North America and Russia. 

The axial age is when 

for all countries (‘Völker’) a common framework of historical self-understanding 

has arisen. This axis in world history would appear to have 

occurred around 500 years before Christ . . . it is here there occurs the 

deepest break in history. It was here that the human being with whom 

we live today originated. This period is to be termed, in brief, the ‘axial 

age’. The extraordinary came together concentrated into a period of 

time. It was the time Confucius and Lao-Tse lived and all the directions 

of Chinese philosophy began and Mozi, Zhuangzi, Lie-Tsi and countless 

others worked; in India the Upanishads originated, Buddha lived, and, 

as in China, all the philosophical possibilities from scepticism, to materialism 

to the sophists and to nihilism were developed; in Iran Zoroaster 

taught the challenging worldview of the struggle between good and evil; 

in Palestine the prophets appeared from Elijah to Isaiah and Jeremiah 

and Deutero-Isaiah; Greece produced Homer, the philosophers – Parmenides, 

Heraclitus, Plato, the tragedians, Thucydides, and Archimedes. 

Everything that these names indicate arose in these few centuries almost 

simultaneously in China, India and the Occident without any awareness 

of each other. 13 

It is in this period that, for the first time, the human being becomes aware 

of human existence itself and the limits of human existence. There occurs 

the first consciousness of what the world is capable of and the powerlessness 

of the individual, and of emancipation and salvation. This consciousness implies 

reflection, that thinking can be directed to thinking itself; also that spiritual 

(‘geistige’) conflict begins with the attempt to persuade others through 

communication of ideas, reasons, experiences. This intellectual conflict and 

the breaking up of the previously unconsidered viewpoints and customs into 

opposing camps brought intellectual chaos. Out of this chaos were created


the fundamental categories of thought, and in which we still think. These 

were the basis of the world religions. ‘In every sense a step was taken into 

the universal.’ The axial replaced the mythical age. The prophets and philosophers 

began a fight ‘against the mythical from the side of rationality and 

of rationally explained experience (of Logos and against Mythos); further, 

a fight for the transcendence of one god against demons . . . and a fight 

against false figures of gods driven by ethical indignation.’ 14 Jaspers writes 

that this change in human existence can be termed one of intellectualization/spiritualization 

(‘Vergeistigung’). Human beings can ask questions they 

never asked before. It is the age of the philosophers, by which Jaspers means 

the wandering thinker in China, ascetics in India, philosophers in ancient 

Greece, prophets in Israel. What they have in common, despite substantive 

differences, is the ability to think within themselves and place human existence 

with its mental, corporal and instinctual attributes in opposition to the 

world. This gives rise to the discourses and practices of ataraxia, meditation, 

the consciousness of Atman, or Nirvana, harmony with Tao, or in submission 

to the will of God. The axial age is the (first) time that revelations can 

be announced (‘Offenbarwerden’), which later become the ideas of reason 

(‘Vernunft’) and individuality (‘Persönlichkeit’). Because there is a consciousness 

of the human being’s position in the world – that there is a gulf rather 

than an unreflexive oneness between the individual and nature – the idea of 

the individual as a person appears. 

This is obviously broad-brush philosophy attuned to the large question 

of what has defined our sense of common humanity. It can hardly be said 

to be an advance on the academic study of religion at the beginning of the 

twentieth century, which insisted on not intellectualizing other cultures, and 

which had great difficulty in separating out just what distinguished magic, 

cult and religion and the nature of their dynamics. Although Max Weber 

might have been flattered that Jaspers made such productive use of his work 

on world religions, he would surely have queried the divide between, essentially, 

the philosophical and the prephilosophical as an era-defining category. 

But then Weber had not experienced the shattering impact of science in the 

service of war and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Jaspers, quite rightly, was a worried man, and his book is an assertion 

of the common origin and destiny of humankind – a sentiment not in the 

foreground of Weber’s thought. The validity of Jaspers’ thesis still requires 

assent by those not in the German philosophical tradition – by scholars in 

China, India, Persia and so on. Modern ‘Offenbarwerden’ will be both declaration 

and dialogue. 

These very pertinent issues aside, Jaspers makes an observation that escaped 

Weber, who was preoccupied by the differences between world religions 

even though he perfectly understood the move from magic to revelation. 

Each of the world religions, for Weber, has a directional potentiality 

– the switchman image. This potentiality itself is what Jaspers grasps. A new 

dynamic is introduced into world history by the philosophical attitude itself,


and this is more important to understand than the actual developmental 

paths influenced by the world religions. The implication of Jaspers’ thesis is 

that modernity is not to be tied down to a specific working out of the claims 

of redemption and action in the world, as occurred in the Puritan revolution, 

but the impulse to modernity is part of a wider axis in world history where 

the tensions between human existence in the world and the superempirical 

or transcendental framing of that existence lead to new ambitions. How the 

challenges of thinking about and, in part, resolving these tensions would be 

specific to the different world religions and their societal context – a matter 

that Jaspers did not enter into. But for Jaspers, all the world religions and 

their civilizations are in their different ways harbingers of modernity. 

S.N. Eisenstadt and others have drawn the conclusion from this that modernity 

is not singular to the Puritan revolution in north-west Europe, but 

should be thought of as multiple. Eisenstadt states his thesis thus: 

The conception of Multiple Modernities entails the view that although 

obviously the first modernity developed in the West, in Europe, and that 

this modernity was presented by its bearers as the ‘natural’ modernity 

and was for long periods of time often conceived in this way also by 

many groups in other societies, yet in fact from the very beginning of the 

modern era there developed throughout the world, with the expansion of 

modernity, distinct patterns of modernization and of converging industries- 

the European or Western pattern need not be repeated elsewhere, 

especially as these later modernities were no longer ‘first’ modernities 

and developed already in periods and situations in which European and 

later Western modernities were already fully established and acquired a 

hegemonic status in the new, modern, international systems. 15 

One implication of the Jaspers’ thesis is that modernity could have originated 

in China or India, or in an Islamic country. The classical historian 

Arnoldo Momigliano articulates this far wider set of possibilities. He dates 

the axial age to between 600 and 300 bc (not 800 to 200, which was Jaspers’ 

dating) and writes, 

It has become a commonplace, after Karl Jaspers’s Vom Ursprung und 

Ziel der Geschichte – the first original book on history to appear in postwar 

Germany in 1949 – to speak of the Achsenzeit, of the axial age, 

which includes the China of Confucius and Lao-Tse, the India of Buddha, 

the Iran of Zoroaster, the Palestine of the Prophets and the Greece 

of the philosopher, the tragedians and the historians. There is a very 

real element of truth in this formulation. All these civilizations display 

literacy, complex political organization combining central government 

and local authorities, elaborate town-planning, advanced metal technology 

and the practice of international diplomacy. In all these civilizations 

there is a profound tension between political powers and intellectual


movements. Everywhere one notices attempts to introduce greater purity, 

greater justice, greater perfection and a more universal explanation 

of things. New models, either mystically or prophetically or rationally 

apprehended, are propounded as a criticism of, and alternative to, the 

prevailing models. We are in the age of criticism. 16 

In Eisenstadt’s extensive writings, this is an inference that is never ruled 

out and, certainly, in the construction of other non-western modernities, 

different philosophical heritages are drawn upon. With Weber, they are 

ruled out by his methodological approach. In his studies of China or India, 

or Islam, he always makes statements along the lines that capitalism, markets, 

finance, trade, law and technology existed in these civilizations. But 

the switchman intervenes in conjunction with the particular dynamics of 

interests, so that inevitably no rational capitalistic modernity could emerge. 

Confucianism was so adjusted to the world that it regarded with distaste any 

transcendental idea (which was the basis of the Christian transformation of 

the social world according to an ethical vision of what a god decreed). Hinduism 

had a superempirical vision, but its conduct of life led in the direction 

of contemplation and the lessening of the pain between earthly life and a life 

beyond, i.e. in the direction of apathy. The era of world religions for Weber 

offers the possibility of complex outcomes, but only one of these produces 

modernity – which happens for a series of identifiable reasons to occur in the 

west. Hence, the commonality of world religions as offering sophisticated 

accounts of humankind’s relation to the universe, and being able to conceptualize 

such a thing, is the basis of difference in their actual developmental 

paths. Accordingly, modernity is singular to the west. In the Protestant ethic 

studies of 1905, Weber draws this singularity in narrow terms – Calvinism 

and the Puritan sects. It could not have happened elsewhere and, if it did, 

we would not be calling it modernity; rather The Way, The Umman or The 

Garden, perhaps. 

The issue for Eisenstadt is that modernity is realized in a number of institutional, 

ideological and individual–state relationship formats. Modern 

twentieth-century societies exhibited a great variety: western European societies 

differ from British society, just as American society is different from 

Japanese. And Russia and the eastern bloc offered an alternative solution to 

modernity, and so on. Modernity, in this reading, is an inherently divergent 

phenomenon not a convergent one, as some argued in the 1950s – that modernization 

across the world would occur as a replication of the institutions, 

structures and values of the United States. 

Tracking the developmental paths of diverging modernities is a major 

academic industry in comparative historical sociology, all registering various 

allegiance to Max Weber’s writings. The multiple versus singular question 

still arises here, however. If one traces the various divergent developmental 

strands back in time, do they have a common origin, root or theme? Is 

there a singularity that originates this complex called modernity, and then


unfurls outwards in different trajectories? Or is modernity a multiple birth 

phenomenon? 

I take the Eisenstadt school to be saying the latter (and I take Weber to be 

saying the former). Eisenstadt is a modernization theorist, not the Parsonian 

AGIL convergent model, but a differentiation model that produces divergence 

in its formation. Speaking of developments in societies after 1945, 

Eisenstadt writes: ‘While a general trend toward structural differentiation 

developed across a wide range of institutions in most of these societies – in 

family life, economic and political structures, urbanization, modern education, 

mass communication, and individualistic orientations . . . this gives 

rise to multiple institutional and ideological patterns.’ 17 The same manner 

of argument would seem to apply to early modernity. In a chapter with 

obvious homage to Weber. ‘The Sectarian Origins of Modernity’, Eisenstadt 

outlines the start of modernity as an institutionalization of value positions. 

Those value positions belonged in the sphere of religion and were marked 

by conflict as to how a transcendental vision, such as redemption, was to be 

realized in the world. 

. . . the implementation of such visions constituted an inherent part of 

their institutionalization in the Axial civilizations. Historically such process 

of institutionalization of transcendental visions was never a simple 

peaceful one, it was usually connected with a continuous struggle and 

competition between many groups and between their respective visions. 

Because of this multiplicity of visions, no single one could be taken as 

given or complete. Once the conception of a basic tension between the 

transcendental and the mundane order was institutionalized in a society, 

or at least within its center, it became itself very problematic. Thus 

the very process of such institutionalization generated the possibility of 

different emphases, directions and interpretations of the transcendental 

visions. 18 

Institutionalization is a conflictual process of resolution – in his words, it 

‘crystallizes’ the tensions in an institutional outcome. Without the crystallization, 

the axial age would remain in a state of chaos. Institutionalization 

operates across a number a dimensions. There is a political–religious struggle 

as to how transcendental visions are to be realized in the world. For example, 

the foundation of Buddhism was reliant on the huge support of King 

Ashoka, Christianity to the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine. 

Within the realm of doctrine and philosophy, revelation is tempered to an 

extent by reason, the latter providing the capacity of reflexivity, of being 

able to consider critically what in a religious sense is beyond question. Transcendental 

visions raise profound questions of how an ethical or godly order 

will be created in the mundane world. Christian theorists referred to this as 

realizing the Kingdom of God on earth (or, in Troeltsch’s terms, reconciling 

sacred law with profane law). Various ‘social contracts’ seek to regulate the


mundane life and its tendency to anarchy and selfishness with the vision of 

what a godly order should be like. 

‘The cultural program of modernity entailed a very distinct shift in the 

conception of human agency of its autonomy, and of its place in the flow 

of time’. Again, this is resolved through institutionalization. The English 

historian R.H. Tawney saw the developments in English society from the 

fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries as one of the Church, supported by 

the crown, moving away from the insistence that the community was the 

‘summum bonum’ to one in which the individual, as an economic agent 

in his own right, could pursue his own ends. 19 The acquisition of wealth 

could become legitimate activity in a way, as the medieval church said, ‘is not 

pleasing to God’. Agency – the idea that men can make their own fortune, 

or even that they might make their own history – is a new awareness that becomes 

internalized into political and economic arrangements. How agency, 

reason, revelation and transcendence are institutionalized is country specific. 

Liah Greenfeld’s Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity demonstrates this 

extensively by itemizing the differential experiences of England, France, 

Russia, Germany and the United States. For her, how national communities 

are formed and constituted in early modernity (not the nineteenth century 

as the title might seem to imply) is the crucial ground on which the tensions 

of the axial age are resolved. 

Enough has been outlined about the multiple modernities position to 

show that the origination process throws up diversity. It is an institutional 

differentiation process that ‘crystallizes’ values that are intrinsically not resolvable 

in themselves. This I do not think can be claimed as Max Weberian, 

at least not directly. Values do not crystallize in institutional formats for Weber. 

They can become routinized through institutional carriers. Values here, 

while no longer vibrant and pristine, still belong to individuals and groups. 

Weber’s nominalism has it that institutions do not speak for the individual, 

although they may well influence the individual’s outlook. Crystallization 

takes actually held values of individuals and renders them second-order phenomena 

at the level of institutions. This is a separation that Weber never 

undertakes. His separation is between value spheres and their inevitable existential 

conflicts for people, such as Cromwell, who have two masters (God 

and politics); and his resolution is through conduct of life as a practice of life 

and so always an existential choice. 

Of course, this does not mean that Weber is right and Eisenstadt wrong. It 

is far more agreeable to follow Eisenstadt because a condition of modernity 

in its inception is the capacity of agency, of controlling one’s own destiny 

and the directionality of society. In politics, this reached a new high point in 

the English revolution of the seventeenth century, of self in the Renaissance, 

of society in the ideas of the Enlightenment. Eisenstadt is also quite explicit 

that modernity has a prodigious capacity for going wrong and for violence. 

This is a very long chapter, which I will not relate. But agency and renewal 

are linked together in Eisenstadt’s account. Societies have the capacity to


reform themselves politically and socially and to escape their episodes of 

blood-letting. 

Weber regarded agency and reflexivity (to use Eisenstadt’s terms) less benignly. 

European societies did not choose to be modern. Instead, they chose 

and struggled to be Puritan or some other religious denomination. English 

Puritans had a life conduct constructed to maintain piety, not to give birth to 

money-making machines. Weber’s vision of reform, or routinization of values, 

or control, and of violence, and of ethical dehumanization is far darker. 

Modernity arose through the honouring of an absent god, and rationalism 

was an unstoppable and unceasing effort of religious intellectuals to introduce 

consistency and order into irrational metaphysical revelation and what 

were taken by intellectuals to be its assumptions. Reflexivity was not a term 

used by Weber and, although intellectuals are involved in reflective activity, 

this has an internal dynamic all of its own (‘Eigengesetzlichkeit’) that would 

exclude ‘second-order reflexivity’. 

A highly relevant part of the debate over modernity is its relation to a 

globalizing world. Eisenstadt and others have quite rightly given this due 

attention: ‘one of the most important implications of the term “multiple 

modernities” is that modernity and Westernization are not identical; Western 

patterns of modernity are not the only “authentic” modernities, though 

they enjoy historical precedence and continue to be a basic reference point 

for others.’ The history of modernity, for Eisenstadt, 

is a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity 

of cultural programs. These ongoing reconstructions of multiple institutional 

and ideological patterns are carried forward by specific social 

actors in close connection with social, political, and intellectual activists, 

and also by social movements pursuing different programs of modernity, 

holding very different views on what makes societies modern. 20 

During the twentieth century, this has produced nation states differing 

through their cultural and ethnic traditions, fascism and communism, as 

well as new nationalist movements in the Third World. What makes these 

different regimes modern is their reference to the forces that had created 

the original modernity. In a global world, there is an attempt to appropriate 

modernity by societies on their own terms, ‘to appropriate the new international 

global scene and the modernity for themselves for their traditions 

of “civilizations” – as they were continually promulgated and reconstructed 

under the impact of their continual encounter with the West’. 21 Modernity 

for Eisenstadt is the ability of leading groups to confer agency on societal 

development, and this is no longer seen as a western monopoly. 

In the case of India, Eisenstadt quotes Myron Weiner: 

The classical conceptions of the state and the political order were closely 

linked to basic concepts around which society was organized – notions


concerning equality and hierarchy, rights and duties, the individual’s 

place in the community and the relationship between the community 

and authority. The introduction of European institutions and political 

concepts notwithstanding, India continues to retain a social order that is 

very different from the one upon which European political institutions 

were built. Moreover, many of the beliefs that underlie this social order 

remain intact. The result is not that Indian political institutions do not 

or cannot work, as some of its critics suggest, but that they work differently 

. . . 22 

The introduction of modern institutions of government, civil service, 

democracy and political parties has reflected the immense linguistic, ethnic 

and social stratification of the country. Governments have tended to be 

grand coalitions representative of religious and linguistic groups, cultural 

autonomy has been upheld – as opposed to the homogenizing imperative in 

western national states – and minority rights are guaranteed. The working 

through of a modern political system downwards through the mass of the 

people has been an intricate, gradual and pragmatic process involving the 

charismatic–ascetic movement of Gandhi in asserting the rights of the peasant. 

This is just a snapshot, but enough to demonstrate the point that the 

multiple modernities concept allows that modernity itself is malleable and 

open to different political, cultural and religious influences. Modernity, for 

Eisenstadt, is practically the same as modernization. The differentiated capacity 

within separate institutional spheres that incorporate the crystallization 

of tensions within axial civilization is what makes modernity possible 

in the first place. In this argument, there is no singularity and no originary 

modernity. In the singularity argument, the actual creation of modernity is 

a fortuitous coming together of circumstances, driven by strong values and 

commitments within a dynamic of interests. Modernity as a singularity is like 

a great number of eschatological movements – blindly driving forwards to a 

superempirical goal, but more a prisoner of circumstances, even self-created 

ones, than controlling one’s destiny. 

Once modernity is seeded, then institutional patterns of law, governance, 

economic activity, science and education do start to perform in the way 

described by modernization theorists. But whether modernization can be 

extrapolated backwards to explain the singular event itself has to be queried. 

How values and interest positions are crystallized out of what Jaspers termed 

the ‘chaos’ of the axial age presents a problem of how order (modernization 

patterns) emerges from chaos. Robert Bellah writes of axial ‘breakthroughs’, 

‘. . . there is no clear indication of the causal relation of these changes to the 

emergence of strikingly new cultural–religious formations’. 23 Modernization 

theory places the emphasis on the variety of outcomes and the complexity 

of process. Weber remained preoccupied with the causal question: why here 

in the west and not elsewhere? It is not implausible to see his work as an


attempt to answer this question without ever being able to achieve closure 

of it. 

Does this argument between singularity and multiple modernities matter? 

Clearly, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and North 

America, patterns of modernization can be discerned and, although subject 

to wide-ranging academic debate as to the exact shape, the general movement 

of law, economy, government, society and culture is unmistakable. 

Weber is not terribly helpful here in his writings, in that having gone into 

the origins of the event – capitalist modernity and a rationalistic culture 

– he displayed no great interest in tracking its subsequent history. Likewise, 

in his brief remarks on how capitalist modernity would spread internationally, 

he simply notes that China in 1910 was well on the way to embracing 

capitalism, and that, in India, the caste system would disappear under the 

impact of nationalism. 24 What we want to know from Weber is whether he 

thought that capitalism in China was simply going to replicate, say, nineteenth-century 

British capitalism, and whether – as he does seem to imply 

– a modern movement such as nationalism would have a levelling effect on 

India’s heterogeneous social structure. 

‘Prefatory Remarks’ to the ‘Collected Essays in the Sociology 

of Religion’ 

The ideas of singularity are most pronounced in PESC 1904–5, not least 

because, of all his religious studies, it has the closest historical focus. But the 

same insistence on how distinctive Puritanism was, and its impact upon occidental 

development, can be found in the well-known comparison between 

Confucianism and Puritanism. This was the last chapter of his ‘Religion of 

China’, which as we know was revised for publication in his ‘Collected Essays 

on the Sociology of Religion’. The whole programme of the study of 

the economic ethics of the world religions was undertaken to discover the 

uniqueness of Christianity (including its Judaic heritage) on western development. 

His comparative studies cannot be criticized for a falsely construed 

image of ‘the Orient’ as an idealized other – in the way, for example, Edward 

Said has shown how a literary image of the Orient has been created by western 

writers and artists. Weber charts the differences at the level of religion, 

social structure and politics. He may have made scholarly mistakes and been 

dependent on unreliable sources, as he himself admitted. But his comparative 

studies establish the internal and external reasons for the separateness of 

the world religions and the effects on their corresponding societies. 

When it came to the publication of his ‘Collected Essays on the Sociology 

of Religion’ in 1920, Weber was faced with the task of writing a preface 

that would link the original Protestant ethic studies of 1904 and 1905 with 

his studies of the economic ethics of the world religions. The same causal 

model is offered up for both the world religions and the Protestant ethic 

studies. Religious ideas as well as magic impact upon the practical conduct


of life, and this has consequences for economic life and for prevailing social 

structures. The Protestant ethic exemplifies the positive causal factors; the 

other world religions flag up the ‘spiritual obstacles’ to the development of 

rational economic conduct (pp. 26–7). The world religions are only studied 

from the viewpoint of how they differ from the situation in the Occident. 

This enables the unique causal factors of the Occident to be better understood 

in terms of their distinctiveness. Weber uses a series of words here: 

‘eigentumlich’, ‘Eigenarten’ and just plain ‘eigen’. Parsons translates these 

as peculiar or peculiarities. My preference is for ‘distinctive’ or ‘distinctiveness’. 

But the overall sense of what Weber is trying to capture is that the 

development of the Occident is something ‘sui generis’ to a whole culture 

– it was unique to itself. 

The ‘Prefatory Remarks’ (termed ‘Author’s Introduction’ by Talcott Parsons) 

introduce a change in tone and a change of argument. His preface 

alters the terms of comparison from why and how the Occident is different, 

to its being different ‘tout court’. Throughout his studies, he had been creating 

platforms on which to analyse difference: Calvinism against Lutheranism, 

magic against religion, Confucianism against Islam, the western city 

against the city in patrimonial regimes. Each comparison could throw up 

possible causal factors that had meaningful consequences. Lutheranism was 

accommodating to the world, Calvinism was not – it was inherently radical 

in all its dealings with the world. Magic is rational and this-worldly, religion 

alters the worldview and leads to behaviour orientated to obtaining salvation 

goods. The western city produced the social stratum of the burghers 

(‘Bürger’), who achieved a degree of economic and jurisdictional autonomy 

and self-rule, whereas the Islamic merchant was subordinate to the patrimonial 

ruler. In saying that the west was different in its entirety, Weber was 

giving up a platform on which to base his comparison. 

The ‘Prefatory Remarks’ stretches the historical timespan of the Occident, 

almost as if it had no beginning. Western culture or civilization is generalized 

over its whole extent, and it has no clearly defined starting point. Perhaps 

its starting point lay in Abrahamic religion 600 bc, perhaps earlier in archaic 

kingdoms. Throughout his writings, Weber was keen to emphasize key 

episodes and developments, which mark points of divergence and change: 

the Greeks on the plain of Palatea, St Peter in Antioch, the role of Hebrew 

prophets in the face of Babylonian invasion. In the ‘Prefatory Remarks’, Weber 

generalizes occidental ‘Kultur’ to one characteristic, rationalism. 

Weber opens his ‘Prefatory Remarks’ by listing the various ways in which 

the Occident differs from other civilizations: it has science based on empirical 

knowledge and experimentation; its law, historiography, painting, music 

and architecture have a uniquely rational character; its universities and 

academies pursue rational and systematic science and train specialist personnel. 

The Occident is unique in producing the trained, specialist official, in 

government, business and the professions. Its politics is based on rational, 

written constitutions, rationally ordained law and an administration bound


to rational rules and laws. Its capitalism is unique, not for its pursuit of 

gain, which is universal, but ‘forever renewed profit by means of continuous, 

rational, capitalistic enterprise’. This continuous dynamic capitalism is based 

on profit calculations made possible by budgets and distinguishing profit and 

loss over a fixed time period in terms of capital invested. ‘Only the Occident 

has developed capitalism both to a quantitative extent . . . in types, forms, 

and directions which have never existed before’. Only the Occident has developed 

‘the rationalistic organization of (formally) free labour’, and this 

has been made possible by the separation of the household from the business 

(unlike the classical ‘oikos’ and the manorial household). Both bourgeoisie 

and proletariat are unique, because nowhere else existed ‘rational organization 

of free labour under regular discipline’. 

At this point in his preface, Weber puts the question of origins: ‘We must 

hence ask, from what parts of that structure [social structure of Occident] 

was it [modern capitalism] derived?’ His answer is the rational structures of 

law and administration. But he has already listed these, and they cannot claim 

any special originating status. Having built up his list, Weber rephrases the 

question: ‘Why did not scientific, the artistic, the political, or the economic 

development there [China and India] enter upon that path of rationalization 

which is peculiar (‘eigen’) to the Occident?’ (p. 25). 

His answer states, ‘For in all the above cases it is a question of the specific 

and peculiar “rationalism” of Western culture’ – ‘einen spezifisch gearteten 

“Rationalismus” der okzidentalen Kultur’ (pp. 25–6). 

Weber has the opportunity at this point to distinguish the culture of the 

Occident in terms of the philosophical validity of rationalism. It would seem 

to be a strong term, implying the systematic exercise of reason and intellect 

in relation to a world whose empirical status (epistemologically) is acknowledged. 

Distinctiveness could then become superiority according to criteria of 

validity. Ancient India developed numbers but had no systematic mathematics, 

China had technology but, because of magic, no grasp of the potential of 

science, and it was only in Greece that there developed an awareness of how 

concepts conferred a critical grasp of the world and man’s place in it. Weber 

makes all these points and numerous similar ones, in his various texts, but 

he insists on placing rationalism in quotation marks to indicate that western 

rationalism should not claim any special validity. 

Spelling out validity criteria would have given Weber a platform from 

which he could declare the distinctiveness of western rationalism. Instead, 

he does the opposite. He argues that all civilizations display rationalistic 

tendencies. Mysticism may be rationalized by its practitioners, for example. 

There can be rationalizations of the ‘specifically irrational, just as much as 

there are rationalizations of economic life, or technique, of scientific research, 

of military training, of law and administration’ (p. 26). Weber uses 

the concept of rationalism extensively in his writings. In his ‘Introduction’ 

to the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’, he outlines several (interrelated) 

usages of the concept:


1 The increasing theoretical mastery of reality by means of increasingly 

precise and abstract concepts. Systematic thinkers undertake this work 

on (religious) worldviews. 

2 The methodical attainment of a defined and given practical end by means 

of ever more precise calculation of the necessary means. 

3 Methodical in the sense of a planned routine for achieving some end. 

Weber gives the example of Buddhist prayer machines – a sequence is 

established and has to be followed. 25 

The ends to which these rationalisms are put are not in themselves rational. 

Buddhist salvation goals have led to a ‘rationalist’ method. Puritan ideas 

of predestination have received intense systematization. Confucian ethics are 

the closest thing to the ‘rationalist’ ethics of utilitarianism, in that both have 

clear rules of what to do and what not to do. Confucianism seeks to achieve 

perfection and a utilitarian happiness. Neither of these ends is validated by 

the rationalist system itself. 

The process of applying rationalism to the conduct of life, Weber’s primary 

interest, is termed rationalization. Each of the world religions achieves 

high levels of rationalization, and so the determination of life conduct. 

There is, then, no priority given to western forms of rationalism, which is 

characterized by the means–end calculativity of point 2 above. Returning to 

‘Prefatory Remarks’, Weber notes of the various areas of life, 

. . . each one of these areas may be ‘rationalized’ according to very different 

ultimate viewpoints and directions, and what is ‘rational’ from 

one point of view may well be ‘irrational’ from another. Hence rationalizations 

of the most varied character have existed in various areas of 

life (‘Lebensgebieten’) and in all areas of culture (‘Kulturkreise’). To 

characterize their cultural–historical differences it is necessary to know 

what spheres are rationalized and in what direction. This then depends 

first of all on recognizing the particular character (‘Eigenart’) of occidental 

rationalism – and within this of modern occidental rationalism 

– and of explaining how it came into existence (‘in ihrer Enstehung zu 

erklären’). 26 

The last phrase in this quote indicates that the distinctiveness of western 

rationalism is to be sought in terms of origins. Parsons, in his translation, emphasizes 

this: ‘to explain genetically the special peculiarity of the Occident’ 

(p. 26). This points to a singularity argument – that there is some genetic 

origin in western history that seeded its peculiar (means–end) rationalism. 

But this is countermanded by the position that Weber had arrived at in 1920 

through his extensive comparative studies. It was the whole of western history 

that displayed rationalism, and it becomes very difficult and extremely 

implausible to trace this back to one originating event. Rationalism can be 

dated back to the Jewish prophets of the exilic period of Israel, but this could


hardly be held to account for Attic rationalism in the second century bc or 

for the rationalist features of Roman law. What Weber says is that, in the 

various spheres of life, within occidental history, rationalism is a commonality. 

It might have made more sense for Parsons to translate ‘Enstehung’ as 

‘memetically’ – that there was a cultural ‘gene’ within the civilization able to 

replicate the occidental features of rationalism across history and in different 

areas of life. This is unfair on Parsons because ‘meme’ is a concept that was 

only invented by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1986 (in 

The Selfish Gene). It is an interestingly line of thought, because a meme is a 

cultural artefact and has no biological basis in sexual reproduction (and so in 

genetics). It may well be that societies and civilizations can socially generate 

cultural patterns that are enduring and replicable. This line of inquiry, in 

relation to Puritanism, has been initiated and developed in a series of essays 

by W.G. Runicman. 27 

But this takes us far beyond Weber. His summation of both world religions 

and Protestant ethic studies in ‘Prefatory Remarks’ is a statement 

that ‘rationalism’ as a modality of thought (abstract and methodical thought, 

consistency, calculability) is common to all world religions. His investigations 

would show that the content and substantive goals of rationalism are 

various, and that their realization within the different areas or spheres of 

life adds more empirical variability. World religions display distinct patterns 

of development by virtue of the ordering of their salvation beliefs and how 

these are carried into practical conduct. The spheres of life – politics, kinship, 

economics, art, etc. – will in their turn receive differential impacts from 

religion and, conversely, religion will be impacted upon by the particular 

dynamics of these other spheres. Comparative history is a matter of what 

Weber terms a ‘combination of circumstances’ – it is a matter of contingency. 

Western rationalism is contingent upon a set of circumstances, and there is 

no adequate or valid theory that could deliver an explanation of that set of 

circumstances. Hence, all that is left ultimately in comparison is the comprehension 

of difference. 

A child of modern European civilization will necessarily and rightly 

treat problems of universal history in terms of this question: [to] what 

combination of circumstances may the fact be attributed that in western 

civilization and only in it, cultural phenomena have appeared, which 

– nevertheless as we like to think at least – lie in a line of development 

having universal significance and value? 28 

This is the opening paragraph in full to the ‘Prefatory Remarks’. Weber’s 

answer to the question he poses so dramatically is that western rationalism is 

contingent on its own history and can claim no universal validity. Westerners, 

especially with the global expansion of the western model of rational 

capitalism at the start of the twenty-first century, tend to assume the validity


and superiority of many aspects of their civilization. It is a historicist statement 

writ large, an amplification of Herder. 

It is not a rhetorical question. It is the opening question to three volumes 

of essays in the sociology of religion. The studies in the world religions 

outline the directionality and contents of rationalization processes. All the 

world religions have an equivalence, what separates them is the content of 

their salvation messages, the cognitive framework of worldviews and the 

contingent directionality of rationalization processes. Schluchter has captured 

the equivalences and differences in the world religions with respect to 

their rationalist tendencies (Figure 7.1). 29 

Weber wrote of this as his ‘contribution . . . to the typology and sociology 

of rationalism’ (EW, p. 216). All the world religions are arranged on the 

bottom row, including their variant forms. In the first row, the big divide is 

between rationalist systems that affirm or are adjusted to the world (such as 

Confucianism) and those rationalist systems that confront religious values to 

those of worldly values. And, in the second row, the major divide is between 

salvation religions that turn away from the world and those that live in the 

world. Buddhist contemplation and (western) monastic asceticism lead to 

a compartmentalization of religion separate from the world. Puritanism 

separates itself from the other Abrahamic legacies by, uniquely, embracing 

asceticism within the world. Puritanism distinguishes itself by the enormous 

tension that it generates by superimposing transcendental demands upon 

its believers while they live and work in the world – hence the example of 

Bunyan. This schema also usefully places Puritanism within the religions of 

the Near East. This allows the judgement that modern capitalism was a result 

of a late variant. Puritanism is a singularity, but one that comes out of a much 

longer tradition of religious rationalisms. 

This, as Weber insists, is a typology. He has heuristically constructed tendencies 

within world religions that rarely appear with such consistency. But 

because the feature of religious rationalism is their striving for consistency 

and the attainment of salvation goals through methodical means, the clarity 

of the typology is in part justified in historical reality. What cannot be 

included in the diagram is the historical and contingent impact of all the 

other spheres of life and their various economic, political, artistic and kinship 

values. For example, Islam follows one trajectory when carried within a 

feudalistic warrior stratum and an entirely different one as an urban religion 

with mystical tendencies. Confucianism and a polity that looks territorially 

inwards led to a sort of equilibrium and stasis within the Chinese Empire. 

But had an outward-looking trading or political class become influential, 

then some of the principles of Confucianism might have undergone change 

or challenge. The contingency of politics in relation to Protestantism is extremely 

well documented. Had the Habsburg emperor, Phillip II of Spain, 

crushed the Protestant opposition in the Low Countries, Puritanism may 

never have made its historical rendezvous with the rising middle classes.

World-rejecting 

cultural religion 

or salvation religion 

World-affirming 

cultural religion or 

‘political’ religion 

1. World-affirming/ 

world-rejecting 

Salvation religion 

turning towards the world 

Salvation religion 

turning away from the world 

2. Turning towards/ 

turning away from 

the world 

Ascetic Contemplative or 

ecstatic 

Ascetic Contemplative or 

ecstatic 

3. Ascetic, 

contemplative 

or ecstatic 

Overcoming the world World flight World mastery Accepting fate in the 

world 

Adjustment to the 

world 

Basic attitudes 

toward the world 

Protestant ethic Ancient Judaism, 

Early Christianity, 

Oriental Christianity, 

Islam (?) 

Hinduism and 

Buddhism 

Western Christianity 

(monasticism) 

Studies Confucianism and 

Taoism, Islam (?) 

Figure 7.1 Classification of cultural religions.


Religious rationalism, and a different modernity, would have travelled on a 

different and less agonizingly individualistic path. 

This brings us back to the fortuitous nature of modernity. History favoured 

a particular form of rationalism that turned out to be highly adaptive 

and consequential. It did not possess intrinsic validity. This perhaps is the 

sense of peculiarity or distinctiveness of the Occident that Weber is always 

worrying away at. Modernity’s triumph over other civilizations is its peculiarity. 

Weber is quite comfortable analysing, and digressing on, the two millennia 

of Confucianism, and he is explicit in his admiration of the religiosity 

of Indian intellectuals. 

It stands out by virtue of its consistency as well as by its extraordinary 

metaphysical achievement: It unites virtuoso-like self-redemption by 

man’s own effort with universal accessibility of salvation, the strictest rejection 

of the world with organic social ethics, and contemplation as the 

paramount path to salvation with an inner-worldly vocational ethic. 

(FMW, p. 359) 

Religion and its relation to the social and economic order in India achieved 

an impressive stability over three millennia. 

Modernity acculturated in Puritanism, in contrast, has a disturbing dynamic. 

Religion’s enduring function was to create meaning by placing the 

human being in a wider cosmology. Puritanism, by the peculiarity of its 

path to salvation and life conduct, led to secularization and the destruction 

of cosmology. Science and rationality, which in the western enlightenment 

tradition is cause enough for validity, for Weber remains the source of disenchantment 

and perhaps the last step out of Edenic paradise. In civilizational 

comparison, there is nothing self-evident about reason, the rights of man, 

and a science able to validate itself through criteria of proof and evidence. 

While these give rise to what Weber suggests is the illusion of universality 

(not to say the actual empirical diffusion of this universality), it remained the 

fortuitous gift of individuals striving for salvation.

8 Power, legitimacy and 

democracy 

Power is a subject that is inextricably linked to the work of Max Weber – in 

a double sense. Not only was he a theorist of power, but he also provided 

some of the most acute analyses of the political situation of his day. I will 

summarize very briefly his contemporary situation and his commentary on 

it. I will then present his academic analysis of power in the two versions 

provided, in the earlier version and final version of Economy and Society, 

respectively, and relate them to some recent treatments of power in political 

sociology. I examine his analysis of democracy and ‘leadership democracy’ 

in particular, which I argue should be looked at anew in the light of recent 

tendencies within British and American democracy. 

Weber’s political background 

Weber’s own family belonged to the political and cultural elite of Wilhelmine 

Germany and played a part in the supporting the Kaiserreich, which was 

founded by Chancellor Bismarck in 1871 and disintegrated dramatically at 

the end of 1918 with the cessation of the First World War. Weber’s working 

life belonged to the same timespan of the Kaiserreich, he remained closely 

involved in the politics of the period, and he was an influential and cogent 

analyst of the regimes many tensions and contradictions. The origins 

of those difficulties can be traced through Weber’s family history, and what 

emerges are some of the main components for the formation of the modern 

nation-state. As we now know, to our cost, the harmonious coming together 

of these components tends to be the exception rather than the rule. 

His grandfather, Georg Friedrich Fallenstein (his mother’s father), was a 

volunteer at the age of 23 in the ‘War of Liberation’ in 1813 against Napoleonic 

rule. He joined the Lützow corps, which was not a regular army unit 

but a band of comrades in arms who took great pride in their German heritage, 

creating romantic ballads in the course of their campaign. In military 

terms these volunteer units were insignificant, measured against the regular 

armies that were deployed by many states to counter Napoleon. But in the 

formation of the idea of the German people, the episode became hugely

Power, legitimacy and democracy 221 

significant. Of it, James Sheehan writes, ‘The Volk’s role in its own liberation 

was, at best, a minor one. Napoleon was defeated by regular armies, 

not patriotic poets and quaintly attired gymnasts. Eventually, however, the 

apostles of nationalism were able to create a historical memory of liberation 

which projected their own enthusiasms onto the nation.’ 1 Fallenstein 

went on to be a middle ranking Prussian official, who was held back in any 

preferment by his obvious enthusiasm for all things German. 2 His superiors’ 

loyalty lay with the Prussian monarchy and they were distrustful of patriotic 

fervour advancing, as it did, the cultural unification of the German people as 

a political force in its own right. 

Fallenstein retired to Heidelberg, built a grand villa on the banks of the 

Neckar (in which Max and Marianne Weber were eventually to live) and 

supported the celebration of German language, literature and folk traditions 

– for example the work of the brothers Grimm. At his Heidelberg home, 

Fallenstein took in Gervinus, one of the mostly widely read and most liberal 

historians of his day. As a professor at Göttingen, Gervinus had been exiled 

for refusing an oath of allegiance to the Prince Regent, who had suppressed 

the existing constitutional rights in the state of Hanover. Gervinus took his 

case to the supreme court of the German Confederation. He lost the case 

but became the champion of constitutional rights among the liberal middle 

class. Their political hour came in 1848 when Europe was convulsed by 

revolutions of peasants and workers, from Spain to Russia. Gervinus was a 

leading force in the National Assembly in Frankfurt, a collection of reformers 

and radicals that sought to put in place the first constitutional system for 

the peoples of central Europe. The reformers, given their opportunity by 

the widespread protests, deliberated too long and were split along too many 

cleavages: the politics of language and ethnicity versus the claims to self-determination, 

and the politics of constitutionalism for the privileged middle 

class versus the (then) radical demands of the democrats for a republic and 

parliamentary rule. 3 

Fallenstein may be thought of as the ethnically defined cultural component, 

Gervinus as the liberal constitutionalist component. The option of 

a democratic republic was resisted by Fallenstein and, initially, Gervinus. 

Instead of looking to a newly enfranchized people as the basis of political 

power, the liberals sought to conjoin their constitution to an existing dynastic 

state, which would retain the continuity of monarchy and the attributes 

of state power – an army, fiscal system, judiciary and policing. The aspiration 

of the liberals was to transfer legitimacy from dynastic autocracy to constitutional 

liberalism that would, in addition, recognize the basic rights of all 

the people. After much wrangling in the National Assembly the leadership 

of the German Nation was offered to the King of Prussia. This decision in 

itself represented a betrayal of two elements in the National Assembly: those 

elements who wanted self-government and democracy without monarchical 

state rule from above, and the multifarious elements (Poles, Hungarians, 

Ruthenes, Slovaks, Italians etc.) who wanted self-determination outwith a

222 Power, legitimacy and democracy 

German nation. These facts tend to be overlooked in face of the historic 

disappointment caused by the response from the Prussian king who rudely 

refused the offer of becoming the head of the new nation. 4 

Over the second half of the nineteenth century Prussia achieved hegemony 

over the separate thirty-nine German territories, which were agreed upon in 

1817 at the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon. But in 1848 

the geo-politics of central Europe did not automatically favour Prussia. Bismarck 

was the supreme strategist, who as Minister-President of the Prussian 

kingdom achieved this in the 1860s. He manipulated the balance of political 

forces both within the state and between states. He regarded the Austrian 

Empire as the main threat to Prussia. Liberal as well as democratic protest 

was widespread across Austria in 1848. It was eventually suppressed by the 

Austrian authorities, just as the outbreaks of democratic radicalism in Frankfurt 

were suppressed by Prussian troops. Bismarck perceived that liberalism, 

vocalized in Frankfurt, and German unity under Austrian leadership could 

combine to sideline Prussia. Accordingly, in 1866 Bismarck engineered a 

successful war against Austria, very much against the sentiment of liberal, 

middle class opinion in Prussia. And in 1870 he provoked France into a war, 

where Prussia was again successful. This placed German territorial fortunes 

beyond the interference of foreign powers (Russia, Austria, France and England). 

The war against France was welcomed with popular enthusiasm in 

Germany. Bismarck devised a constitution of his own making and the Kaiserreich 

(or second German Empire) was founded in 1871. The German 

states, excluding Austria, were incorporated into the Empire under Prussia’s 

leadership. Nominally the monarchic constitution offered federalism 

to the incoming territories and universal male franchise to the people. In 

reality, neither people nor previously independent territories had any executive 

power. The historian Geoffrey Barraclough summed up the situation: 

‘In Bismarck’s system, nationalism, long the concomitant of liberalism, was 

deliberately fostered as an antidote to liberal and radical demands; he offered 

the German people unity, but at the expense of the radical reform 

which alone made unity worth while.’ 5 But in the attainment of German 

unity under Prussian rulership, Bismarck had unleashed a populist nationalism 

that by the 1890s had become anti-Semitic and anti-foreigner, fostered 

a trust in militarism, and created powers for monarch and aristocracy beyond 

the reach of parliamentary accountability. Although he had introduced 

male suffrage for elections of political parties to the Reichstag, that body 

had no real parliamentary powers to appoint ministers and administrations 

or budgetary oversight. Real power lay with the Prussian aristocracy and 

their ‘Landtag’ which had an outrageously unfair electoral system favouring 

the rich. And above both ‘Reichstag’ and ‘Landtag’ was the unaccountable 

power and influence of the Emperor. The liberals had got a constitution 

and German unity but the system ‘was, in fact, a veiled form of monarchical 

absolutism vested in the King of Prussia.’ 6 Weber learnt at first hand from his


family what compromises and choices were involved in the construction of 

the German Empire. 

Weber’s uncle, Hermann Baumgarten, acted as a secretary to Gervinus 

in Heidelberg in the early 1850s. Gervinus deplored the reactionary turn in 

Prussian policy after the fervour of the events of 1848 had cooled, and he 

regretted the offer made by the National Assembly to the King of Prussia. In 

1853 he wrote publicly that the political future belonged not to the middle 

classes but to the fourth estate of workers and peasants. For this he was 

charged with treason and Fallenstein, Hermann Baugarten and other friends 

had to organize his defence. 

Following Bismarck’s military successes in the 1860s, Baumgarten broke 

with Gervinus. In 1866 he wrote a self-critique of German liberalism, which 

he held was preoccupied with freedom, ideals and constitutionalism. ‘Politics 

is action, it must always want something and achieve something; liberalism’s 

problem is its ability to adapt its demands to reality, it must seek… to become 

capable of government’. State power and the ‘real relations’ of power 

had to be grasped. This was the new liberalism – and the ‘unity through 

freedom’ of the ‘old liberals’ was an ‘obvious chimera’. 7 If Germany was to 

be united, then it would have to accept the leadership of Prussia. This was 

the new ‘realpolitik’, a phrase invented by Ludwig von Rochau, a journalist 

friend of Baumgarten’s. 

Weber’s own father was a member of the National Liberal Party, which 

had despite a split given its guarded support to Bismarck. He held a number 

of important governmental posts in Berlin in budgetary committees and in 

the administration of Berlin itself. The young Weber learnt that Bismarck 

could govern with the support of the National Liberals and he could govern 

without their support. The Chancellor was not subject to parliamentary 

political parties, as in the English case, but only to the confidence of the 

Emperor. What he learnt from Hermann Baumgarten was his uncle’s subsequent 

extreme disillusion with Bismarck’s rule, which he thought had not 

lived up to the ideals of a Protestant German state. 

Baumgarten accused Bismarck of ‘Caesarism’. Bismarck had introduced 

universal male suffrage with the belief, it is said, that the masses would be 

conservative and patriotic. Bismarck would rule with popular approval. This 

approval was not forthcoming and Bismarck was forced to govern by manipulating 

and overriding an often hostile Reichstag, which sought to exercise 

its legislative powers. Baumgarten himself disapproved of universal suffrage, 

preferring a graduated suffrage – empowering the middle class prior to the 

entry of the working people. 

This brings us to Weber’s own politics. He was a bourgeois liberal, which 

in his case meant that he took the supreme political value to be the power of 

the state, and that middle class liberals should displace the incumbent Prussian 

aristocracy as the political class. Like his father’s generation, he had no 

way of achieving this against the deeply entrenched power of the Prussian 

aristocracy. His political writings reflect his seething resentment at the lack


of bourgeois leadership and they are marked by an angry but forensic skill 

in analysing the real interests that underlay political rhetoric. Only later in 

life (around 1910) did Weber seriously consider the reform of the Prussian 

‘Landtag’ and making its powers subordinate to the Reichstag. 8 His politics 

also reflected his views as an economist. Germany should be a world power, 

taking its part in competition with the other great powers in the search for 

economic opportunities (trade, emigration, colonies). To this end he supported 

the re-arming of the German navy and he contributed a journalistic 

article supporting Tirpitz’s Naval Bill of 1898. 9 He realized this aggressive 

stance could lead to war, but argued that announcing Germany’s imperial 

claims would deter other nations from frustrating its ambitions. 10 Weber’s 

‘nationalism’ was therefore based on the power of the German state in relation 

to other nations, his liberalism was a belief in an expanding capitalism 

at national and international levels as the new competitive reality, and his 

political reforms were directed at making the government more vital and 

more responsive to the interests of the nation. He accepted that trade unions 

and working class political parties were inevitable under modern capitalist 

industrialization and he was a vigorous reformer for their right to participate 

in the political and economic life of the country. 

When war broke out in 1914, he supported the German patriotic cause 

and joined up as a reserve officer. His wartime and postwar political articles 

for leading German newspapers are some of the best things he wrote. In the 

light of the sacrifices of the troops, he demanded a proper parliamentary 

and fair electoral system. Under pressure, and in a minority, he criticised the 

Kaiser and High Command. He immediately recognized the foolhardiness 

of unrestricted U-boat warfare by the German marine – because it would 

bring America into the war, as it did. After the war he helped to found the 

German Democratic Party within the political framework of the Weimar 

Republic – whose constitution he had influenced through his writings and 

political reputation. 

Weber’s participation, however much on the sidelines, in world historical 

events has made him a controversial figure. His name is linked with the 

idea of ‘realpolitik’. Weber argued that Germany could not shirk its power 

responsibilities on the world stage. He rejected the Christian message of 

pacifism, which a small peace movement in Germany had been advocating. 

No politician at the national or international level could ignore what Weber 

termed the pragma of power. To act weakly, to ‘turn the other cheek’, was 

a dangerous illusion that ignores the rules of the game, and puts one’s own 

constituents or country at risk (EW, pp. 261–2). The countering Enlightenment 

position was formulated by Immanuel Kant. ‘Nature herself ’ whether 

by fate or providence should produce ‘concord among men, even against 

their will and by means of their very discord.’ 11 Kant argued against secret 

treaties activated by states in time of war and against territorial acquisition. 

He argued for the reduction of standing armies, the raising of national debt 

for foreign policy objectives, and for the observance of the laws of war.


Weber is also controversial for his advocacy of leadership within democracy. 

His justification for strong leaders was in part based on his view that 

bureaucratic growth within the state, government and political parties would 

stifle the voice of the true political leader, who would articulate national values 

and formulate his own goals in the face of the levelling effects of modern 

politics. The political leader was, however, accountable to parliament and 

subject to constitutional laws. The mature political leader has to combine 

conviction, the awareness of the consequences of political actions, and an 

ability and judgement to cope with the normal business of politics. 12 Unfortunately, 

this normative list of criteria has often been cruelly abbreviated by 

twentieth century politicians – conviction without responsibility, and gesture 

over the substance of politics. Weber’s case has also been diminished by the 

democratic election of the leaders Hitler and Mussolini, who suppressed 

democracy, put in train genocide and unleashed the most violent war in the 

history of the world. This has led to and re-asserted the view that democracies 

are made safer through the reduction in the powers of political leaders. 

The case for benign strong leaders, like Franklin Roosevelt and General de 

Gaulle and Willi Brandt, can, of course, be made also. 

Weber, therefore, was a political commentator and activist in his own 

right, in addition to his academic writings on the topics of power, interests, 

rulership and politics. His acute sense of power and the political enters into 

the academic writings. He was an academic who lived through a momentous 

period of German history and he rarely stopped observing, debating and 

commentating on the political situation of his day. Weber was a scholar, 

but not the dry as dust variety. It is quite hard to single out his real passion 

– politics or scholarship. Ernst Troeltsch, it will be recalled, observed of 

Max Weber that he had two minds in one head. One was political, always 

cynically and cleverly reducing the utterances and actions of politicians to 

their underlying self-interest; the other mind pleaded for an absolute sense 

of justice and fairness – this other mind belonged in the western humanist 

tradition. 13 

This places Weber in a unique position: as a kind of modern Machiavelli 

who could impartially analyse the practice of power and was not repulsed by 

its choices and outcomes. The power and prestige of the nation was a noble 

cause for Weber, imparting dignity, culture and worth to human existence. 

This, he recognized, was true of all leading nations and, in addition, they 

were compelled to struggle for power and prestige in the international arena 

– hence the politics of nations could not escape a diabolical element. 14 Political 

leaders had to make decisions that were guided by what Weber termed an 

ethic of responsibility – weighing up and thinking through the consequences 

of their actions. They were also accountable to the values of the nation, 

its culture, and the prestige of the state. The leader’s political values here 

depended on firm convictions that may, ultimately, not be compatible with 

the more rational ethic of responsibility (EW, pp. 261–8). Weber belonged in 

the long western tradition of the secular enlightenment of politics, but one


sceptical of any self-evident natural law. The irrationalities of power could 

not be squared with philosophies that took the end of the politics of living 

together to be happiness. 15 

The dimensions of power 

I now turn to his academic writings in the various versions of Economy and 

Society. ‘Domination (‘Herrschaft’) in the quite general sense of power, i.e., 

of the possibility of imposing one’s own will upon the behavior of other 

persons, can emerge in the most diverse forms’ (ES, p. 942). Power is the 

ability to impose your will on others, even if they resist. Weber’s definition 

follows most people’s understanding of power. ‘Domination in the most 

general sense is one of the most important elements of social action’ (ES, 

p. 941). It is to be found everywhere: ‘a position ordinarily designated as 

“dominating” can emerge from the social relations in a drawing room as well 

as in the market, from the rostrum of a lecture-hall as well as from the command 

post of a regiment, from an erotic or charitable relationship as well as 

from scholarly discussion or athletics.’ The ubiquity of power, that it is to be 

found in all possible social relationships, creates difficulties for a sociology of 

power. ‘Such a broad definition would, however, render the term “domination” 

scientifically useless’ (ES, p. 943). 

The earlier drafts of Economy and Society, read as a whole, produce three 

sociological dimensions of power: economic power, social power and political 

power. His sociology of rulership (‘Herrschaftssoziologie’) analyses the 

last dimension in depth and breadth. The rationale and structure of Economy 

and Society does not pursue a general theory of power, because it is the 

relation of the various orders of society in relation to the economy that is its 

focus. Rulership stands alongside economic activity as one of the enduring 

and salient features of all societies. In the modern economy, the operation 

of power and control in both the economic enterprise and politics resembles 

each other. The basic social relationship is rationally ordered according to 

fixed rules with operations carried out by trained officials and personnel. For 

most of human history, the economy has never achieved such self-direction, 

but remains embedded within the prevailing structures of kinship and kingship. 

Weber’s sociology of rulership analyses the major types of rulership 

and shows their controlling and shaping effects on economic activity. 

This should not obscure the point that the major elements of a more 

general theory of power are in place in these writings. Weber recognizes the 

centrality of economic power. 

A comprehensive classification of all forms, conditions, and concrete 

contents of ‘domination’ in that widest sense is impossible here. We will 

only call to mind that, in addition to numerous other possible types 

there are two diametrically contrasting types of domination, viz., domination 

by virtue of a constellation of interests (in particular: by virtue


of a position of monopoly), and domination by virtue of authority, i.e., 

power to command and duty to obey. 

(ES, p. 943) 

The exclusive possession of an economic resource places its holder in a 

position of domination over all those who need that resource. If a water supply 

is controlled unrestrictedly by one owner, or if the provision of computer 

software was controlled by one supplier, then this places huge economic 

power in the hands of those owners. In finance, Weber notes, any large central 

bank through its monopolistic position can control capital markets. 

Weber uses the phrase ‘domination by virtue of a constellation of interests’. 

By this, he means that the attributes of power in the economic sphere 

are qualitatively different from rulership itself. Weber gives the example of 

a powerful bank which owns the debt of another company. It can exercise 

its interest over that company through economic devices, for example by 

varying or threatening to vary the terms of its loan. Or, the relationship of 

power could be altered by bringing the company director(s) into the authority 

structure of the bank itself. Those directors would then be subject to the 

commands of the bank itself. This latter situation belongs to the structure 

of rulership within an organization and, hence, belongs to the sociology of 

rulership, not the ‘constellation of interests’. It is the specific quality of the 

power relationship that is Weber’s concern. 

The sociology of economic power is further analysed in his writings on 

class and status groups. Weber defines class in terms of two variables: the 

ownership of property and the possession of skills that can be sold. This 

provides a simple but widely applicable stratification of very many societies. 

Slave-owners, patriarchal owners of landed estates, capitalists who own 

companies and stock are positively privileged, in terms of class, by virtue 

of property. Underneath and economically subordinated are the slaves, the 

peasants and serfs and the wage-earners. Possession or non-possession of 

skills provides a more complex picture of stratification, in that skills are 

often more graduated through a society. In today’s societies, the economic 

division of labour produces a myriad of gradations in terms of types of skills 

in particular areas: semi-skilled, unskilled and professional skills. These gradations 

are not fixed, but change according to the development and dynamic 

of the economy, as certain skills are made redundant while new ones appear. 

In a medieval economy, skill differences were institutionalized through guild 

regulations as well as by status ascription; if one was born a peasant, one 

almost always remained a peasant on the lord’s estate. 

Status distinctions represent the third dimension of power, social power. 

In European medieval societies, a person belonged to a fixed status group 

within a clear hierarchy of social power. The feudal lord was at the top of the 

hierarchy, his knights in an inferior status (but only to him), with dependent 

peasants completely subservient. In the medieval towns, a different status 

order had been established, especially in those towns that had achieved


jurisdictional autonomy from feudal lords, which they could have achieved 

by buying the privilege of autonomous rule within the city walls or by fighting 

the feudal lord for those rights. This then produced the status hierarchy 

of guild master, journeyman and apprentice. Closed status hierarchies border 

on becoming caste societies, in which no movement whatsoever occurs 

between status groups. Marriage across status boundaries is not permitted, 

and status distinctions are maintained through strict rituals of a religious 

nature. Status boundaries are policed by extraordinarily powerful measures 

such as pollution, magical rites and totemic symbols. 

In contrast with the ‘class situation’, which is determined by purely 

economic factors, we shall use the term ‘status situation’ to refer to all 

those typical components of people’s destinies which are determined by 

a specific social evaluation of ‘status’ whether positive or negative, when 

that evaluation is based on some common characteristic shared by many 

people. 

(EW, p. 187) 

Social power involves a struggle for social esteem. Social groups such as 

medieval merchants or religious priests, e.g. Brahmans, can develop into 

occupational status groups. Some special qualification can also be claimed 

through hereditary descent, or an office or profession can be appropriated 

through political power. 

As can be expected, Weber immediately acknowledged that the dimensions 

of economic power interact with social power. In European medieval 

society, status distinctions defined economic opportunities. In today’s capitalistic 

societies, class distinctions are becoming almost completely dominant 

over status distinctions, and this can be seen in the inability of professional 

groups to defend their special skills in the face of those who control economic 

and financial power. This is referred to as the ‘marketization’ of society. 

Status distinctions can also be used to buttress economic class position and, 

conversely, economic power may be consolidated into status distinctions. 

Weber covers many pages of text discussing and illustrating the interactions 

that occur in different periods of history and in different societies between 

rulership, economic power (class) and social power (status). 

The overall conclusion is that all societies are engaged in a perpetual struggle 

for the distribution of power along these three dimensions. In addition, 

power registers in most forms of social relationship – for example between 

lovers – beyond the major dimensions picked out for treatment by Weber. 

An international footballer has obvious economic power through selling his 

skill. That economic power can be translated into status by those footballers 

who become celebrities, eventually becoming independent of those footballing 

skills. But, in theory, the celebrity footballer is subject to the complete 

rule of the football manager who might choose to praise or humiliate the 

player in whatever way he wishes. Each of the three dimensions of power


comes into a single case. The three dimensions are ideal typical ways of modelling 

power that, in its multidimensionality, would be extremely difficult to 

analyse in the concrete case. 

In these last paragraphs, I have recapitulated the introduction provided 

for Part 2 of The Essential Weber. Reading Gianfranco Poggi’s thoughtful 

and informed book Forms of Power, I realize I should have made clear that 

this exposition is not the standard account of Weber’s theory of power. 

Poggi asks: ‘if we seek to differentiate forms of social power by referring 

to the different “bases” of it, how many forms should we come up with?’ 16 

He quotes Weber: ‘Classes, status groups and parties are phenomena of the 

distribution of power within a collectivity’. 17 This formula, for Poggi, produces 

a ‘basic trinity of social power forms (again: normative/ideological; 

economic; political) . . .’. 18 Classes are the form of economic power, status 

groups of normative/ideological power, and parties the form of political parties. 

Poggi rightly observes that this tripartite division has been followed 

by the sociologist and philosopher, Ernest Gellner, and the Italian political 

theorist, Norbert Bobbio. Michael Mann’s massive account of The Sources 

of Social Power makes a similar tripartite classification, but adds in a further 

dimension, military power. 

Taking a closer look at Mann, he outlines ‘the four sources and organization 

of power’. These are: (1) ideological power, where a claim to meaning is 

monopolized by a social group, or moral norms are monopolized; likewise, 

the ritualistic and aesthetic constructions of meaning can be monopolized. 

Hence, those who control rite, morals and religion are termed, by Mann, as 

exercising ideological power. (2) ‘Economic power derives from the satisfaction 

of subsistence needs through the social organization of the extraction, 

transformation, distribution, and consumption of the objects of nature.’ 

Mann echoes here the definitions of social economics provided by Weber 

and Sombart, other than that these writers include the motivational bases of 

behaviour – which in Mann are included but await his further analysis. He 

continues: ‘A grouping formed around these tasks is called a class . . . which 

is therefore purely an economic concept.’ (3) Military power ‘derives from 

the necessity of organized physical defence and its usefulness for aggression’. 

(4) ‘Political power . . . derives from the usefulness of centralized, institutionalized, 

territorialized regulation of many aspects of social relations’. 19 

Mann uses these definitions to provide a historical sociology of power as farranging 

as Weber’s comparative studies. Each of the four forms is an ideal 

type, which enables the conceptual clarification of human history that would 

otherwise appear to be hopelessly complicated. But in an empirical case, 

these four types would come together, through their specific organizational 

forms, to provide ‘the dominant power structure of a given area’. 

Poggi is quite explicit in acknowledging Weber, and Mann is more reluctant 

in this regard, but the similarities to Weber are fairly obvious. In my 

exposition, I argue that Weber outlines three dimensions of power, but these 

do not map to subsequent accounts, as suggested by Poggi and Mann. Social


power is not the overall outcome of the three or four dimensions of power, 

it is simply one (important) dimension in the multiplicity of relationships 

of power. Social power for Weber is the negative and positive distribution 

of prestige in status groups. The Brahman’s lifestyle is an expression of his 

social power over lesser lifestyles. The category of prestige is couched in 

meaning, but is not of itself normative or ideological. It is a practice, a lifestyle, 

an embodiment of conduct and habitus; it is visible and forms a basis 

of social measurement. 

This is not the same as ideological and normative power as Poggi would 

have it. Mann’s placing it as his first form is a departure from Weber’s 

writings. Weber’s Sociology of Religion is the closest text to what Mann 

summarizes under ideological power. Priests, magicians, cultic mystagogues 

propagandize – Weber’s term – their various beliefs and practices within 

social groups, and world religions represent successful propaganda on a 

mass scale. Weber would have had no problem with the concept ‘ideological’ 

(which in his day had a fairly narrow Marxist usage). But religion is not 

for Weber a dimension of power. There is a sense that religion exercises 

power within people’s minds and behaviour, and Weber had the option 

of including it in his threefold division of power in the text ‘Class, Status 

Group and Party’. But he did not do this. Instead, the power of religion is 

rendered by Weber as an ‘ideal interest’ and, in the architecture of his work, 

ideal interests are counterpoised to ‘material interests’. Power belongs to the 

realm of material interests, and social prestige, economic class and political 

power are all forms of material interests. As the Outline Plan of 1914 shows, 

the (unfinished) chapter on religion would be separate from the chapters 

on power. The dynamics of ideal interests has an autonomy (‘Eigengesetzlichkeit’) 

different from the spheres of the social, economic and political 

order. They are not equivalent as factors in a multicausal scenario, which 

is how Mann conceives of the development of human societies. This brings 

us back to Weber’s recalcitrance in treating religion as just another factor. 

It is a separate element, and the best that can be achieved is determination 

through the idea of elective affinity. Much turns on this insistence because, 

for Weber, historical outcomes cannot be deduced from the various input 

factors. The combination of ideal and material factors introduces a new and 

unpredictable historical element. 

Nevertheless, both Poggi’s and Mann’s analysis of power forces an interesting 

dialogue with Weber’s writings on the subject; specifically, how Weber 

arranged his chapters or sections in the various versions of Economy and 

Society. Both Mann and Poggi assume that the whole point of the analysis 

of power is to explain the allocation of resources in society. Resources, 

argues Poggi, can be allocated by custom, by exchange and by command. 20 

Normative, economic and political power control these resources. I am not 

certain that this is the thrust of Economy and Society. In the final version of 

that work, Weber would have seemed to have placed the chapter ‘The Basic 

Concepts of Economic Activity’ at the core (see Chapter 9). This was then


followed by the chapter on ‘The Types of Rulership’ and then ‘Classes and 

Status Groups’. At that point, he unfortunately died. But he would have expected, 

surely, to have drawn down and revised the early drafts on religion, 

law and social groups. Stratification (in ‘Classes and Status Groups’) would 

be but one field of determination and co-determination in relation to the 

economy. Stratification, therefore, cannot be privileged as the explanandum, 

as the thing to be explained. Social economics was more than resource allocation 

– it was the principal types of economic activity or ‘economizing’ 

through history as conceived by Weber in terms of motivations for economic 

goals and organizational forms. Stratification would obviously impact upon 

this, but economic classes did not belong to the core analysis. 

Mann provides his reader with a schematic diagram (Figure 8.1) of how 

he interlinks the goal-directed behaviour of human beings; how this flows 

through the ‘boxes’ of the four types of power and results in a power structure 

which itself contributes to the evolution of further societal development. 

What might an equivalent diagram look like, were Weber to have supplied 

one for Economy and Society? In the central circle would be economizing 

activities and their types. Around this, in a series of overlapping circles, 

would be the types of law, types of rulership, face-to-face types of community 

and wider communities, types of religious groups and types of social 

stratification. The ‘Basic Sociological Concepts’ (Chapter 1) are intrinsic to 

all the other special sociologies. Chapter 1 appears to stand apart from the 

succeeding chapters, but it has to be read as an accompanying presence to 

those other chapters. Therefore, diagramatically, it has to be ‘fed into’ the 

cluster of other sociologies, for which it provides a terminological grounding 

(Figure 8.2). 

Mann’s schema demonstrates a clear linearity of motives being translated 

into the resources and organization of power and resulting in the evolution 

of societies. Weber, as we have seen, continuously rehearses and reprises 

themes of narrative and developmental history, but never commits himself to 

Original motor Major sources of 

social power 

Human beings 

pursuing their 

goals 

Ideology 

Economy 

Military 

Types of state 

Institutionalization 

Dominant power 

structure of areas 

Figure 8.1 Mann’s four sources and organization of power. 

Emergence 

of rival power 

networks


Figure 8.2 Simulation of the final version of Economy and Society. 

any sort of evolutionary account of societal change. Instead, Economy and 

Society, most especially in its final version, pulls back away from historical 

development in favour of interactions between spheres of activity that are 

conceptualized as types of social relationships. 

Figure 8.2 is hypothetical, although I would argue a reasonable surmise 

of Weber’s final version. Discerning the overall plan of Economy and Society 

is a contentious and scholarly issue. What also has to be held in mind is 

Weber’s readiness to execute such a programme. A sphere, such as power 

and rulership, is treated as a major theme in its own right. Then, it is related 

extensively to types of economic activity. And then, the economic bases of 

rulership are discussed. This procedure would then be repeated through all 

the special sociologies – law, religion and all the subsidiary circles of Figure 

8.2. Each time Weber makes one of these manoeuvres, his mind always carries 

with it a ready supply of examples and empirical materials. The illustrative 

material is allowed to dominate the exposition, but Weber will then 

switch the theme and line of analysis. 

Keeping this discussion in mind – admittedly, given Weber’s ambitions 

and capabilities, not an easy task – I examine Weber’s ‘Herrschaftssoziologie’ 

in the two versions that he wrote for Economy and Society. The older version 

is Chapters 10–15, and the final version is Chapter 3 of Economy and 

Society, edited by Roth and Wittich. 

What follows greatly benefits from Edith Hanke’s editing of Weber’s 

‘Herrschaftssoziologie’ in MWG I/22-4. Her introductions and footnotes 

clarify many issues. 

Weber’s political sociology 

‘Herrschaftssoziologie’ was a special sociology, like those of law and of religion, 

and was designed to feed into Economy and Society. But it was also 

a subject especially close to Weber’s heart. As a national-economist, he had


to deal with issues of law, government and power structures, but it was not 

until 1909 that Weber started to develop his own political sociology. One 

impetus for this was discussions with Georg Jellinek on the setting up of a 

German–American Institute to be supported by the Carnegie Foundation. 

Weber recommended that it should research the legal, political, economic 

and the general cultural dispositions (‘allgemeine Kulturverhältnisse’) and 

how these determined modern nations and international relations. Other 

topics for study included: the internal structures of states; the role that military, 

bureaucratic and feudal or industrial, commercial and other bourgeois 

strata have on the political culture (‘politische Geist’) of the state; the political 

division of powers and the practical role of public law and administrative 

machinery; how all these contribute to the formation of the political 

culture (‘öffentliche Meinung’) of a country and determine its relation to 

other countries. ‘Therefore the direct analysis of the international legal and 

political relations must go hand in hand with the internationally comparative 

analysis of the legal, political, economic and cultural structure of individual 

countries and states.’ 21 This initiative never came to fruition and, as 

Hanke notes, it would have undertaken much empirical work for his ensuing 

contribution to Economy and Society. 

Power, state, administration were all part of any national-economist’s 

vocabulary, especially Weber’s with his comparative abilities that, up to the 

point of the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, had culminated in ‘Agrarverhältnisse 

im Altertum’. The switch to a more specialized political sociology is 

marked by the gradual introduction of the concept of ‘Herrschaft’. There is a 

long-running issue as to how ‘Herrschaft’ should be translated into English. 

Semantics are determined by problematics in this dispute. Talcott Parsons 

used the term ‘authority’. In his sociology of societies and social systems, he 

emphasized the coordination functions of authority. Modern societies not 

only command, they organize and execute complex policies. For Parsons, 

the essence of power was not the relationship of the command of superior 

over subordinate, so that one person gained and one lost in the transaction 

– the so-called ‘zero-sum’ account of power. What was more important was 

the capacity to organize and administer, the advantages of which flowed to 

all members of a society. 

In America, C.W. Mills embraced a conflict model of society, most notably 

in his book The Power Elite (1956). This rehearsed a tradition first articulated 

in modern times by Gaetano Mosca, the Italian political scientist who 

noted how a small organized group will always dominate a larger disorganized 

group. Mills brought this insight up to date, noting that US cities were 

controlled by small interlocking elites of administrators, political representatives 

and economic leaders. He also expanded on President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 

warning, in 1955, that democratic power in the United States 

was falling into the hands of the military–industrial complex. In Germany in 

1959, Wolfgang J. Mommsen brought out his controversial Max Weber und 

die deutsche Politik, which argued that Weber was less a constitutional liberal


(which had been the accepted picture) than a ‘realpolitiker’ who favoured 

the interests of the German state in the competitive international arena 

over the values of democracy, which had to take second place. 22 Following 

on from these influences, domination became the preferred translation of 

‘Herrschaft’ – because it brought out the conflictual, realist side of power. 

And this flowed back into the problematic, with theorists such as Anthony 

Giddens favouring the realist view of power, in his Nation-State and Violence 

(1981). 

These tensions are all expressed in the Roth and Wittich edition of Economy 

and Society. This is an amalgam of translators and translations. Parsons 

used ‘authority’, Guenther Roth uses ‘domination’ (in the ‘Herrschaftssoziologie’) 

and Benjamin Nelson expressed a preference for ‘rule’ and ‘rulership’. 

My preference, which I should declare at this point, is for ‘rule’ and 

‘rulership’. (In the quotations below, I have not changed the translators’ 

choice of words, although the translations in The Essential Weber do reflect 

my preferences.) 

Hanke’s discussion of the aetiology of ‘Herrschaft’ in Weber’s usage is 

relevant here. There was clearly a ‘realist’ school for the analysis of power. I 

have already mentioned Weber’s own tutelage under Hermann Baumgarten. 

In addition, Weber had read in Italian the first volume of Mosca’s Elementi di 

scienza politica, which appeared in 1896 (although not the second volume, 

which appeared in 1923). Weber’s close friend and academic colleague (until 

they fell out over German politics during the First World War), Roberto 

Michels, also used Mosca’s ideas to argue that the revolutionary aspirations 

of socialism could never be achieved because of the constraints of organization. 

Similarly, a Grundriss author, Friedrich von Wieser, argued a revisionist 

line that mass movements have to accept the inevitability that power can 

only be wielded by small organized groups. This provenance points towards 

a realist conception and elites. 

Simmel was also an influence. He published two chapters – ‘The Sociology 

of Super- and Subordination’ and ‘Towards a Philosophy of Power 

(‘Herrschaft’) in his 1908 book, Soziologie. Within the general theme of the 

tension between freedom and authority and individuality and compulsion, 

Simmel probed the social–psychological issues of why free individuals allow 

themselves to be subject to authority and power. As Hanke notes, this is the 

psychologically equivalent question to Locke and Hobbes’ formulation of 

the acceptance of a social contract between the ruler and the ruled. 

This psychological aspect is directly reflected in Weber’s definition of 

‘Herrschaft’, that is 

the situation in which the manifested will (command) of the ruler or 

rulers is meant to influence the conduct of one or more others (the 

ruled) and actually does influence it in such a way that their conduct to 

a socially relevant degree occurs as if the ruled had made the content of


the command the maxim of their conduct for its very own sake. Looked 

upon from the other end, this situation will be called obedience. 

(ES, p. 946) 

Hanke makes the very pertinent point that this formulation is close to 

Kant’s categorical moral imperative. Morality is internalized by the individual, 

and moral imperatives are followed for their own sake (and not for some 

other instrumental purpose). This does not mean that Weber had adopted 

the German Lutheran idea of obedience or, for that matter, Heinrich Mann’s 

obsequious notion of ‘the subject’ (‘Untertan’). The phrase ‘as if ’ is crucial 

in Weber’s definition. Commands are obeyed – obviously a feature of power 

– but ‘as if ’ the command is accepted legitimately as an obligation on the 

behalf of the ruled. 

Explaining why someone should so accept a command in this way is finely 

balanced between psychology and sociology. There is a large field of psychology 

that deals with hierarchical dispositions in human beings, and the very 

word ‘domination’ signals the wide variety of forms of dominance and abjection 

between human beings. Weber did indeed recognize this psychological 

side, for example in erotic relationships but, as a political sociology, the 

issue for him is the acceptance of legitimacy in a particular power structure 

(‘Gebilde’). This brings the balance down firmly on the side of sociology, or 

– more exactly – interpretative sociology. Hanke argues convincingly that 

the essay ‘Some Categories of Interpretative Sociology’ not only expounds 

Weber’s distinctive emphasis on meanings and types of social action, but that 

‘Herrschaft’ is used as a major example of the new method. 

For its [‘Herrschaft’] sociological analysis depends decisively on the 

varying possible subjectively meaningful bases of that legitimacy consensus 

that determines in fundamentally significant fashion the specific 

character of domination wherever naked fear of directly threatening 

power does not condition the submissiveness. 

(Cat, p. 177) 

The idea of consensus is a direct extension of Weber’s concept of agreement 

through consensus (‘Einverständnis’) – a fundamental concept of action 

that Weber elaborates in the ‘Categories’ essay (Cat, pp. 166–8). Likewise, 

‘Verband’, another sociological category, is crucial for the analysis of closeknit 

power groups. 

Legitimacy represents the validity claims of rule in the minds of the ruled. 

The whole of Weber’s ‘Herrschaftssoziologie’ follows according to this formulation. 

The ‘validity’ of a power of command may be expressed, first, in a 

system of consciously made rational rules (which may be either agreed


upon or imposed from above), which meet with obedience as generally 

binding norms whenever such obedience is claimed by him whom the 

rule designates . . . Obedience is thus given to the norms rather than to 

the person. 

The validity of a power of command can also rest, however, upon 

personal authority. 

Such personal authority can, in turn, be founded upon the sacredness 

of tradition, i.e., of that which is customary and has always been so and 

prescribes obedience to some particular person. 

Or, personal authority can have its source in the very opposite, viz., 

the surrender to the extraordinary, the belief in charisma, i.e. actual 

revelation or grace resting in such a person as a savior, a prophet, a 

hero. 

The ‘pure’ types of domination correspond to these three possible 

types of legitimation. The forms of domination occurring in historical 

reality constitute combinations, mixtures, adaptations, or modifications 

of these ‘pure’ types. 

(ES, p. 954) 

It should also be said that the type of legitimacy is interdependent with 

the structure of rulership. Weber organizes his chapters (in the old version 

of Economy and Society) in the following sequence: ‘Bureaucracy’; ‘Patriarchalism 

and Patrimonialism’; ‘Feudalism, Ständestaat and Patrimonialism’; 

‘Charisma and its Transformation’. Bureaucracy not only proceeds on 

grounds of rule-bound behaviour, but this is also the precondition of its 

elaborate rational, centralizing and hierarchical apparatus. Traditional legitimacy, 

as exemplified in the manorial household or ‘oikos’, is a far looser 

‘organization’ where, while there might be status distinctions between members 

of the household, they are all ultimately dependent on the lord/ruler. 

Charismatic structures are not organized, they simply represent the ‘following’ 

of the charismatic ruler. Traditional rulership has limitations placed on 

its apparatus formation; power structures based on charisma are inherently 

unstable. Michael Mann places great emphasis on the extensibility of power 

structures in their political and military forms. This is not ignored by Weber, 

but he brings his analysis back to the ideal typical principle of legitimacy. 

Hanke’s scholarly research has provided the best approximation that we 

have of the dating of the various chapters of the ‘Herrschaftssoziologie’. 

Chapter 15 in Economy and Society, ‘Political and Hierocratic Domination’, 

is one of the earliest compositions. It lacks the social action types and, hence, 

is not a beneficiary of Weber’s interpretative sociology. It does not have any 

cross-references to other sections of Economy and Society. It stands in close 

relationship to the ‘Agrarverhältnisse’, and its excursus on sacerdotal power 

and the economy indicates that it is a direct reworking of the Protestant ethic 

studies. The chapter on patrimonialism also lacks the use of ‘Herrschaftsverhältnis’ 

as a concept, and Weber’s treatment emphasizes the structure


and apparatus of power and its constraints. The chapters on bureaucracy 

and charisma do display the interpretative categories of legitimacy, but there 

is some evidence that Weber inserted this into the draft at a later date (c. 

1913). This is especially apparent in the chapter on bureaucracy, which tends 

to read as an analysis of structure rather than social action. 

‘The City’ was not completed and is certainly a very early composition. 

The first editors of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Marianne Weber and Melchior 

Palyi, had difficulties integrating it into the volume. Two major topics, 

which were trailed in the 1914 Outline – ‘The Development of the Modern 

State’ and ‘Modern Political Parties’ – never received a proper exposition. 

Hence, the circles of political groups and rulership in Figure 8.2 are themselves 

incomplete. Weber revised his political sociology (‘Herrschaftssoziologie’) 

in 1919–20 – as Chapter 3 of ‘Part 1’ of Economy and Society. Weber 

achieved a highly disciplined encyclopaedic format as well as providing a 

cross-analysis with the economy. The analysis flows directly from the definitions 

of power and legitimacy. The historical illustration and developmental 

digressions are severely pruned, and all civilizational arenas are treated 

equally. Wilhelm Hennis has observed that the ‘Herrschaftssoziologie’ would 

be extremely hard work if we possessed it in only this final version. 23 Hanke 

recommends the public lecture ‘Politics as a Vocation’ as the most complete 

summation of Weber’s sociology of rulership: the sociological conceptualization 

of the state, the types of rulership and their corresponding forms of 

administration in their mature formulation. 24 

Weber’s conceptualization of democracy 

A frequently asked question of Weber’s three types of legitimacy is why there 

is no separate category for democratic legitimacy. Stefan Breuer, in an essay 

entitled ‘The Four Pure Types of Democracy. A Proposal for Systematization’, 

has provided the most resolute response. He argues that the ideal 

types of legitimacy are a value-free conceptualization. They do not involve 

criteria of normative desirability or undesirability. In a normative sense of 

justice, probably most people, if they were offered the choice, would prefer 

to live in a democracy. The answer to this Rawlsian hypothetical question 

is quite unsurprising – who would elect, if they did not know what position 

they might be born into, for a tyranny or traditional rulership or a charismatic 

rulership (although some might prefer the last for its excitements)? To 

demand normative criteria for the analysis of rulership entirely misses the 

thrust of Weber’s political sociology. Legitimacy is a way of analysing the 

nature of obedience, organization and the inequality of power. In universal–historical 

terms, Weber offers three main, not to say gargantuan, ideal 

types. To demand normative criteria is to ask Weber to become a political 

philosopher who should frame his argument in terms of legitimation criteria. 

Legitimation criteria provide validity. When Weber uses the term validity, he 

usually places it in quotation marks to indicate that no normative judgement


is being made. The traditional ruler would argue that he provided a sense of 

continuity and security for his subjects. The charismatic ruler would point 

to his grace, his protection against all enemies and the belief in the extraordinary. 

Legal–rational rulership offers the assurance that everything that 

happens accords with legally enacted procedures – safe even though rather 

predictable. 

These are all value judgements, and the political philosophy of legitimation 

is dedicated to arguing the normative superiority or inferiority of the 

various principles of rulership. Weber, instead, is interested in the empirical 

grounds on which those subject to commands should carry them out, even 

against their resistance and reluctance, because they accept the legitimacy of 

the command. Very many people in societies operating under legal–rational 

rulership might not wish to obey the commands or instructions of their employer, 

their tax office or parking fines, but they do so because they accept 

the underlying legitimacy of the command structure. In individual cases, 

they can and often do refuse to do what is asked, but this does not alter the 

salience of Weber’s ideal type of legal–rational rulership/authority. (I have 

expanded here on Breuer’s insistence on value-free conceptualization.) 

Breuer’s second point is that Weber did have a concept of democratic legitimacy 

– indeed, there are a number of subtypes, all of which expressed the 

principle of rule from below. In Chapter 3 of Economy and Society, Weber 

devotes a section (7) to ‘The Transformation of Charisma in a Democratic 

Direction’. In successor stages of a charismatic leadership, the ‘following’ 

can come to elect their next leader. This marks a shift ‘to the belief that the 

group has a right to enact, recognize, or appeal laws, according it its own 

free will, both in general and for an individual case’ (ES, p. 267). 

A second subtype is rule by notables (Chapter 3, Section 20), whose 

principal feature is that the notable is economically qualified to provide the 

administration of rule from his own resources. Selecting this person can involve 

democratic procedures. ‘In the American township the tendency has 

been to favor actual rotation on grounds of natural rights. As opposed to 

this, the immediate democracy of the Swiss Cantons has been characterized 

by recurrence of the same names . . .’ (ES, p. 291). As Weber indicates, 

there are limitations to this route to democracy. ‘Both immediate democracy 

and government by notables are technically inadequate, on the one hand in 

organizations beyond a certain limit of size, constituting more than a few 

thousand full-fledged members, or on the other hand, where functions are 

involved which require technical training or continuity of policy’ (ES, p. 

291). Weber notes that the permanent technical officials appointed to assist 

the notable tend to control ‘actual power’, while the nominal leaders 

‘remain essentially dilettantes’. 

The third subtype is discussed in the representative forms of rulership 

(Chapter 3, Section 9). ‘The primary fact underlying representation is that 

the action of certain members of an organization, the “representatives”, 

is considered binding on the others or accepted by them as legitimate and


obligatory’ (ES, p. 292). A patriarchal ruler can choose to appoint a representative 

in his stead; feudal nobles can form an estate and represent 

their appropriated rights and privileges as independent from the feudal or 

patrimonial king; a representative can be instructed and given a mandate 

– Weber notes, in the context of the period 1917–19, that this was a feature 

of revolutionary soviets and was used as a substitute for mass democracy and 

its organization. Finally, Weber comes to ‘free representation’ and parliamentary 

rule. Weber devotes a page to this. As this subtype conforms to the 

normatively most accepted form of rule, parliamentary democracy, a close 

examination of this page of text is required. 

The free representative is not mandated by a community but makes his 

own decisions. 

He is obligated only to express his own genuine convictions, and not to 

promote the interests of those who have elected him . . . the representative, 

by virtue of his election, exercises authority over the electors and is 

not merely their agent. The most prominent example of this type is the 

modern parliamentary representation. It shares with legal authority the 

general tendency to impersonality, the obligation to conform to abstract 

norms, political or ethical. 

This feature is most pronounced in the case of the parliaments, the 

representative bodies of the modern political organizations. 

(ES, pp. 293–4) 

Reading this passage is rather like trying to find somebody famous in 

Who’s Who? At last, in a very large book, there the person is, just as we might 

have been beginning to doubt his or her inclusion. Likewise with democracy. 

Nevertheless, Weber has included one of the most preferred types of representative 

rule in modern history, even though, in the sweep of universal 

history, it does appear as a subtype. Clearly, the treatment is ideal typical, 

the intensified contrast turning on the instructed mandate and the freely 

deciding agent. The most important point to grasp is that parliamentary rule 

is an example of legal–rational legitimacy. It is subsumed under that type. 

Also, it has normative principles, which Weber treats in a value-free manner. 

These norms are abstract and therefore confer an impersonality upon 

parliamentary rulership. The sorts of abstract norms that Weber would have 

had in mind are the rights of man or the commitment to happiness (to think 

of the United States). 

Breuer’s systematic comment on Weber’s treatment of democracy draws 

a contrast between those forms of direct democracy that possess no apparatus 

(in a Swiss commune or soviet, or in the charismatic following) and 

those forms that exist through structures (parliamentary representation and 

plebiscitary democracy). Weber’s analysis of power in these two situations 

is that democracy may be genuine in the small face-to-face groupings, but it 

cannot acquire extension of its powers as it lacks the organizational means.


Or, where it does possess an administrative bureaucracy, the organizational 

machine becomes more powerful than the voice and convictions of the politicians 

themselves. 

Breuer correctly identifies the critical thrust of Weber’s political sociology. 

Obviously, it is not a celebration of democracy or a justification of its 

philosophical validity. This strikes the reader quite forcibly today when the 

process of democracy can make a strong case for universal validity, both in 

terms of diffusion and in terms of reasoned arguments. Instead, Weber treats 

democracy just like any other rulership: it has legitimacy grounds, it is organized 

on certain principles, it has various structural limits and contradictions. 

So, while we might wish to complain that Weber’s coverage of democracy 

could have been more expansive and not have been placed in the subtype 

classification, there is still something to be learnt from its critical intent. 

Leadership democracy 

Because democracy has now spread and is spreading so extensively around 

the world – it is not just a European-bound invention – we need to attend to 

Weber’s critical remarks, whose applicability may be all the more pertinent. 

In many democracies, a gap is opening up between the face and the content 

of those rulerships. ‘The Transformation of Charisma in a Democratic Direction’ 

is a perverse way of alighting upon the presence of democracy – it is 

hardly the normal route to democracy – but the section is worth pursuing. 

Weber says that leaders who are dependent on the vote of their predecessor’s 

following are a transitional case of plebiscitary leadership. ‘Both the Napoleons 

are classical examples, in spite of the fact that legitimation by plebiscite 

took place only after they seized power by force. The second Napoleon also 

resorted to the plebiscite after a severe loss of prestige’ (ES, p. 267). 

Both the Napoleons acquired power in very unstable situations. The first 

Napoleon emerged from a period of vicious revolutionary in-fighting in the 

new French republic and consolidated his power through military means as 

a general. A plebiscite, a ballot of the whole of the French people, confirmed 

him as Emperor. The second Bonaparte did the same with the added threat 

of the deposed monarchy claiming to be the ‘Legitimists’. Hanke notes that 

these debates and events were still very current when Weber was writing. 25 

The critical thrust of this argument is to point out that a democratic procedure 

is used to legitimize what is little more than an opportunist grab for 

power. 

This leads Weber to put forward plebiscitary democracy as ‘the most important 

type of Führer-Demokratie’, i.e. leadership democracy (ES, p. 268). 

Contemporary democracies have generally built up thick structures or dense 

interweavings of democratic culture, democratic accountability, democratic 

media (i.e. not censored), representative and party structures, intermediate 

groupings of civil society, overlapping constituencies (local, regional, national, 

federal) and different voting systems and so on. In these respects, they


are far more robust than some of the pseudodemocracies of the nineteenth 

century. But very many contemporary democracies approximate to or are 

tending towards a form of leader democracy. In certain countries, the power 

of Presidents and Prime Ministers has grown, and grown in such a way 

that the organization of rulership structures and legitimacy is coming to be 

moulded around the leader. This does not amount to a leadership principle, 

which would be antithetical to democratic norms. But, in Weber’s always 

dispassionate analysis of rulership, it is the task of the political sociologist to 

analyse power – its distribution, its hierarchies, its organization, its choice 

of meanings and emotions. Democratic rulership, even direct democracy, 

involves the exercise of power, the construction of hierarchy and the building 

of organizational structures. Democracy is just another form of rulership 

and is not immune to conflict and hierarchy. 

Using his long historical perspective, Weber supplies a chastening list of 

measures through which the democratic leader has consolidated power. In 

‘Führer-Demokratie’, the leader hides behind a legitimacy ‘that is formally 

derived from the will of the governed. The leader (demagogue) rules by 

virtue of the devotion and trust which his political followers have in him 

personally. In the first instance his power extends only over those recruited 

to his following, but if they can hand over the government to him he controls 

the whole polity’ (ES, p. 268). This happened in the ancient classical 

world, in the medieval towns and in Reformation Switzerland. ‘In modern 

states the best examples are the dictatorship of Cromwell, and the leaders of 

the French Revolution and of the First and Second Empire.’ 

Weber’s analysis of demagoguery is a good example of his value-free approach. 

As a political commentator in his day writing for the public, Weber expressed 

judgements, many of which condemned the demagogue. On the 

other hand, in academic mode, he makes a cool and considered assessment 

of the role and function of demagoguery in democracy. Democracy in Athens 

would not have emerged had it not been for the demagoguery of its first 

democratic politicians. 

The charismatic politician – the ‘demagogue’ – is the product of the 

western city states. In the city state of Jerusalem he appeared in religious 

garb as the prophet; the Athenian constitution after the innovations of 

Pericles and Ephialtes was tailored to the existence of the charismatic 

politician, without whom the state machine would have had no prospect 

of functioning. 

(EW, p. 140) 

Weber emphasizes that his comments should be understood in a valuefree 

sense – ‘the demagogic gifts of Cleon [a tyrant] are in sociological terms 

just as good “charisma” as the qualities of a Napoleon, Jesus or Pericles’.


And in his public lecture, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, he reminds his audience 

of the unavoidability of demagoguery. 

Since the time of the constitutional state, and definitely since democracy 

has been established, the ‘demagogue’ has been the typical political 

leader in the Occident. The distasteful flavor of the word must not make 

us forget that not Cleon but Pericles was the first to bear the name of 

demagogue. In contrast to the offices of ancient democracy that were 

filled by lot, Pericles led the sovereign Ecclesia of the demos of Athens as 

a supreme strategist holding the only elective office or without holding 

any office at all. Modern demagoguery also makes use of oratory, even 

to a tremendous extent, if one considers the election speeches a modern 

candidate has to deliver. But the use of the printed word is more enduring. 

The political publicist, and above all the journalist, is nowadays the 

most important representative of the demagogic species. 

(FMW, p. 96) 

‘Periclean democracy, too, which according to the intent of its creator 

was the domination of the demagogos by means of the spirit and the tongue, 

received its characteristic charismatic trait by virtue of the election of one of 

the strategoi, the other being determined by lot, if Eduard Meyer’s hypothesis 

is correct’ (ES, pp. 1126–7). Needless to say, Weber was fully informed 

about Athenian political history. The ‘strategie’ was a military command of 

nine people, eight of them elected by lots cast by clan groups. For the first 

time, the people of Athens were given the opportunity of voting for the 

ninth member. Pericles’ rhetorical gifts swung the vote his way. Hence, in 

one of those historical first instances much loved by Weber, both the art 

of speaking and the first emergence of democracy were tied together. It is 

probably also from Greece that Weber learns his cool dispassion. Ancient 

democracy was a winner-take-all scenario. Losers were killed, ostracized or 

exiled. Ancient democracy, as Weber reminds the reader in The City, was 

intimately connected to war. Under democracy, war was chronic. ‘Almost 

every victorious battle was followed by the mass slaughter of the prisoners, 

and almost every conquest of a city ended with the killing or enslavement of 

the entire population’ (ES, p. 1362). 

Modern constitutional democracy also cannot exist without the demagogue. 

Bismarck was one, and Weber disapproved of the use to which he 

put his gifts (ES, p. 1452). The British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, is obliquely 

referred to as a plebiscitary leader. He would not have achieved the 

premiership had it been decided by ‘the confidence of the parliament and its 

parties’. Instead, as a war leader, he received the support of the masses and 

the army in the field. Weber could well have added that Lloyd George’s ability 

to reach beyond the parliament and his (Liberal) political party was based 

on his oracular artistry. He knew how to speak to the people – the issues they 

cared about, and in a language that captured their imagination and attention.


Furthermore, Lloyd George was supported by Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail 

– the first mass newspaper to become an effective tool for propaganda. The 

same points can be made in relation to Winston Churchill, who followed 

the career route Weber saw as typical of the modern politician: From being 

a journalist to adoption by a political party and then through demagogic 

talents, the construction of a party beyond rapport with the electorate – also 

supported by leading newspapers. This was a typical route for the leader in a 

democracy (‘Führer-Demokratie’). ‘Democratization and demagogy belong 

together . . .’ (ES, p. 1450). 

In ‘Führer-Demokratie’, the arts of demagoguery can extend to the manipulation 

of the emotions of voters and to the use of spectacle. 

It is characteristic of the Führer-Demokratie that there should in general 

be a highly emotional type of devotion to and trust in the leader. This 

accounts for a tendency to favor the type of individual who is most 

spectacular, who promises the most, or who employs the most effective 

propaganda measures in the competition for leadership. This is a natural 

basis for the utopian component which is found in all revolutions. It also 

dictates the limitations on the level of rationality which, in the modern 

world, this type of administration can attain. Even in America it has not 

always come up to expectations. 

(ES, p. 269) 

Weber’s comment on America is that the pattern of leadership in the 

American political system tends to produce leaders who articulate not the 

normative criteria of democracy (whose values flow from the American 

Revolution of 1776 and the founding of the Constitution) but psychological 

values of trust. Examples of this would be American populism where leaders 

have presented themselves as having the same ‘folksy’ values as lower strata 

of the population. 

Weber noted that, in America, the appointment of officials may follow 

charismatic not legal–rational principles. Civil servants and administrators 

in Germany and Great Britain would accord to Weber’s ideal type of rational–legal 

bureaucracy. They would be trained officials who gained their 

posts through competitive examinations whose criteria would be formally 

rational. Candidates are selected according to administrative competence 

– for example the ability to work with complex documents – and not because 

they possessed a sympathetic attitude to citizens or sections of them. 

But, using America as an illustration, Weber writes: 

Once the elective principle has been applied to the chief by a reinterpretation 

of charisma, it may be extended to the administrative staff. 

Elective officials whose legitimacy is derived from the confidence of the 

ruled and who are therefore subject to recall, are typical of certain democracies, 

for instance, the United States. They are not ‘bureaucratic’


types. Because they have an independent source of legitimacy, they are 

not strongly integrated into a hierarchical order. 

(ES, p. 267) 

If these two statements are taken together, Weber would seem to be suggesting 

that America has the capability of becoming a plebiscitary leadership 

democracy with its administrative officials chosen on charismatic criteria. 

Emotional and demagogic appeals to the electorate are possible, and these 

stand outside modern legal–rational legitimacy. In fact, Weber is not being 

as ‘tough’ on America as the above passages suggest. He deeply admired 

the American political system for its vitality, its openness, its fluidity, and he 

held it up as an example to his German compatriots of the primacy of politics 

over bureaucratic administration. The major critical thrust of Weber’s 

political sociology is directed against the soullessness of bureaucracy. It was 

a machine, impersonal, formally rational, ‘sine ira et studio’ (an aloof impartiality). 

He joined his brother Alfred in 1909 in an attack on the Prussian bureaucratized 

state, where the administrative class had displaced democratic 

politics and where the bureaucracy was seen as a deadening and suffocating 

force in society. Alfred Weber referred to Germans as being in love with the 

‘metaphysics of bureaucracy’. 26 America, in refreshing contrast, cut its civil 

service down to size, making it directly electable. Hence, the usual interpretation 

of Weber’s political sociology is that he saw and analysed the danger 

of legal–rational bureaucracies stifling the life blood of politics. And it is for 

these reasons that Weber is associated with the call for strong parliamentary 

leaders who can override the power of bureaucracy in the civil service and 

in their own political parties. 27 Rather in the same way as today George 

Ritzer predicts the ‘McDonaldization’ of the world, so Weber bemoaned 

the bureaucratization of the world – not only politics, but also trade unions, 

companies, voluntary associations, the churches and so endlessly on. (And, 

of course, all these are rationalization processes that seem to possess an 

inherent and unstoppable dynamic in which rational procedure and instrumentalism 

become the sorcerer’s apprentice – enabling yet controlling.) 

The peculiarity of Weber’s treatment of democracy is that he does not 

start from the normative grounds of legitimation and its presumed superiority 

over other political systems. That, one suspects, would be to accept 

democracy’s credentials at face value and impede the political sociology of 

power, interest and bureaucratization. Weber places democratic rule within 

the ideal type of charismatic rulership, and this gives the analysis a critical 

awareness of tendencies not immediately associated with democracy. In the 

case of America, populism, recall and elected officials introduce a vigour into 

the political system (whose merits have subsequently been much debated 

over the twentieth century). In the case of the British political system, Weber 

pointed out the dangers of ‘Caesarism’, that the British prime minister 

can, without adequate safeguards in the constitutional system, assume semidictatorial 

powers.


Parliament’s function, writes Weber, is to protect the people against the 

supreme ambitions of the leader, who might have what Weber terms ‘Caesarist’ 

ambitions. It safeguards the continuity of leaders and oversees their 

power position. It preserves civil rights and serves as a proving ground for 

‘wooing the confidence of the masses’. It steps in to peacefully eliminate the 

leader when he [or she] has lost the confidence of the masses (ES, p. 1452). 

Weber then notes: ‘However, since the great political decisions, even and especially 

in a democracy, are unavoidably made by few men, mass democracy 

has bought its successes since Pericles’ times with major concessions to the 

Caesarist principle of selecting leaders’ (ES, p. 1452). Weber’s overall judgement 

of the tendencies towards caesarism and demagoguery are conditional 

upon the system concerned. He is scathing about demagoguery without 

parliament – addressing the masses in the street. Strong leaders and weak 

parliaments (the Bismarck case) also attracted his condemnation. Britain and 

the United States would seem to have enough democracy in depth for these 

tendencies to be held in check. 

Political scientists have recently been drawn to the cases of the prime 

ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, because of – in Weberian 

terms – their ‘Führer-Demokratie’ tendencies. While they have emerged as 

parliamentary leaders through their respective political parties, they have 

also – not least through their rhetorical skills – appealed to the mass of the 

electorate over the head of their parties. Both have been dependent on the 

support of the most powerful sections of the mass media, who have been 

happy to amplify attacks on political opponents within both their parties 

and the parties of opposition. Weber took the locus of political power to lie 

in the British Cabinet, which he observed has no constitutional underpinning 

or check. It exists within the political framework of parliament and its 

oversight. This is not out of line with the concern of political scientists today. 

Their concern is the movement of the locus of power to the leader and his or 

her private office, and the relegation of members of parliament to a passive 

rather than an active role in parliamentary debate. 28 

From these examples, it makes more sense today to examine the potentiality 

of a transition from and within constitutional and parliamentary democracies 

to plebiscitary and Caesarist features as described by Weber. The 

transition from charisma to plebiscitary democracy, as expounded by Weber, 

is not very often exemplified historically, ‘pace’ Pericles. It is the universal–historical 

constants of power that matter. As Kari Palonen has shown, 

the exercise of power through persuasion leads to the analysis of rhetorical 

discourse – whatever the normative pretensions of the rulership. 29 

There is a further step in these arguments on power and democracy. Power 

does not belong to the dimension of politics and rulership alone. What happens 

when the dimensions of status and class are brought into the analysis? 

Power is a distributional process within society, working within the channels 

of politics, economics and status. This not only has allocation outcomes, it 

also determines the structuring of outcomes, as Poggi quite rightly stresses. 30


If class comes to determine status, as it does increasingly in the twenty-first 

century world (for reasons yet to be adequately explained), then two dimensions 

of power are aligned. The sphere of politics and rulership has its own 

dynamic, but what happens when its operation becomes dependent on the 

financial backing of the wealthy? A contemporary Weberian would be asking 

these questions, which revisit the debates between C.W. Mills’ analysis of the 

power elites and the thick and resistant structures of pluralist democracy and 

stratification.

9 Sociological categories and 

the types of economic activity 

A final account 

The ‘logic’ of the final version of Economy and Society has now been established. 

Developmental histories take second place to universal–historical 

themes. Ideal types are built on meanings and social relationships, and they 

tend towards being classificatory devices. Arguably, this is a tension. An ideal 

type cannot be a culturally heuristic explanatory instrument as well as a 

method of classifying different types of societies and their structures (‘Gebilde’). 

When the ideal type was first presented in PESC in 1904, it referred 

to a ‘historical individual’, and was highly specific in what it referred to and 

intensified in terms of meaning. At the level of universal–historical comparison, 

this ‘historical individualism’ is given up in favour of interrelated 

typologies. But, nevertheless, meaning remains crucial to the method. 

The last chapter examined Michael Mann’s ideal typical analysis of the 

sources of social power. This was a modelling device that allowed the analysis 

and comparison of a huge range of empirical cases, which in their specificity 

offered complexity and combinations of ideal types. Weber developed the 

ideal type to perform just this sort of exercise. But, in Weber’s political sociology, 

the classification turns on meaning. Power is ubiquitous in all societies 

and in a large range of situations. The value-related question is: what aspects 

of power is the researcher interested in investigating? With Weber, it is the 

legitimacy bases of rulerships with structures, hierarchies and apparatus following 

on from the identification of the typifying meanings that structure 

the social relationships of power. 

By following the Outline Plan of 1914, we can form a good idea of what 

special sociologies should have been in the final version of Economy and 

Society: the ‘gemeinschaftlich’ communities, the sociologies of religion, the 

market, law and rulership and the state, and stratification of class and status 

groups. We know from the revised first four chapters of Economy and 

Society how he handled ‘Herrschaft’ (Chapter 3) and ‘Classes and Status 

Groups’ (Chapter 4). It is possible to speculate how he would have amended 

the special sociologies of law and religion. His basic task here was to make 

these fit within the cross-referring structure of Economy and Society as a 

contribution to the encyclopaedic Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. He had to

248 Sociological categories and the types of economic activity 

stop treating them as subjects in their own right. Law in its first (and only) 

version was his own area of expertise by training, and his draft generated an 

enormous complexity of classification, definitions, examples and historical 

digressions. We still await the ‘definitive’ version of this draft in the Max 

Weber Gesamtausgabe, which it is hoped will provide the ‘correct’ sequencing 

of the chapters as well as his thinking behind his legalistic conceptualization. 

The sociology of religion, we have established, was a problem case, 

in that no ready classification on universal–historical terms was available, 

and evolutionary accounts, while attractive for explaining an inner logic of 

development, created all sorts of problems of fitting to a recalcitrant reality. 

As Robert Bellah notes, nothing is forgotten: rites, magic and religion are 

still to be found in all areas of modern societies. 1 

In the final version of Economy and Society, he had to relegate his grand 

question: why did modernity originate in the west? In part, this had gravitated 

into the question: what is so specific and unique to the west? A Millsian 

logic of causation simply could not be made to work. The comparative studies 

of the world religions might have suggested the method of difference 

would produce the decisive causal factor that was present in the west but absent 

elsewhere. But comparison, as in its nature, tends to confirm difference, 

period. The ‘Prefatory Remarks’ to the ‘Collected Essays in the Sociology of 

Religion’ came up with a summating answer to the question of difference. It 

was western rationalism. But this was diffuse across occidental history and 

societies and had none of the clarity of Puritan ascetic conduct that could 

be identified as the crucial causal factor. In conducting his world religion 

studies, and not forgetting all the studies he planned to carry out, Puritan 

asceticism turned out to be one episode in a longer and wider tradition of 

religious rationalism. And, finally, Weber was quite happy to concede that all 

the world religions had rationalization processes whose ‘rationalist’ motors 

drove them in directions simply different from that of western religion; he 

refused to accord any superiority to the validity claims of western rationalism 

over other cultures. 

One issue that still reverberated was the issue that Bücher was supposed to 

have addressed and dealt with. Could the dynamic of historical development 

be dealt with legitimately (in social science terms) through a stage theory? To 

this was added the question of moving out of ‘primitivism’ – how did societies 

attain a developmental path that would pull them out of the circle of 

face-to-face ‘gemeinschaftlich’ relationships into what Jaspers would call ‘the 

axial age’? This question underlay the whole German approach to nationaleconomy. 

In 1919–20, Weber was again lecturing as a national-economist, 

at the University in Munich, and he was still lead editor of the Grundriss der 

Sozialökonomik. More still had to be said about social economics. 

Bearing these issues in mind, in this chapter, I will examine what are probably 

the least understood parts of Weber’s oeuvre. These are Chapters 1 and 

2 of Economy and Society: ‘Basic Sociological Concepts’ and ‘Basic Sociological 

Categories of Economising (‘Wirtschaftens’)’. (The Talcott Parsons’

Sociological categories and the types of economic activity 249 

translation of Chapter 2 is ‘Sociological Categories of Economic Action’. I 

have preferred the more literal translation.) 

Economy and Society, Chapter I: Basic Sociological 

Concepts 

I have given a fairly extensive exposition of Chapter 1 in The Essential Weber 

(EW, pp. 296–308), not least because it is a summation of his writings. It is 

often taken out of the context of Economy and Society. It has been published 

as a stand-alone book, and is frequently seen as a kind of fundamental 

statement of how sociology should proceed. This is not unconnected with 

the theory of social action, which has remained one of the central debates 

in the discipline. Weber was seen, by different camps, to assert the primacy 

of meaning, of individual action and of social relationships, in place of the 

reifications of market, state, mode of production, class as living entities and 

social system. He was seen as anti-market (as a reification), anti-social system, 

anti-positivism. All these assertions were valid but, somehow, Chapter 1 

taken in isolation produced a rather bland version of sociology. Where were 

the determining structures that govern people’s lives? Where were the issues 

of power, of economic inequality and culture couched in meaningful terms 

current to contemporary issues? Not so many authors use Weber’s theory of 

social action, tying it to issues of power, market and the structuring of social 

groups. 2 Rex and Moore’s Race, Community and Conflict is a good example 

of how to approach Weber’s ‘Basic Sociological Concepts’. In this study of a 

West Midlands town in the 1960s, the housing market was analysed in terms 

of stratification of ownership and renting, and the ‘gemeinschaftliche’ attitudes 

were interpreted in terms of ethnic groups and attitudes. Social action 

theory was used to probe issues of market power, social prestige and prejudice, 

and the working of local politics and local government. 3 A more recent 

example in the same vein, but with different conclusions, is Dench, Gavron 

and Young’s study, The New East End. The study investigates housing 

markets and their (limited) opportunities for the communities of London’s 

East End, the values that underpin the face-to-face communal relationships 

of family and neighbourhood – and the dispersion of those communities 

by individualistic values, how ethnicity affects the sense of different communities, 

and the changing political prioritization of welfare needs by local 

government. 4 

Rex and Moore’s study uses an explicitly Weberian framework, the Dench, 

Gavron and Young study does not. But in both studies, the investigators 

operate with a conceptual language not dissimilar to the ‘Basic Sociological 

Concepts’. This is unsurprising because what Weber outlines in that chapter 

is a set of universal categories that are relevant to any investigation of social 

reality. The survey and interviewing methods, which inform The New East 

End, reach the same language by a different route. What makes both studies 

important, within the sphere of inner city living, is their ability to relate the


experience of key social relationships of neighbourhood, family and settlement 

to the wider structures of society – economic markets, stratification 

and demographic movements. 

It would clearly be artificial to separate the concepts of social action from 

those wider structures or, as Weber would put it, the social ‘Gebilde’ with 

the German word’s more mutable emphasis. But, when we turn to the final 

version of Economy and Society, there is an impression of isolation, and 

so of artificiality, of the theory of social action. Weber himself knew that 

his ‘casuistry’, which is how he referred to ‘Basic Sociological Concepts’ 

and which was also delivered as a lecture course at Munich, was driving his 

students away in droves. 5 

The chapter can only be rescued from its seeming abstractness – an irony 

as the whole position is to argue for the understanding and explanation of 

actual behaviour. Above all, the chapter has to be related to the ensemble 

of Economy and Society. Just to repeat the remarks made in the previous 

chapter with reference to Figure 8.2 (p. 232), Chapter 1 sits apart from 

all the other chapters (both those that were written and those intended) as 

a key. Small groups, household economizing, market economies, political 

groups, rulerships, structures of law, ethnic communities and so on – these 

should relate to the compendium of basic sociological concepts. The basic 

concepts underwrite the analysis of the substantive sociologies. Weber had 

undertaken this process once already with the ‘Categories’ essay of 1913, 

whose conceptualization occurs more or less across the range of the first 

drafts of his writings in the period 1911–14. The ‘Categories’ essay, however, 

was too difficult and too abstruse. Nobody understood what he was 

trying to achieve. 6 Chapter 1 represents a very careful and very clear reworking 

of his concepts – to make them accessible and applicable. These then 

become ‘basic’ to the rest of the exposition of Economy and Society. But the 

rest of that exposition was never completed, adding to the sense of limbo of 

Chapter 1. This perceived difficulty can only be got around by referring back 

to the Outline Plan of 1914, which presents the full range of substantive 

sociologies as originally conceived by Weber (see above, p. 157). 

Chapter 2, on economizing, should probably be assumed to be the centre 

of gravity of the final version of Economy and Society. In the first drafts 

(1910–14), the smallish chapter on economic groups was dwarfed by the 

special sociologies. The new version would rectify that problem, but Weber 

only got as far as Chapter 4 (and this chapter itself, as its notation form 

suggests, might not have been the final version). Hence, Chapter 2 predominates, 

but itself remains somewhat stranded in the absence of the completion 

of the whole project. It is reasonable to place the major stress on Chapter 2, 

as national-economy and then social economics were his constant concern 

from his lecturing in the 1890s, through his editorship of the Archiv, the 

studies on the economic ethics of the world religions and, finally, the Grundriss 

der Sozialökonomik. 

Chapter 2 along with the other chapters, both completed and intended,


therefore has to be read through the explanatory exposition of Chapter 1. 

Weber’s revision of Chapter 1 reflects a clarification and maturing of his 

views on the central issues of understanding, meaning, causality, explanation, 

the proper subject matter of the social sciences and the exposition of 

concepts central to the special sociologies. It reprises, in a compressed form, 

the debates on meaning and causation that arose in the context of PESC 

1904 and the essay on ‘Objectivity’. Weber’s conclusions, in clarified form, 

are relevant and applicable to universal–historical investigations, but they do 

not constitute a ‘general sociology’. ‘Sociology, a word used in quite diverse 

ways, is to mean here: a science which seeks interpretative understanding of 

social action, and thereby will causally explain its course and effects.’ Weber 

is interested only in behaviour that is meaningful to the social actor. Behavioural 

psychology or evolutionary psychology would be excluded by Weber, 

in the first instance, because its subject matter deliberately excludes behaviour 

governed by meanings (in favour of behaviour governed by revealed 

preferences – outcomes independent of intention, or evolutionary traits in 

the human brain). Behaviour becomes social action ‘where the meaning intended 

by actor or actors is related to the behaviour of others, and conduct 

so oriented’ (EW, p. 312). 

‘Correct causal interpretation of a concrete action requires its apparent 

course and motive to be accurately recognized and meaningfully understood 

in context’ (EW, p. 319). Motive, action and context of meaning involve the 

operation of ‘Verstehen’, in the way I outlined in Chapter 4, and followed 

in the footsteps of Dilthey (even though Weber renounced his tutelage). In 

line with German hermeneutics, the establishment of understanding enables 

the grasping of the truth of what was intended. This is an empirical matter 

because it involves the investigations of the expression of motives (in a 

document, in a cultural artefact, in observed behaviour). Weber, in his opening 

footnote to Chapter 1, distances himself from the subjective method of 

Simmel that appealed through empathy to a common medium of the soul or 

psyche. This was interpretation with no means of ascertaining truth. Because 

the observed, or the artefact, has an objective concretization, a courtroom 

method of imputation after the event can be used to establish correct motive. 

In sciences of culture (rather than the actual courtroom), imputation is 

enabled by the construction of ideal types. Is an action a pure type of rage 

(affect), or tradition, or of purposeful rationality? Having constructed the 

ideal type, to what extent does social action in empirical reality diverge from 

the pure type? Causation involves the understanding of motive and meaning 

and its empirical elucidation in concrete cases that the imputed motive did 

in fact result in specific outcomes and consequences. 

Although social action is always denominated in and by the individual 

person – all other entities are abstract and not real, i.e. state, law, market, society 

– the individual exists in social contexts invariably made up of various 

groups. The sociologist is interested in individuals insofar as their actions 

are similar, and interpretative sociology is interested in meaningfully similar


behaviour. It rains and many individuals on the street put up their umbrellas 

in a non-meaningful reaction to rain. A football crowd collectively leap 

to their feet to applaud (or condemn) a brilliant goal – this is meaningful 

behaviour in common to a group of people. 

Individuals orientate their action and behaviour to laws and customs. Laws 

and customs form part of their context of meaning and cannot be ignored 

(or else would have to consciously be rejected, i.e. ignoring or breaking the 

law). Individuals relate, therefore, not to other isolated individuals, but to 

what a group or a law or a convention means in the minds of individuals. 

Again, something like the law may be regarded by jurists as having an objective 

reality with normative obligations but, for Weber, the law as a living 

entity cannot be presupposed. Its consciousness in the minds of individuals 

can be presupposed. ‘Pace’ Durkheim, social facts are not social things 

(‘choses’), but they can exert obligation on the individual. Weber articulates 

this as the orientation of the individual to law or particular laws. So, a whole 

‘order’ may be regarded by individuals as legitimate by virtue of tradition, 

or emotional appeal, or values or, lastly, legality. The legality of law does not 

exist by virtue of its enactment as legal (positive law) but because it is either 

agreed to or imposed. Each of the reasons for accepting the legitimacy of 

an order relates to the creation of meaning (by Weber in the ideal type) and 

the imputation of motives to social actors (EW, pp. 337–9. The ‘Categories’ 

essay also discussed this more extensively, but with less clarity.) The typology 

of legitimacy of an order, Weber then signals, will form the basis for the 

special sociologies of law and rulership. 

The seesaw point in the developmental histories of so many societies – the 

central problem in economic history within German national-economy – is 

handled through the concepts of the forming of community (‘Vergemeinschaftung’) 

and the forming of associative relationships (‘Vergesellschaftung’). 

The former turns on feelings of mutuality and smaller scale, local 

interactions, the latter on association through rational motives or the pursuit 

of interest (which Weber appears to assume is self-evidently rational). 

In the sociology of religion, we saw how Tiele and other scholars saw this 

breaking out beyond the bounds of communal face-to-face groups as being 

achieved through religion, just as, in economic history, Sombart thought of 

it as the acquisitive drive or, in the work of Bellah or Innis, the rise of archaic 

kingdoms. 7 Sociology assists the historian in ascertaining cause-specific 

explanations by being able to note the fundamental changes in social action. 

Weber does note (EW, pp. 344–5) that associative relationships turn around 

struggle and competition in a way not true of the mutuality of communal 

relationships. 

The first reference to Chapter 2 occurs here – to markets. It gives an 

indication of Weber’s approach to social economics. 

Participation in a ‘market’ (see ch. II of Economy and Society) is structured 

differently. A market creates associational relationships (princi-


pally one of ‘competition’) between prospective exchanging parties, for 

in each case these agents have to orient their behaviour towards each 

other. But associational activity only develops from this if some of the 

participants seek to improve their competitive situation, or reach agreement 

on ways to regulate and stabilize transactions. (The market and the 

commercial economy based upon it is incidentally the most important 

type of mutual influence of action through sheer self-interest, characteristic 

of modern economic organization.) 

(EW, pp. 345–6) 

‘Market behaviour’ is a term that is now frequently heard. An entity is 

assumed – the market – and people orient their behaviour towards it. With 

Weber, the assumption in the first instance still has to be justified. A market 

presumes an attitude of conflict, pursuit of self-interest and benefit to participants; 

only then can a ‘market’ be understood to exist. ‘Market behaviour’, 

like marginal utility, can then be analysed by economic theory. 

Paragraph 10 of ‘Basic Sociological Concepts’ defines open and closed 

social relationships. A market is an open economic relationship, and a guild 

is at times open and expanding its numbers and, at other times, restrictive. 

Weber also refers to the English ‘closed shop’, which restricted entrance 

to certain occupations. Neo-liberal reforms in Britain in the 1980s forced 

many of these closed shops to move to open market labour access. Again, 

this demonstrates that ‘market behaviour’ is a construct of specific types of 

social relationships that are either reached through agreement or imposed 

from outside. 

Section 12 takes up the definition of a ‘Verband’. ‘A social relationship 

that is either closed to outsiders or restricts their admission according to set 

rules will be called a group body (‘Verband’). ‘Verband’ is quite difficult to 

translate. Normally, one would use ‘organization’. But that implies that the 

group has a degree of openness, whereas ‘Verband’ has the sense of a small 

band of people who act together as a controlling group within a range of organizations. 

Within government, an opposition party, a university, a church, 

a company, a warrior band, a criminal network, there is a ‘Verband’ who 

control the wider organization. The translator Dr Yano suggested ‘corps’ 

as in army corps to try to get this sense. Weber retains something of the 

legal theorist and historian, Otto von Gierke’s, usage. The ‘Verband’ is like 

an ‘individuum’, it is a ‘leiblich–geistige Lebenseinheit’ – ‘a bodily–spiritual 

entity’. 8 It is a central concept for the analysis of power and relates directly 

to the discussions in the previous chapter, 9 as do the concepts of power 

(‘Macht’) and rulership (‘Herrschaft’) in Section 16. A ‘Verband’ can be hierocratic 

– order is guaranteed by psychic coercion in a religious context. 

There is no application of hierocracy in the final version of Economy and 

Society, although it is discussed in a brilliant historical digression in an earlier 

version (ES, pp. 1158–204). Weber’s own imposed intellectual division 

of labour is between preparatory, not to say bland, conceptualization and


brilliant sketches of developmental history on a comparative basis. A close 

reading of Chapter 1 should register the full range of applications that Weber 

intended for his compendium of terms (although this cannot be undertaken 

here). 

Economy and Society, Chapter II: The Basic Sociological 

Categories of Economising 

This opens with a rather deprecatory admission. 

What follows is not intended in any sense to be ‘economic theory’. 

Rather, it consists only in an attempt to define certain concepts which 

are frequently used and to analyze certain of the simplest sociological relationships 

in the economic sphere. As in the first chapter, the procedure 

here has been determined entirely by considerations of convenience. 

(ES, p. 63) 

This tends to imply that Weber is going to duck the big question about the 

origins and emergence of modern capitalism, just as in Chapter 1 the whole 

question of moving out of ‘primitivism’ was made into one of appropriate 

terminology. What we are offered in subject matter does not differ greatly 

from his 1898 lectures in national-economy. All the topics in Book One of the 

lecture course (see above, pp. 23–27) are repeated in Chapter 2 of Economy 

and Society, although the latter expands its treatment of the technical and 

the social division of labour and, post 1917, registers the economic arrangements 

of communism. Although Weber says he is not offering economic 

theory, the chapter does provide an opportunity to show how he finally 

dealt with the opposition of the ‘two economic schools’ – marginalist and 

historicist. In addition, the chapter should be read according to the schema 

in Figure 8.2 (p. 232). The special sociologies of groups, law, religion and 

rulership cannot be separated from the economy, just as economic relationships 

cannot be divorced from those special sociologies. Weber is supplying 

in Chapter 2 a complex piece of cross-referencing for universal–historical 

comparative studies. 

The opening definition is standard national-economy put into the language 

of social action theory. 

Action will be said to be ‘economically oriented’ so far as, according to 

its intended meaning, it is concerned with the satisfaction of a desire for 

utility (‘Nutzleistungen’). ‘Economising’ (‘Wirtschaften’) is a peaceful 

use of the actor’s control over resources, which is rationally oriented, 

and so deliberately planned, to economic ends. An ‘economy’ is an autocephalous, 

and ‘economic enterprise’ an organized system of continuous 

economic action. 

(ES, p. 63)


What has to be brought out is the meaning that all economic processes 

and objects have for human action in terms of ends, means, obstacles and 

by-products. Returning to the scene of his anti-psychologism, Weber notes 

that, while valuation of goods is subjective, the explanation is not to be 

found within a psychologism of utility; rather, explanation is given through 

meaning underlying economic action. Satisfaction of consumption does not 

constitute a sufficient explanation. There has to be a desire for certain needs 

and, as in his 1898 lecture course, Weber goes on to discuss how desires are 

sociologically given. Economic action is a conscious orientation to achieving 

or choosing between certain ends. These ends are valued for certain reasons 

by economic actors. They also have to think about the means for their 

achievement, but activity solely oriented to means without thinking about 

ends is relegated to the category of ‘the technical’ (ES, pp. 65–6). 

It is difficult to expound the intricacies of Weber’s analysis without this 

chapter becoming a textbook treatment itself. Weber proceeds in the steps 

of the Austrian school and places their analysis within a framework of social 

action. The Austrian school formulated economic analysis in terms of the 

motivations of economic ‘units’ (‘Einheiten’) in their mutual relation to each 

other. This was ready-made, so to speak, for Weber’s absorption of their 

analysis into his own theory of social action, which had the same ‘individualizing’ 

methodology. Austrian utility theory, however, tempted theorists to 

produce an underlying psychology of utility, which Weber regarded as futile 

and pointless. Why someone values an extra five sheep to be exchanged 

against one cow can quite simply be referred to the value of one farming 

enterprise and the structure of its household economy, for example, against 

another. The values placed on objects represent desire which, in its turn, is 

formed by a person’s social environment. The theory of marginal utility, provided 

by Menger, gives a rationalist explanation of the exchange. In Section 

3, entitled ‘Modes of Economic Exchange’, Weber points out that economic 

orientation may be traditional or may be goal-oriented rationality. In the 

latter, the exchange of sheep against cows will follow according to marginal 

utility as a form of calculation; in the former, it is set by custom. 

In Section 4, Weber discusses the rational allocation of goods and services 

in terms of present and future uses following Menger’s own analysis of the 

individual using marginal utility. (Menger provided an important strand of 

investment theory by thinking of the choice between present consumption 

and investment for future consumption in terms of a choice of marginal utility 

– foregoing ‘x’ units of consumption for ‘y’ future units.) In the process 

of exchange, agreements are reached between parties – this is ‘Vergesellschaftung’, 

one of Weber’s basic sociological concepts. 

Section 5 produces a flurry of sociological terms applied to the economy. 

According to its relation to the economic system, an economically oriented 

organization may be: (a) an ‘economically active organization’ 

(wirtschaftender Verband) if the primary non-economic organized action


oriented to its order includes economic action; (b) an ‘economic organization’ 

(Wirtschaftsverband) if its organized action, as governed by 

the order, is primarily autocephalous economic action of a given kind; 

(c) an ‘economically regulative organization’ (wirtschaftsregulierender 

Verband) if the autocephalous economic activity of the member is directly 

oriented to the order governing the group; that is, if economic 

action is heteronomous in that respect; (d) an ‘organization enforcing 

a formal order’ (Ordnungsverband) if its order merely guarantees, by 

means of formal rules, the autocephalous and autonomous economic 

activities of its members and the corresponding economic advantages 

thus acquired. 

(ES, p. 74) 

This is difficult to understand, and it is hard to grasp its significance; it 

also stands as an indication of why Chapter 2 does not count as the most 

read piece of Weberiana. (d) is a free market order with little interference or 

regulation by the state; (b) is when a body, such as a medieval gild, regulates 

economic activity. (b) is simply an economic enterprise from the smallest 

workshop to the largest international company, and (a) is a non-economic 

institution such as a church or a state that manages its own financial affairs. 

When this analysis is rendered as a 2 by 2 matrix, it forms the basis of a 

theory of regulation. Medieval gilds and modern companies or corporations 

are primarily economic organizations. The Church is primarily a religious 

organization, but does act in an important secondary capacity as an owner 

of extensive real estate (Figure 9.1). 

Weber adds that, even in economically independent enterprises with light 

regulations, principles of law and taxation will have a considerable effect 

upon the enterprise, and he cross-references to his sociology of law. 

Section 6 offers a sociology of money, drawing on the monetary theory 

of Knapp and von Mises. Weber outlines two axes: means of payment and 

means of exchange. In a modern market economy, both are automatically 

thought of in terms of money. But in economic history, exchanges occur 

Type of economic 

organization 

Primary Medieval gild 

Figure 9.1 Types of economic regulation. 

Regulation 

High Low 

Company in free 

market environment 

Secondary Church lands Voluntary organization


without money through the use of ornaments, clothing or other useful objects. 

Whether through money or other means, value has to be guaranteed 

by law or conventions that confer their validity (‘Geltung’). Money itself is 

subdivided by Weber into free available coinage (through a national mint), 

limited money and regulated money, both of the last two operating under 

restrictions of the issuing body. The means of exchange and the means of 

payment rarely coincide in ‘primitive conditions’, whereas the modern state 

is dependent on both coinciding – effective taxation assumes a monetized 

economy. The argument can be used today where financial instruments, exclusive 

to financial traders, represent innovative means of payment that have 

repercussions for exchange in the modern economy. As economic activity is 

always time related – decisions are made in the present with regard to future 

outcomes, e.g. consumption versus investment – the nature of the economy 

would change if the means of payment no longer coincided with the means 

of exchange (Figure 9.2). 

A similar sort of analysis can be carried out for Section 8 ‘The Market’, 

in which Weber introduces the two axes of regulation of markets and the 

extension of marketability of goods and a further subdivision of rational and 

non-rational regulation (ES, p. 83). 

Section 9 ‘Formal and Substantive Rationality of Economic Action’ produces 

a complex set of options. One axis is formal rationality, which Weber 

defines as quantitative calculation or accounting. Calculation in terms of 

money (the other option is in kind) is closely tied to accounting, which is 

designed to allow a periodical comparison of expenditure and revenue. Substantive 

economic rationality is the meeting of the needs of groups of persons 

where economic action is oriented to certain specific values that are treated 

as ultimate, ‘whether they be ethical, political, utilitarian, hedonistic, feudal, 

egalitarian or whatever’. Economic activity could therefore be orientated to 

feudal and knightly ostentation, i.e. governed by a lifestyle, or it could be 

governed by wartime economic criteria of austerity and armaments. Today, 

in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 

countries, economic competence is judged in terms of formal procedures 

Means of payment 

Fully circulating Monetary economy 

Restricted 

circulation 

Figure 9.2 Economic sociology of money. 

Medium of exchange 

Chartal Non-chartal 

Private coinage 

Tokens e.g. shells in 

simple economy 

Futures and options in 

commodities


(fiscal prudence, open markets, commercial law, accountancy methods). 

These criteria approximate to what Weber means by formal rationality. In 

substantive terms, they are seen to deliver wealth and hedonism, but these 

substantive goals are subsidiary to the means of attainment. Weber’s analysis 

of modernity is borne out in that means are elevated over ends. But this is 

a fine judgement. The motivational bases of the modern economy would 

probably not be sustained without a commitment to consumerist hedonism, 

which, as a substantive goal, strongly influences the nature of capitalist 

production. Also, other substantive goals remain a focus of oppositional 

groups and social movements. The fight against poverty is an egalitarian 

goal, just as environmental sustainability is an ethical goal, both of which 

are substantively rational. They could only be forced through by political 

means. This would then permit economic policy to introduce rational economic 

measures for the attainment of those substantive goals. Weber, as an 

academic, would have remained value free in such debates, not least because 

the interaction between formal and substantive rationality is complex, and 

the adoption of substantive goals would undoubtedly have unintended and 

unwanted consequences. Amartya Sen’s work on famine relief, which is substantively 

rational in moral criteria, demonstrates that certain features of the 

market – its ability to process information quickly, i.e. the needs of starving 

people – favour formal rationality. 10 

In Section 11 ‘The Concept and Types of Profit-making. The Role of 

Capital’, Weber distinguishes the interests of consumers from those of 

profitability of the entrepreneur. There is a distribution of power between 

consumer and owner. Economic theory treats each decision as governed by 

marginal utility. Weber, however, holds that the accounting calculations of 

profit-making enterprises differ fundamentally from those of consumers’ 

utility. This inserts an opposition of interests in their respective economic 

activities. Furthermore, the entrepreneur will try to ‘direct’ and to ‘awaken’ 

the wants of the consumer, i.e. the capitalist, given the opportunities, will 

manipulate the consumer. The market is a ‘battle of man with man’ (ES, p. 

93; Weber’s emphasis). ‘Profitability is indeed formally a rational category, 

but for that very reason it is indifferent with respect to substantive postulate 

unless these can make themselves felt in the market in the form of sufficient 

purchasing power’ (ES, p. 94). A contemporary example of the latter would 

be ‘fair trade’ products in supermarkets. 

Ownership and property tends to be taken as axiomatic in market economies. 

In Section 11, Weber refers the reader back to his definition of property 

in Chapter 1. The relevant section there concerns closed relationships. ‘Appropriated 

advantages will be called “rights” ’. ‘Appropriated rights which are 

enjoyed by individuals through inheritance or by hereditary groups, whether 

communal or associative, will be called the “property” of the individual or 

of groups in question; and, insofar as they are alienable, “free” property’ 

(ES, p. 44). It is helpful here to think of the appropriation of communally 

held rights in the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China – first, by


the respective Communist Parties and, then, by individuals. Such, in an accelerated 

case (compared with England), is the process of creating property. 

Considerable legal effort is now being expended in making those property 

rights alienable, i.e. they can be bought and sold. The Russian oil giant Yukos 

is doing this (in 2006) through the expedient of bringing the company on 

to the market through the London Stock Exchange, although this would not 

necessarily exclude Russian citizens legally disputing the right to do this. At 

a later point, Weber points out that the firm, like any technological product, 

has first to be ‘invented’ (ES, p. 200; Weber’s quotation marks). 

It becomes increasingly apparent in the course of the long Chapter 2 how 

Weber inserts a sociology underneath economic theory and its treatment of 

markets and other related phenomena; also that Weber’s social economics 

still has direct relevance today to uncover the sociological foundations of 

processes that would otherwise be glossed over as normal market behaviour. 

The trend to formal economic rationality, as Weber noted, gathers pace with 

the move to a market economy and its extension. 

The organization of economic activity on the basis of a market economy 

presupposes the appropriation of the material sources of utility on the 

one hand, and market freedom on the other. The effectiveness of market 

freedom increases with the degree to which these sources of utility, particularly 

the means of transport and production, are appropriated. 

(ES, p. 112) 

On capital accounting, Weber writes, ‘it will be shown that the most varied 

sorts of external and subjective barriers account for the fact that capital 

accounting has arisen as a basic form of economic calculation only in the Occident’ 

(ES, p. 92). These two quotes indicate a developmental trend: only in 

the west is there the rationalism of markets, accounting and formal rationality. 

Chapter 2 is repeating the overwhelming trend to rationalism in the 

west, summarized in ‘Prefatory Remarks’. Yet, the predominant impression 

of Chapter 2 is a neutrality towards history in favour of universal–historical 

analysis (often of a conceptual matrix character or conceptual algorithm, as 

in the above figures, rather than ‘mere’ classificatory typologies). How, it 

may be wondered, will Weber deal with his pronounced ‘historicist’ phase 

of the PESC? 

A number of passages cast light on the question. In Section 11, Weber 

insists on a conceptual distinction between private wealth and capital, and 

the household unit and the profit-making enterprise. Wealth and profit making 

may seem to be identical but are, in fact, driven by different motivations 

and meanings. The enterprise is oriented to maintaining and improving 

profitability and its market position. It will ensure this through accurate 

budgeting. The holder of wealth will orientate his behaviour to security of 

wealth and its increase: ‘the purchase of securities on the part of a private 

investor who wishes to consume the proceeds is not a “capital-investment”,


but a “wealth-investment” (ES, pp. 98–9). This is of course no surprise today 

when wealth holders are able to destroy enterprises for their capital assets. 

What is surprising is that Weber applies this to the economy in the ancient 

world and the dispute over the ‘oikos’, ignited by Rodbertus, and resolved, 

to an extent, by Bücher. Without these distinctions, says Weber, ‘it is impossible 

to understand the economic development of the ancient world and 

the limitations on the development of capitalism of those times. (The wellknown 

articles of Rodbertus are in spite of their errors and incompleteness, 

still important in this context, but should be supplemented by the excellent 

discussion of Karl Bücher.)’ (ES, p. 99). 

Unpacking this comment a little: Weber argues that antiquity had capitalism 

and wealthy owners, but they did not have profit making on a rational 

basis capable of reckoning the return of investment and expenditures over a 

fixed time period. The ancient world had capitalism (as well as the ‘oikos’, 

‘pace’ Rodbertus) but, without rational profit making, it lacked any continuous 

dynamic growth. This is a more sophisticated version of his comments 

in 1909 in the ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’. But, unlike his 1909 article, 

Weber has a marked disinclination to involve himself in developmental history 

and its controversies. 

A similar comment occurs in Section 15, ‘Types of Economic Division of 

Labor’. Weber makes the still valuable analytical separation of the technical 

division of labour (organizing production), the social division of labour 

(how autonomous firms exist in a given social structure and its system of 

social stratification) and the economic division of labour (how the organization 

of production relates to budgetary administration and profit-making 

enterprise). Schmoller had advanced a theory of economic development that 

identified a series of stages: domestic economy, village economy, seigneurial 

and princely patrimonial household economy, town economy, territorial 

economy and national-economy. Weber rejected this stage theory because its 

descriptors did not pick up the underlying division of labour. Karl Bücher 

reworked the stage theory according to a more theoretical account of the 

division of labour (in Die Enstehung der Volkswirtschaft – see above, p. 127). 

In Chapter 2, Weber endorses Bücher against Schmoller – to an extent. Then 

in a long passage explains why his chapter did not relate to history. 

It should be emphatically stated that the present discussion is concerned 

only with a brief summary of the sociological aspects of these phenomena, 

so far as they are relevant to its context. The economic aspect is 

included only insofar as it is expressed in what are formally sociological 

categories. The presentation would be economic in the substantive sense 

only if the price and market conditions, which so far have been dealt 

with only on the theoretical level, were brought in. But these substantive 

aspects of the general problem could be worked into such a summary 

introduction only in the form of terse theses, which would involve some 

very dubious distortions. 

(ES, p. 115)


What Weber finds dubious is the use of economic theory in economic 

history. 

‘To take an example: It might be argued that for the development of 

medieval, corporately regulated, but “free” labor the decisive period should 

be seen in the “dark” ages from the tenth to the twelfth century, and in particular 

in the situation during that period of the skilled (peasant, mining and 

artisan) labour force whose production activity was oriented to the revenue 

chances of the feudal lords . . .’ (ES, p. 115). Feudal lords fought to secure 

these revenue sources through their control over manpower, creating a spurt 

forward in the economy. Weber declares his disinterest in applying theory 

to history in this way, fearing it could be erroneous. (It is interesting to note 

that one of the major theories, now canvassed, for this economic spurt is 

climate warming.) 

At a later point in the chapter – the section on the ‘Social Division of Labour’ 

– Weber returns to Rodbertus and Bücher as well as his own work on 

agrarian conditions east of the Elbe. Each of these subjects was strongly tied 

to historical and developmental change; Rodbertus because of his ‘oikos’ 

theory, Bücher an amended stage theory, and Weber’s own study that showed 

the dynamism of capitalistic labour relations in place of traditional ones. The 

historical dimensions are all ‘flattened’ to fit within a systematic exposition 

of types of the social division of labour. The ‘oikos’ represented ‘autarky of 

want satisfaction through the utilization of the services of household members 

or of dependent labor . . .’ (ES, p. 124). The agricultural estate ‘of the 

German East with a labour force holding small plots of estate land on a 

service tenure and entirely oriented to the order of the estate (Instleute)’ 

is equated with the enterprise and division of labour of the ‘putting out’ 

system (ES, p. 125). And Bücher is mentioned in connection with household 

enterprises and casual labour. Weber’s comparisons here work across history, 

not with history as a developmental sequence. 

He gives another example, provocatively, from sixteenth-century Europe. 

‘The decisive period for the development of capitalism could be claimed to 

be the great chronic price revolution of the sixteenth century.’ The economic 

theory, Weber notes, argues that rising prices stimulated agrarian economic 

activity – in England, as capitalistic enterprise, and East of the Elbe, through 

forced labour. Also, according to theory, industrial prices fell relative to 

agricultural prices, triggering changes in the organization of enterprises 

to improve competitiveness. Of these theories, Weber opines, ‘In order to 

verify theoretical reasoning about the substantive economic conditions of 

the development of economic structure, theses such as these and similar ones 

would have to be utilized.’ One such ‘similar theory’ could of course be 

Weber’s own Protestant ethic thesis. Weber makes it abundantly clear that 

he has no interest in becoming engaged in such manoeuvres. ‘These and 

numerous other equally controversial theories, even so far as they could be 

proved not to be wholly erroneous, cannot be incorporated in the present 

scheme which is intentionally limited to sociological concepts.’ Weber is


being severe, and it should not be overlooked that, had he chosen, he could 

have put up his own theory against the erroneous theory of price inflation, 

which after all is how knowledge progresses. But no. 

In renouncing any attempt of this sort, however, the following exposition 

in this chapter explicitly repudiates any claim to concrete ‘explanation’ 

and restricts itself to working out a sociological typology. The same is 

true of the previous discussion in that it consciously omitted to develop 

a theory of money and price determination. This must be strongly emphasized. 

For only the facts of the economic situation provide the flesh 

and blood for a genuine explanation of also that process of development 

relevant for sociological theory. What can be done here is only to supply 

a scaffolding adequate to provide the analysis with relatively unambiguous 

and definite concepts. 

It is obvious not only that no attempt is made here to do justice to the 

historical aspect of economic development, but also that the typology of 

the genetic sequence of possible forms is neglected. The present aim is 

only to develop a schematic system of classification. 

(ES, p. 116) 

This statement is reinforced towards the end of the chapter in Section 39 

where Weber discusses the impact of intellectual disciplines that have incorporated 

ethical and religious values and convictions. These ‘have tended to 

limit the development of an autonomous capitalistic system of the modern 

type to certain areas.’ He continues, 

In an historical analysis, we can only point out certain circumstances 

which exert negative influences on the relevant thought processes – that 

is, influences which impede or even obstruct them – or such which exert 

a positive, favoring influence. It is not, however, possible to prove a 

strictly inevitable causal relationship in such cases, any more than it is 

possible in any other case of strictly individual events. 

(ES, p. 200) 

I have made clear from the start of this book that we should be wary of 

trying to draw connections and unities and trajectories when they might well 

not exist. But the above statements so trumpet Weber disinterest with history 

in its development and genetic sequence that they deserve some comment. 

Clearly, this is not the Weber of 1904–5, who sought to develop heuristically 

honed cultural concepts in order to explain a causal process of a crucial 

juncture in European history. That may well have been a too adventurous 

undertaking, but one nonetheless undertaken by an extremely well-informed 

lecturer in national economics. And Weber always defended the Protestant 

thesis to the hilt against his critics. 

The move into the respective projects c. 1910 of ‘Economy and Society’ 

and the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ cannot be described as the


abandonment of the Protestant ethic thesis – although as noted below (pp. 

122–3), Weber did fail to follow up on detailed studies of the Reformation. 

Rather, the two projects represent a dilution of the thesis and its highly 

culturally attuned methodology. Puritanism becomes but one episode in the 

long history of occidental rationalism, and the comparative studies into the 

religious influence of economic ethics reveal not causative factors but simply 

the difference between ways of life and cultures. The final version of 

Economy and Society is forced to withdraw from the developmental thrusts 

that characterized the special sociologies of law, rulership and religion. Typologies, 

while built around orientation in respect to meaning, are offered 

as a practical step to further detailed research. The typologies in the final 

version are universal–historical and ‘renounce’ any claim to stages, development 

and genetic history. 

Chapter 2 is infrequently studied and has remained something of a puzzle. 

Its purpose, I think, is pretty clear – it was to be the key text of Economy 

and Society as it fitted into the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. This is not 

a very satisfying thing to say, because the final version of the whole book 

was never completed, so it is extremely hard to gain a sense of how it fitted 

into the overall scheme. But it does repay study, it is still very relevant, and 

Weber’s discipline of social economics needs to be relaunched. It is a highly 

considered and dense piece of writing. We may ask whether Weber himself 

considered he had gone out on a limb with the Protestant ethic thesis. The 

consensus of scholarly opinion is that it is a very hard thesis to sustain, not 

least, as I have shown in Chapter 4, because of its (impossible) methodological 

demands. Weber, like a good professional sportsman, never showed or 

admitted weakness. His footnotes addressing his critics in the revised 1920 

PESC are pugilistic. But in crafting Chapter 2, Weber was demonstrating 

that he not only understood economics but, above all, capitalism. Further 

research to settle the issues more decisively would, for Weber, require a firm 

sociological underpinning. 

Coda: is there a Weber paradigm? 

In early 1920, Weber broke off from writing his ‘Basic Concepts of Sociology’ 

to read the 240 pages of Volume 1 of Robert Liefmann’s The Principles 

of Modern Economic Theory. 11 Liefmann had been pressing Weber for his 

views of the book, which included a critique of sociology and a presentation 

of Weber’s own standpoint. Weber replied to Liefmann on 9 March with a 

long letter. Weber pointed out that he was now also a sociologist under the 

terms of his contract. As a sociologist, he is making an end of the bad enterprise 

with collective concepts, ‘for sociology is individualistic’. 

The state, for example, is a place where one finds prospects of certain 

types of action, the action of definite people. ‘Subjective’ means that action 

is oriented to definite ideas (‘Vorstellungen’). The ‘objective’ for us


observers is the chances that with this orientation to ideas the action will 

ensue. So, if certain actions did not ensue, there would not be a state. 

Weber raises this clarification as a correction to Liefmann’s treatment of 

utility and prices in economic theory. Subjective value, writes Weber, in an 

economic transaction is what one party reckons or estimates a particular 

commodity is worth to him. The actual price paid for a commodity is an 

objective, historical fact. 

Liefmann had written of Weber that he says that the knowledge value of 

theory is ‘small’. 12 Weber protested. 

Where did I say that? Theory creates ideal types and for me this function 

is simply indispensable. That sociology and economic history never replace 

theory is one of my basic convictions. What interests me (according 

to your page 17) is more the ‘special’ situation (‘Zusammenhang’)? 

Yes, if one is asking the question: why only in the Occident has rational 

(profit-making) capitalism originated, and one can call that a ‘special’ 

situation! There have to be people who investigate this question. In this, 

only highly paradoxical complexes are important. The modern economy 

presupposes not only the rational state, in the sense of its calculable 

functions, but also rational technology (science) and a defined form of 

rational life-conduct. Why didn’t modern capitalism originate in China? 

It had many thousand years for that! For centuries they have had exchange, 

paper money for 1100 years, coinage for 2600 years. 13 

These passages are part of a point-by-point rebuttal and discussion of 

Liefmann’s book, and so are contextually specific. It is also worth noting that 

Liefmann appears to misunderstand the fundamentals of Weber’s approach. 

One inference to be drawn from the exchange between Liefmann and Weber 

is that it is difficult to be conclusive about Weber. When he wrote the letter 

– with its summating insights as to his approach – he was in another of 

his expansionary periods of work. He was completing the final version of 

Economy and Society – at speed – and he had revised his collected essays in 

the sociology of religion. He might have continued with his advertised plans 

to expand his studies on the world religions. But he might not have. Bavaria 

and Munich had experienced revolution, rule by soviets and counter-revolutionary 

violence – all before his own eyes. In Russia, the revolution of 1917 

had held. Weber could have returned to his studies of Russia and expanded 

his political sociology of revolution, and of the limits of direct democracy. 

The conclusion to be drawn from this book is that Weber was unpredictable 

in the direction of his writings. His was not a neatly built academic career 

and reputation. 

Nevertheless, certain constants can be drawn throughout the variation in 

his studies. Methodology is the foremost. Weber does give the impression 

that he had solved the methodological problems in national-economy and


its related disciplines to his satisfaction. There is a consistency from his essay 

on ‘Objectivity’ in the social sciences (1904) through to ‘Basic Sociological 

Concepts in 1920. His position presumes that academic knowledge in the 

social sciences is precarious and provisional in a way that is less so for the 

natural sciences, which are able to uncover more enduring regularities and 

produce law-like statements. His epistemology, i.e. his assumptions about 

social scientific knowledge, held that there was an unbridgeable gulf between 

investigator and the ever-changing flux of social reality. Moreover, the investigator 

was himself, or herself, part of the ongoing flux of reality. Academic 

knowledge does not stand apart from the world, fixed somehow in time 

while an objective study of social reality is conducted. What distinguishes 

academic knowledge is the motivation of the social scientist to choose a 

topic or research problem for study, because it has knowledge value (‘wissenwert’). 

These values could be intrinsic to a discipline as a community of 

researchers, which is how Rickert thought about this issue. Or the individual 

researcher might be motivated by a wider pool of ideas, including that of his 

or her own creativity, which at its extreme reaches the artistic licence of a 

Nietzsche. The connection between investigator and the social/cultural/historical 

situation studied is transmitted through the medium of values and 

meanings. It was Dilthey who pointed out that this was not only the distinguishing 

feature of the human sciences that separated it from the natural 

sciences, it was also its major advantage and not a limitation. Human beings 

can understand other human beings through a process of interpretation of 

meaning. The medium through which this interpretation of meaning operates 

was and remains an issue of controversy. Simmel and others inclined to 

the view that there existed some kind of psychological meta-soul, into which 

we could also somehow dip and intuit the motivation of other people, now 

and across time. Dilthey, to his credit, pointed out that the interpretation 

of meaning is worked out, more arduously and with claims to correctness 

and truth, through the techniques of textual hermeneutics. Weber assumes 

that the interpretation of meaning is possible and is achieved through the 

Diltheyan route of empathy and re-experience. He asserts this, rather than 

justifying it in his methodology. He secures the reliability of interpretation 

through the procedure of casual attribution of motivation, which, as a retrospective 

and empirical exercise, ascertains the hypothetical nature of understanding 

motives and meanings. 

The ideal type functions as the equivalent of experimental design in the 

natural sciences. The methods of both are quite easy to outline. In an experiment, 

the investigator matches two situations with the exception of one 

key factor. In the ideal type, an interpreted meaning is intensified in order 

to provide conceptual clarity. In both situations, the complexity and sheer 

messiness of the world in its immediate state have to be manipulated to 

discern underlying causal mechanisms. Pure affect, pure instrumental rationality, 

pure tradition are ways of heuristically manipulating what is being 

studied to reach an empirical assessment of how each meaning should be


weighed – how ideas are actuated in social reality. The ideal type in Weber’s 

hands is, however, more than a method. Just as an academic psychologist 

will point out that it is not the experimental method per se but the cleverness 

of the design that is the real contribution to knowledge, so with the imaginative 

and theoretical power of Weber’s own ideal types. Weber’s comments to 

Liefmann slot in here. Ideal types stand for theory and are ‘indispensable’. 

Weber’s own ideal type of ascetic life conduct and its effects on economic 

behaviour have become part of the canon of sociological ideas as well as 

entering public consciousness, just as charisma has. To some small degree, 

the world is seen through Weber’s ideas, testifying to the power and creativity 

of the ideal type. 

‘That sociology and economic history never replace theory is one of my 

basic convictions.’ Weber’s position on methodology and ideal type, which 

are generic to the social and cultural sciences, are in my view paradigmatic; 

his views on sociology less so. In Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm, it 

was not simply a new unifying theory and research programme, but the 

accommodating capacity of a theory to researchers on institutional, normative 

and social grounds. Weber’s thinking about sociology is not broadly 

accommodating. He always turned his back on a general sociology, disputing 

its claims to a totalizing, or organicist, or positivist, or evolutionary view 

of the world. He had a disinclination to build in the features that the later 

twentieth century has thought indispensable. He preferred to conceptualize 

the sociological field exclusively in terms of social relationships of particular 

kinds. He did not develop an explicit theory of institutions, he had no notion 

of role and he rejected a formal theory of system differentiation. Above 

all, he was never tempted to construct a frame or social system within which 

the actions of the individual were to be integrated. This sets him apart from 

prominent sociologists such as Talcott Parsons or Pierre Bourdieu, whose 

whole oeuvre is a continuing attempt to reconcile action at the level of the 

individual and group with the structures or systems of society. For Weber, 

this would be akin to trying to square a circle. The same point can be made 

with respect to sociologists such as James Coleman and George Ritzer, who 

would unify the micro with the macro. For Weber, there is only one level 

– sociology is ‘individualistic’ – as he wrote to Liefmann. This I do not think 

should be read that sociology is atomistic; rather, as a statement against 

any form of reification. Of all the major sociologists, Weber had the lowest 

tolerance threshold to reification. Structures, classes, regimes, orders, value 

spheres all feature, unavoidably, in Weber’s sociology, but not as sociological 

objects or things. Law, noted Weber, exists as a living entity insofar as 

the state enacts law, and lawyers and courts process it. But sociologically, 

what counts is the idea or meaning of law in the mind and actions of the 

individual. The operation of ‘structures’ (Weber’s ‘Gebilde’) is denominated 

in the motives, meaning, thinking and actions of individuals. Hence, the 

purpose of sociology is to depict the basic sociological relationships. 

In one sense, this is dismaying for sociology because it is permanently


reduced to an underlabouring role: to theory on one side and to verification 

on the other, which is carried out by historians and economic history. But 

underlabouring does not capture Weber’s fashioning of sociology, which for 

him, in the form of a theory of social action, underwrites any study in the 

social sciences, to the extent that meaning is constitutive of people’s actions. 

Hence, sociology also turns out to be indispensable even though it does have 

to restrict its ambitions. 

Dismay, however, on the part of sociologists can be countered by the 

place of theory. The whole thrust of the Weberian enterprise is theoretical. 

Ideal types are heuristic nets cast into the flux of social reality. They create 

a rapport at the level of meaning; they are interventions into social reality. 

Theory is generated by economists, political scientists, academic theologians 

(‘Religionswissenschaft’), the study of law, ethnography and anthropology. 

Referring back to Figure 8.2 (p. 232), these other disciplines can be envisaged 

as substantive sociologies. Today, we would say that Weber demands 

an interdisciplinary science of society, with the basic sociological concepts 

underwriting the enterprise. A pure sociology, therefore, is somewhat ineffectual 

by itself. To ask the important questions about power, interests, want 

satisfaction, culture, religion, the nature of the human animal requires the 

presence of substantive sociologies committed to the large issues and questions 

of the day. 

Future tasks and debates 

In the Introduction to this book, I stated that the revaluation of Weber’s 

work would involve a critical engagement with some of his central questions. 

In one part, this demands a critical scholarship in relation to his writings, 

and this has taken up the majority of this book. But another part necessitates 

emerging from the scholarly cave and engaging with contemporary issues 

and debates. There are a number of central questions that are relevant to 

both Weber’s day and ours and, in this sense, they may be described as classic. 

A critical scholarship should be making the full complexity of his writing 

accessible to contemporary debates, and it should also challenge interpretations 

that patronize, reconstruct or fail to acknowledge both the complexity 

and the multiple directions of the writings. I list four central questions for 

further debate. 

1 Social economics. Weber’s whole academic life existed within the 

intellectual framework of national-economy. He was one of the very 

few proponents in Germany of the Austrian marginalist revolution in 

economics, yet clearly he remained committed to the historical, cultural 

and social analysis of economic activity. The marginalist heuristic 

exercise, the fiction of pure rationality, entered into his formulation of 

the ideal type. His sociology developed in parallel with his immense 

project to found a social economics. But very little of that latter project


remains, and the critical question is whether we should be making more 

use of that buried legacy. It is a little strange that Weber can be honoured 

as a sociologist but more or less forgotten as an economist. Richard 

Swedberg has made important contributions in this department, but 

are we yet able to characterize social economics and state what value it 

still has in relation to the dominant paradigm of neo-classical economic 

theory – a huge and powerful edifice that Weber would have termed 

economic rationalism. 14 

Part of this task involves a critical scrutiny of the account provided 

of social economics and of Weber in general by Joseph Schumpeter in 

his History of Economic Analysis. Schumpeter was part of the stable of 

authors who composed the project of social economics. His contribution 

to the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik – first published in German in 

1912, translated as Economic Doctrine and Method and published 

after his death in 1954 – makes a more measured assessment of the 

potential of Weber’s approach than that provided in his later History 

of Economic Analysis. 15 No mention is made by Schumpeter of Weber’s 

familiarity with the economic writings of Carl Menger, Bohm-Bäwerk 

and von Wieser. Much of this is perhaps bound up with the disastrous 

situation of economic life and economic policy in central Europe after 

1918 and the sense that marginalist economics was to be developed in 

the Anglo-Saxon world. Nevertheless, the question remains whether our 

remembrance of Weber’s social economics is adequate. 

2 Weber’s central position on hermeneutics (a term he did not use) 

connects meaning with causal attribution. Weber can be criticized for 

not engaging in an explicit acknowledgement and critique of Dilthey. 

Weber used his method of ‘Verstehen’, but wanted to remain distant 

from any hint of psychologism and of ‘Lebensphilosophie’. This is a 

disservice to nineteenth-century hermeneutics, whose function and 

technique was to establish textual truth. The great bifurcation between 

analytical philosophy and the positivism of the Vienna circle, on the 

one side, and phenomenological and interpretive philosophies on the 

other side – which gets under way in the 1920s – might have developed 

differently had hermeneutics not been seen as reductive, relativist and 

unreliable. Weber’s method of ‘Verstehen’ in practice resisted any such 

bifurcation. The interpretation of meaning is an attribution of a cause 

or reason for acting, whose consequences are empirically ascertainable. 

The debate remains. It is still controversial to assume that a reason for 

acting can be considered as a cause of acting. Also the interpretation of 

meaning as a reason or motivation for acting requires the application 

of ordinary language philosophy, as for example in Donald Davidson’s 

essays. 

3 Philosophy of history. Weber was against this in its guises of Hegelian 

idealism, Marxist historical materialism, and evolutionism in its Comtean 

or Frazerian forms. Weber held that the empiricism of historical


‘nacheinander’, the cause and effect of concrete events, was a necessary 

discipline and source of verification. But his historical sociology was 

founded in strong theory construction. His developmental history on 

a comparative basis revolved around the coming together of certain 

material and ideal interests. The causal model that underlay this coming 

together was the theory of ‘elective affinity’. Culture bonds with material 

and political interests to produce determinative outcomes in the course 

of civilizational history. I cannot see that Weber ever progressed beyond 

this conception, which was introduced as an explanatory metaphor 

in PESC in 1904–5. Chemical bonding – and elective affinity is its 

nineteenth century equivalent – is, as we now know, an immensely strong 

force. Just how one can explicate the mechanisms of elective affinity 

within historical sociology is an issue that remains unresolved, indeed 

barely even addressed seriously. For Weber, it is handled as cultural 

ideas determining life conduct in interaction with material interests. 

The alternatives are the programme developed by W.G. Runciman of 

selectionism in history, in which the initiation of cultural ideas and 

interests becomes subsidiary to their uptake within the temporally 

subsequent social environment. Or the most popular alternative is the 

historical sociology of multifactorialism, discussed in relation to Michael 

Mann’s work on power. Multifactorial causation and selectionism can 

claim lineages to Max Weber but, along with elective affinities, they are 

each separate and different programmes. 

4 Singularity of modernity. The benign position on the origins and nature 

of modernity is to argue that its constitution includes a reflexive capacity 

in politics, science, technology and culture to steer the direction of 

societal development in a desired direction; also that the modernity, 

which originated in the west, is in fact adaptable by other cultures and 

civilizations to their own values. This is the multiple modernities position 

as developed by S.N. Eisenstadt and colleagues. It owes more to Karl 

Jaspers than it does to Max Weber who, I would argue, saw modernity 

as the singular accomplishment of western rationalism. At root, it is a 

pessimistic vision. Western science was rooted in the reflexive innovation 

that concepts, resulting from rational thought, could be intervened 

between the human beings and their immediate experience of the world. 

As such, it was the intellectual successor to cultural religions, which had 

already made metaphysical interventions of various sorts. In that sense, 

science represented progress but also disenchantment. Once the tree of 

knowledge is bitten into, the magic garden of existence becomes subject, 

inescapably, to rational discourse. Puritanism was uniquely inimical to 

magic, rite and superstition, and jolts, as a minor but historic episode, a 

civilizational configuration into an irreversible direction. To an extent, 

Weber might even have underplayed the role of what the Toronto school 

would term the ‘symbolic technologies’ at work in this process, which 

accelerate social relationships away from the ‘Gemeinschaft’ of face-


to-face relationships to the associative patterns of relationships made 

possible through modern communication. 

Weber writes that mechanism supervenes over meaning: 

This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of 

machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals 

who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned 

with economic acquisition, with irreversible force. Perhaps it will so 

determine them until the last ton of fossil fuel is burnt. 

(PESC, p. 181) 16 

This has an even more ominous ring to it some hundred years after it 

was written. In another hundred years, it is most probable that the last ton 

of fossil fuel will have been burnt. In the singularity argument, this is an 

irreversible process of rationalization driven by the inner logic of occidental 

rationalism; and if modernity is singular, there is no other, alternative modernity. 

By its nature, modernity is concerned with the perfection of means 

rather than the deeper reflection on the ends of humankind.

Notes 

Introduction 

1 Nelson, B., ‘Max Weber’s “Author’s Introduction” (1920): A Master Clue to his 

Main Aims’, Sociological Inquiry, 44, 4, 1974, pp. 269–78. 

2 Nelson, p. 275. 

3 Colliot-Thélène, C., La Sociologie de Max Weber, Paris: La Découverte, 2006, 

p. 6. 

4 See his The Rise of Western Rationalism. Max Weber’s Developmental History, 

Roth, G. (transl.), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981 and Rationalism, 

Religion and Domination. A Weberian Perspective, Solomon, N. (transl.), 

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. 

5 Scaff, L., ‘Weber before Weberian sociology’, in Reading Weber, Tribe, K. (ed), 

London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 15–41. 

6 See Roth, G., Max Webers deutsch–englische Familiengeschichte 1800–1950, 

Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001; Radkau, J., Max Weber. Die Leidenschaft des 

Denkens, Munich: Hanser, 2005; Whimster, S., (ed.), Max Weber and the Culture 

of Anarchy, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. 

7 See the collection Max Weber zum Gedächtnis, König, R., and Winckelmann, J. 

(eds), Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1963. 

8 Graf, F.W., ‘Ernst Troeltsch’s Evaluation of Max and Alfred Weber. Introduction 

and Translation of a Letter by Ernst Troeltsch to Heinrich Dietzel’, Max Weber 

Studies, 4.1, 2004, p. 105. 

9 Lepsius, M.R., ‘Münchens Beziehungen zu Max Weber und zur Pflege seines 

Werks’, Das Faszinosum Max Webers. Die Geschichte seiner Geltung, Borchardt, 

K. and Ay, K.-L. (eds), Constance: UVK, 2006, p. 23. 

10 Zur Geschichte der Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter. Nach südeuropäischen 

Quellen (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1889) has been recently translated and edited 

by Lutz Kaelber, as The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle 

Ages (Lanham, Mary: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 

11 In April, 1919 Weber became ‘Professor für Gesellschaftslehre, Wirtschaftsgeschichte 

und Nationalökonomie’. See Lepsius, Faszinosum, p. 19 and p. 259 

below. 

12 Strauss, L., Natural Right and History, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 

1953, pp. 35–80. 


1 First published ‘Weber before Weberian Sociology’, British Journal of Sociology,

272 Notes 

35, 1984, pp. 190–215; reprinted in Reading Weber, Tribe, K. (ed.), London: 

Routledge, 1989, pp. 15–41. 

2 Scaff, L., in Reading Weber, p. 16. 

3 Turner, B.S., For Weber. Essays in the Sociology of Fate, London: Routledge, 

1984, p. 354. 

4 Turner, p. 353. 

5 Dawe, A., ‘The Two Sociologies’, British Journal of Sociology, 21, 2, 1970, pp. 

207–8. 

6 Giddens, A., Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction 

in Social Analysis, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979; 

Modernity and Self Identity, Oxford: Polity, 1991. 

7 Colliot-Thélène, C., La Sociologie de Max Weber, Paris: La Découverte, 2006, p. 

5. 

8 Schroeder, R., Max Weber and the Sociology of Culture, London: Sage, 1992, 

p. 9. The reference to Kalberg, S. is ‘Weber, Max (1864–1920)’ in The Social 

Science Encyclopaedia, Kuper, A., and Kuper J. (eds), London: Routledge, 1985. 

Stephen Kalberg’s integration of social action types with macrohistorical process 

was further developed in his Max Weber’s Historical-Sociology, Chicago, IL: 

Chicago University Press, 1994. 

9 Scaff, L., in Reading Weber, p. 16. 

10 In 1871, a number of German kingdoms, principalities and small states were 

consolidated under Prussian leadership into a unitary state. The King of Prussia 

became its Emperor, and an electoral franchise and parliamentary system were 

introduced. The German (Second) Empire ceased to exist in November 1918. 

The period 1892–1918 is also often termed Wilhelmine Germany after the name 

of its emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II. 

11 Webb, S.B., ‘Agricultural Protection in Wilhelmian Germany: Forging an Empire 

with Pork and Rye’, reprinted in The Economic Development of Germany since 

1870, Fischer, W., (ed.), Lyme: Edward Elgar, 1997, pp. 400–18. See also the recently 

discovered article by Max Weber, ‘Germany – Agriculture and Forestry’, 

reprinted in Max Weber Studies, 6.2, 2006, pp. 207–18. 

12 This was a long established tradition in the autocratic Prussian state. See Rosenberg, 

H., Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy. The Prussian Experience, 

1660–1815, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. 

13 Riesebrodt, M., ‘Einleitung’ to Max Weber’s Die Lage der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen 

Deutschland, 1892, in MWG, I/3, pp. 1–33. 

14 Mommsen, W.J., and Aldenhoff, R., ‘Einleitung’ to Landarbeiterfrage, Nationalstaat 

und Volkswirtschaftspolitik. Schriften und Reden 1892–1899, MWG I/4, 

pp. 16–20. 

15 From the point of view of research design, the Verein’s questionnaire favoured 

an inductive methodology. The study was not designed to test specific propositions, 

such as for instance the relationships between wages and migration. Data 

were gathered and conclusions were drawn afterwards. 

16 Those who left the land were mostly unmarried and young, although curiously 

no explicit demographic questions were included in the main questionnaire. 

17 Weber, M., Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland, Leipzig: 

Duncker & Humblot, 1892, p. 4. 

18 Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, p. 5. The emphases are Weber’s. 

19 ‘Employment regime’ is a little strong as a translation but does pick up the element 

of national-economy in his thinking. The alternative translation is work 

organization, which is somewhat misleading. 

20 Weber, M., ‘Entwickelungstendenzen in der Lage der ostelbischen Landarbeiter’, 

Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Marianne Weber 

(ed.), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988, p. 474.

Notes 273 

21 Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, p. 16. 


23 Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, p. 795–6. 

24 For a more detailed analysis of Weber’s argument, see Agevall, O., ‘Science, 

Values, and the Empirical Argument in Max Weber’s Inaugural Address’, Max 

Weber Studies, 4, 2, 2004, pp. 157–77. 


26 Mommsen, W.J., Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920, Steinberg, M. 

(transl.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 35–59. 

27 Weber, M., Die römische Agrargeschichte in ihrer Bedeutung für das Staats- und 

Privatrecht, Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1891. This has now appeared in the Max 

Weber Gesamtausgabe, edited by Jürgen Deininger, MWG I/2. 

28 MWG I/2, p. 160. 

29 MWG I/2, p. 216. 

30 Mommsen, W.J., ‘From Agrarian Capitalism to the “Spirit” of Modern Capitalism: 

Max Weber’s Approaches to the Protestant Ethic’, Max Weber Studies, 5, 2, 

2005, pp.185–6. 

31 Mommsen, pp. 186–7. 

32 Kaelber, L., ‘Introduction. Max Weber’s Dissertation in the Context of his Early 

Career and Life’, The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages, 

Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. See also Kaelber, L., ‘Max Weber 

on Usury and Medieval Capitalism: From The History of Commercial Partnerships 

to The Protestant Ethic’, Max Weber Studies, 4, 1, 2004, pp. 51–75. 

33 Borchardt, K., ‘Max Weber’s Writings on the Bourse: Puzzling Out a Forgotten 

Corpus’, Max Weber Studies, 2, 2, 2002, p. 153. 

34 Weber, M., quoted in Borchardt, p. 160, n. 53. 

35 Quoted in Borchardt, 154. 

36 Bruhns, H., ‘Max Weber’s “Basic Concepts” in the Context of his Studies in 

Economic History’, Max Weber Studies, Beiheft 1, 2006, pp. 61–8. 

37 Weber, M., Grundriss zu den Vorlesungen über Allgemeine (“theoretische”) Nationalökonomie 

(1898), Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1990. 

38 Weber commissioned Schumpeter to write this book as part of the encyclopaedia 

Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. It appeared as Epochen der Dogmen- und Methodengeschichte, 

Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1912. It was published in 

English translation by George Allen & Unwin in 1954. 

39 Subsection 7 of Section 2 of Weber’s lecture outline is paraphrased below. It 

contains an exposition of value taken from the theory of marginal utility. 

7 Economic value (‘Wertschätzung’) in the isolated economy. 

7.1 The ‘laws of value’ (‘Wertgesetze’). 

Goods whose value is given through exchange and price. This is the normal 

quality of economic goods. Neither the urgency of need nor the scarcity of a 

good determines the price level. The specific economic good being exchanged by 

economic actors (‘Einzelwirtschaften’) is valued according to a subjective component 

plus motive. Cannot see this in the complexity of today’s economy, so 

abstract theory constructs an isolated economy with no exchange, like a primitive 

household in the past or a communist society in the future. Economic subject 

meets perceived economic needs and their subjective urgency through economic 

decision on consumption and means of production (as above). Economic subject 

proceeds like a modern businessman in calculating the whole situation of supply 

and need. Theoretically, this operates (1) from simplified assumption of an 

isolated economy with given, fixed needs in a fixed period of employment of 

labour and material needs of production that are also fixed; (2) through assumption 

that the supply of goods can be increased in relation to consumption

274 Notes 

and production means available to the household. Economic subject makes an 

estimate of value of the particular goods, as presumed above (1 and 2). 

What is the motive that determines the level of value of a unit (‘Einheit’) of the 

absolute limited supply of consumption good ‘x’? Supply of ‘x’ will be expended 

on most (subjectively) pressing needs and, at a certain point, will be forced to 

stop expenditure; the shorter the supply, the more pressing psychic need, the 

more plentiful, the less pressing. Satiation of least pressing need is dependent on 

an unrestricted supply of units of ‘x’. This is the marginal utility of the unit of 

‘x’. Restriction in the supply of units of ‘x’ places the satiation of psychic need 

(‘Bedürfnisregung’) in question – the economic subject knows he is dependent 

on unrestricted supply. The consciousness of dependence is the source of value, 

and the intensity of dependence corresponds to marginal utility. So, declining 

marginal utility (increasing supply), and rising marginal utility with declining 

supply. 

So case (1) is a law of marginal utility, the estimation of value in a monopoly 

situation (limited goods in isolated economy) according to measure of rank 

ordering of needs economically to their expected (‘erzielenden’) ‘marginal utility’. 

Case (2) is like (1) except a consumption good ‘y’ is reproducible (and not 

limited). There is a decline in the marginal utility of ‘y’ with the more complete 

satisfaction of needs, which ‘y’ serves, and ‘costs’. In buying in ‘y’, the marginal 

utility of other goods rises. Supply of ‘y’ could increase costs of ‘z’ so long as the 

marginal utility of ‘y’ does not drop below that of ‘z’. 

The value of increasable goods (‘cost goods’) follows the specific formulation 

of ‘law of costs’ under (1) conditions of labour and capital under given technical 

conditions, (2) rank ordering of needs to lowest marginal utility possible. State 

of need and costs (not costs of labour but economic material goods) are the 

components of value estimation of cost goods. 

40 Bohm-Bäwerk, E., Karl Marx and the Close of His System, McDonald, A. 

(transl.), London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898. Reprinted in Karl Marx and the Close 

of His System, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949. 

41 In his inaugural lecture in Freiburg in 1895, Weber went out of his way to 

demonstrate that all economic policy judgements have to be referred in the last 

instance to the interests of the state. In this sense, he was not ‘value free’, a 

scientific norm that he insisted upon. In his lecture course, however, Weber was 

quite prepared to outline views and theories that he personally would not support. 

Weber thought it was wrong to reveal to students what one’s own personal 

viewpoint was. Quite how he squared that with his inaugural lecture remains a 

mystery – unless the lecture was only open to academic staff. 

42 Quoted by Mommsen, p. 194. The quote itself comes from Weber’s own lecture 

notes, which will be published shortly in MWG III/1. 

43 Mommsen, p. 194. 


1 Lehmann, H., ‘Friends and Foes. The Formation and Consolidation of the Protestant 

Ethic Thesis’, in The Protestant Ethic Turns 100. Essays on the Centenary 

of the Weber Thesis, Swatos, W.H., Jr, and Kaelber, L. (eds), Boulder, CO: Paradigm 

Publishers, 2005, pp. 1–22. 

2 Lehmann, p. 3. 

3 This letter, Brentano’s reply, has yet to be found. 

4 Lehmann, p. 4. 

5 Lehmann, p. 4.

Notes 275 

6 Quoted by Lehmann, p. 5. 

7 ‘Geleitwort der Herausgeber’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 

(Neue Folge), I, 1904, pp. I–VII. 

8 Quoted by Lindenlaub, D., Richtungskämpfe im Verein für Sozialpolitik. Part 2: 

Wissenchaft und Sozialpolitik vornehmlich von Beginn des “Neuen Kurses” bis 

zum Ausbruch des ersten Weltkrieges (1890–1914), Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 

1967, p. 276. 

9 Naumann, F., ‘Das Suchen nach dem Wesen des Kapitalismus I’, Die Hilfe, 17, 

37, September 1911. 

10 Lindenlaub, p. 280. Friedrich Naumann is cited in Lindenlaub, p. 281. These 

are averaged judgements, by Naumann and followed by Lindenlaub, for a group 

of national-economists. Weber, however, should be judged as below the average 

with respect to the Marxist problematic. As we have seen, Weber had already 

accepted the economics of marginalism and, it should be noted, Weber had an 

ability to hold on to not necessarily compatible positions. 

11 Sombart, W., Der moderne Kapitalismus, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, I, 1902. 

12 Sombart’s progressive views of 1902 drift away to romantic anti-modernity, and 

his downgrading of racial characteristics in 1902 falls prey to ethnic characterizations 

of capitalism. 

13 See the article by Lehmann, ‘Friends and Foes’; also Lenger, F., Werner Sombart. 

1863–1941. Eine Biographie, Munich: Beck, 1994. 

14 mK, p. 51. 

15 Talcott Parsons’ influential essay ‘ “Capitalism” in recent German literature: 

Sombart and Weber’ (1928–9, reprinted in Talcott Parsons. The Early Essays, 

Camic, C. (ed.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 3–37) uses 

the second editions of mK (1924 onwards) and PESC (1920) and overlooks 

the linkages as they existed in the first editions. See also the informative essay 

by Lehmann, H., ‘The Rise of Capitalism: Weber versus Sombart’, in Weber’s 

Protestant Ethic. Origins, Evidence, Contexts, Lehmann, H., and Roth G. (eds), 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 

16 mK I, p. 383. 

17 mK I, p. 391. 

18 Gothein, E., Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Schwarzwaldes, I, p. 674, Strasbourg: 

Trübner, 1892. Quoted by Sombart, mK I, p. 381, note 1. Gothein’s book is 

generally supportive of Sombart’s position in that he comes down against the 

institutionalist/jurisdictional analysis of historians such as Georg von Below, but 

it is organised very much within those problematics and lacks the primacy of 

economic principle that Sombart demanded. 

19 For a contemporary account of Darwinian selectionism applied to the Protestant 

ethic thesis, see the series of articles by Runciman, W.G., ‘Was Max Weber 

a Selectionist in Spite of Himself?’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 1.1, 2001, 

pp. 13–32. 

20 See PESC, p. 47 and GARS, I, Mohr Siebeck, 1920, p. 30: ‘In der Überschrift 

dieser Studie ist der etwas anspruchsvoll klingende Begriff: “Geist des Kapitalismus” 

verwendet. Was soll darunter verstanden werden? . . .’ The quotation 

marks around ‘Geist’ become quite intriguing at this point. If Weber is objecting 

to the pretentiousness of ‘Geist’, the quotation marks become scare quotes. 

But they could only become scare quotes through an implicit recognition that 

Sombart was the one who was pretentious. Note also the remark by Lehmann in 

‘The Rise of Capitalism: Weber versus Sombart’: ‘In my view, we should not be 

misled by the fact that Weber mentioned Sombart only two or three times in the 

first version of his essay, that is, in 1904 and 1905, and that those places were 

quite insignificant’ (p. 198).

276 Notes 

21 mK I, p. 193. 

22 mK I, pp, 396–7. 

23 Not to say flamboyance. In 1530, Anton Fugger, when entertaining the Emperor 

Charles V, lit a cinnamon fire using an imperial i.o.u. Simmel observes that the 

Fuggers came to grief because their banking empire operated internationally at 

a time (sixteenth century) of restricted money economy. Lending money to the 

Emperor in Madrid did not extend his credit in Holland where it was needed. 

Die Philosophie des Geldes, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1900, p. 139. 

24 PESC, p. 64; GARS, I, p. 49. 

25 PESC, p. 75; GARS, I, p. 60. Weber entered a long footnote in 1920 attacking 

Sombart’s position. PESC, note 29, pp. 202–3; GARS, I, pp. 56–9. 

26 Friedrich Lenger needs to be credited with the insight that Sombart, Simmel and 

Weber can be usefully tied to together on the subject of ‘Geist’. See his Werner 

Sombart 1863–1941. Eine Biographie, pp. 121–3. 

27 Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft, vol. 13, no. 4, 

1889, pp. 1251–64; now best archived through the Heptagon CD, Berlin, 2001: 

Georg Simmel. Das Werk. 

28 See ‘Introduction to the Translation’, p. 37, note 3, in The Philosophy of Money, 

Frisby, D., and Bottomore, T. (eds/transl.), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 

1978. 

29 Weber, Marianne, Max Weber. A Biography, Zohn, H. (transl.), New Brunswick, 

NJ: Transaction Books, 1988, p. 253. 

30 See Sombart, mK, I, p. 383: ‘Damit aber war die Zeit erfüllt, daß sich jener 

merkwürdige psychologische Prozeß in den Menschen abermals vollzog, dessen 

Verlauf uns neuerdings mit gewohnter Meisterschaft Georg Simmel geschildert 

hat: die Erhebung des absoluten Mittels – des Geldes – zum höchsten Zweck.’ 

Parsons provides an excellent summary of Sombart on money, not realizing it is 

taken from Simmel: ‘All the qualitative differences of the most diverse economic 

goods are reduced to a single common denominator, money. This quantitative 

measure gives a means of comparison of diverse goods on the one hand. On 

the other hand it gives an objective purpose for all economic activity, which is 

primarily the making of profit in terms of money, and only indirectly the securing 

of the goods for which money can be exchanged. Thus a wedge is driven 

between the “natural” end of economic action, the satisfaction of needs, and the 

means to that satisfaction.’ Early Essays, p. 8. Sombart, in applying Simmel’s 

theory to the period of the end of the Middle Ages, left himself short of historical 

evidence; this is reflected in the criticisms of the historians, from which the 

Sombart thesis never really recovered. 

Weber, PESC, p. 52; GARS, I, p. 34, note 1: ‘The concept of the spirit of 

capitalism is here used in this specific sense [Franklin not Fugger], it is the spirit 

of capitalism.’ Weber footnotes this sentence as follows: ‘This is the basis of our 

difference from Sombart in stating the problem.’ ‘For Sombart’s view see op. cit. 

[mK] pp. 357, 380, etc. His reasoning here connects with the brilliant analysis 

given in Simmel’s Philosophie des Geldes (final chapter).’ 

31 This is difficult to reference because it takes us to the heart of Simmel’s analysis. 

But: ‘The projection of mere relations into particular objects is one of the 

great accomplishments of the mind; when the mind is embodied in objects, these 

become a vehicle for the mind and endow it with a livelier and more comprehensive 

activity. The ability to construct such symbolic objects attains its greatest 

triumph in money’ (Simmel, G., Philosophy of Money, 1978, p. 129). ‘All the 

implications of money for other parts of the cultural process result from its essential 

function of providing the most concise possible expression and the most 

intense representation of the economic value of thing.’ . . . ‘This process might 

be called the growing spiritualization (‘Vergeistigung’) of money, since it is the

Notes 277 

essence of mental activity to bring unity out of diversity’ (Philosophy of Money, 

p. 198; 1900 German edition, p. 175). 

32 ‘Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie’, Logos. Internationale 

Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur, 4, 3, 1913, pp. 253–94; reprinted in 

GAWL, p. 427; translated as ‘Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology’, Graber, 

E.E. (transl.), The Sociological Quarterly, 22, 1981, pp. 151–80. In footnote 

1, Weber references Simmel’s Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. At the end 

of the footnote, he indicates he wishes to separate subjectively meant meaning 

more sharply from the objectively valid. This same point is repeated in the ‘rewrite’ 

of ‘Soziologische Grundbegriffe’ of 1921 (GAWL, p. 541), but this time 

Simmel’s Philosophie des Geldes is explicitly mentioned, as is his Soziologie. 

33 This corresponds to the distinction drawn by Martin Hollis, in a different idiom, 

between plastic man and autonomous man. See Hollis, M., Models of Man. Philosophical 

Thoughts on Social Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 

1977, pp. 1–21. 

34 This is quite a remarkable statement for it offers a unification of the human 

and natural sciences. The natural sciences take as foundational the assertion of 

causality – the influence of one event on a subsequent event – and that of energy. 

The English translation does not quite capture the significance of the original 

statement. ‘Der Kompetenzstreit zwischen Kausalität und Teleologie innerhalb 

unseres Handelns schlichtet sich also so: indem der Erfolg, seinem Inhalte nach, 

in der Form psychischer Wirksamkeit da ist, bevor er sich in die der objektiven 

Sichtbarkeit kleidet, wird der Strenge der Kausalverbindung nicht der geringste 

Abbruch getan; denn für diese kommen die Inhalte nur, wenn sie Energien 

geworden sind, in Betracht, und insofern sind Ursache und Erfolg durchaus geschieden, 

während die Identität, die die ideellen Inhalte beider zeigen, wiederum 

mit der realen Verursachung überhaupt nichts zu tun hat’ (Simmel, G., Philosophy 

of Money, 1978, p. 205; Heptagon CD, Berlin, 2001, p. 198). 

35 It is possible for advanced paper currencies to operate in complex but premodern 

societies, such as the Tang dynasty, c. ad 1000. 

36 Nipperdey, T., ‘Max Weber, Protestantism and the Debate around 1900’, in Weber’s 

Protestant Ethic, p. 73. 

37 Simmel, Philosophy of Money, p. 56. 

38 It is as well to note that, in the first edition, Simmel qualified what he meant 

by historical materialism: ‘it might be more exact to call this historical sensualism’. 



41 Riesebrodt, M., in The Protestant Ethic Turns 100, p. 33. 

42 Riesebrodt, M., in The Protestant Ethic Turns 100, p. 35. 


1 There is neither an exact translation equivalence between ‘Kultur’ and civilization 

nor between ‘Kultur’ and culture. 

2 Winckelmann, J. (ed.), Die protestantische Ethik, Gütersloh, Gütersloher Verlagshaus 

Mohn, 5th edn, 1979. 

3 ‘Studies’ in the plural because, in 1906, Weber wrote a second (and shorter) 

essay on the Protestant sects and modern capitalism, reflecting his experience of 

contemporary religion in North America. 

4 Green, R.G., Protestantism and Capitalism. The Weber Thesis and its Critics, 

Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1959. 

5 Max Weber and the Spirit of Capitalism – 100 Years On, special edition of Max 

Weber Studies, 5.2 and 6.1, 2005–6; Das Faszinosum Max Webers, Ay, K.-L.

278 Notes 

(ed.), Constance: UVK, 2006; Swatos, W.H. Jr and Kaelber, L. (eds), The Protestant 

Ethic Turns 100. Essays on the Centenary of the Weber Thesis, Boulder, CO: 

Paradigm Publishers, 2005. 

6 To be edited by Peter Ghosh. 

7 Hedstrom, P., and Swedberg, R. (eds), Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach 

to Social Theory, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 

8 The translator, Talcott Parsons, makes a half-hearted cross-reference to Weber’s 

‘Wissenschaftslehre’ at this point. 

9 To gauge this, consider the complexity and scholarship involved in a recent 

‘generalist’ history – see MacCulloch, D., Reformation. Europe’s House Divided. 

1490–1700, London: Penguin, 2003. 

10 Weber, M., Roscher and Knies. The Logical Problem of Historical Economics, 

Oakes, G. (ed./transl.), New York: Free Press, 1975. 



12 See Baumgarten, E., Werk und Person, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 

1964. See also Baehr, P., The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and 

Other Writings, Baehr, P., and Wells, G.(eds/transl.), London: Penguin, 2002, p. 

12. 

13 Baehr, P., and Wells, G. (eds/transl.), The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of 

Capitalism and Other Writings, London: Penguin, 2002, p. 28. 

14 Liebersohn, H., ‘Weber’s Historical Concept of National Identity’, in Weber’s 

Protestant Ethic. Origins, Evidence, Contexts, Lehmann, H., and Roth, G. (eds), 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 125. 

15 Ghosh, P., ‘Max Weber’s Idea of “Puritanism”: a Case Study in the Empirical 

Construction of the Protestant Ethic’, History of European Ideas, 29, 2003, pp. 

183–221. 

16 Dowden, E., Puritan and Anglican. Studies in Literature, London: Kegan Paul, 

Trench, Trübner, 1900, p. 235. 

17 Dowden, Puritan and Anglican, p. 235. 



20 PESC, p. 129. 

21 PESC, p. 119. 

22 See Dilthey’s analysis of Luther’s hymns. 

23 Davies, N., ‘Gesang’ in Davies, N. (ed.), Europe. A History, Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 1996, p. 486. 

24 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, pp. 

35–6. 

25 MacCulloch, p. 378. 

26 MacKinnon, M.H., ‘The Longevity of the Thesis. A Critique of the Critics’, in 

Lehmann and Roth, Weber’s Protestant Ethic. 

27 See Geyerz, K. von, ‘Biographical Evidence on Predestination, Covenant, and 

Special Covenant’ in Lehmann and Roth, Weber’s Protestant Ethic; Kaelber, L., 

‘Rational Capitalism, Traditionalism and Adventure Capitalism. New Research 

on the Weber Thesis’, in Swatos and Kaelber, The Protestant Ethic Turns 100, 

pp. 157–61. 

28 Westminster Confessions: ‘Those who truly believe in the Lord Jesus, who honestly 

love him and try to walk in good conscience before him, may in this life be 

assured with certainty that they are in a state of grace.’ Quoted by MacKinnon 

in Lehmann and Roth, Weber’s Protestant Ethic, p. 220. 

29 Zaret in Lehmann and Roth, Weber’s Protestant Ethic, p. 249. 

30 An important area of research, see Kaelber, L., in Swatos and Kaelber, The Protestant 

Ethic Turns 100, pp. 154–6.

Notes 279 

31 Zaret, D., ‘The Use and Abuse of Textual Data’ in Lehmann and Roth, Weber’s 

Protestant Ethic, p. 247. 

32 In the German, Weber does not use the subjunctive tense, which indicates indirect 

speech. 

33 I have changed the Parsons’ translation from ‘coal’ to ‘fuel’, and ‘iron cage’ to 

‘casing as hard as steel’. 

34 Nielson, D.A., ‘The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism as Grand 

Narrative: Max Weber’s Philosophy of History’, in Swatos and Kaelber, The 

Protestant Ethic Turns 100, p. 75. 

35 Weber himself treats the ‘isolated economic man’ (‘Wirtschaftsmenschen’) as 

a Robinson Crusoe figure (p. 176). It is merely an aside in his argument, but 

indicates that Weber was well aware of the way in which a form of rationalism 

came to give birth to this construction. This is further underlined by referring 

in his lectures on national-economy, in which he had grasped the scientific (as 

opposed to novelistic) fiction of ‘economic man’. 

36 Max Weber. Das Werk, Müller, T. and Pentzel, A. (eds), Berlin: Heptagon Reader, 

2002. Many of these are lost by Parsons who may well have been affronted by 

Weber’s tendency to vitalism. Or he may well have interpreted the work from 

the side of the sober Protestant rather than the sensuous individual. The art of 

translation is the art of interpretation, going as deep as the fundamental attitudes 

of the translator himself or herself. See the recent research by Lawrence Scaff 

on the Parsons translation, ‘The Creation of the Sacred Text’, MWS 5.2/6.1, 

2005–6, p. 205–28. 

37 Lepsius, R.M., ‘Mina Tobler and Max Weber: Passion Confined’, Max Weber 

Studies, 4.1, pp. 9–21. There is a Goethean flourish in Tobler’s statement. From 

his retreat in Dornburg in 1828, Goethe wrote, ‘the rational world can be considered 

as a great, immortal individual which ceaselessly produces that which is 

necessary and thereby comes to control the accidental’. Quoted by Dilthey, W., 

Introduction to the Human Sciences, Makreel, R.A., and Rodi, F. (eds), Princeton, 

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 103. 

38 Lepsius, p.19. 


1 J.G. Fichte presented his ideas on ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ at the University of Jena 

during the 1790s and reformulated them on his move to the University of Berlin 

in 1800. The Weber–Fichte link cannot be entered into here, even though there 

is more to be said on the subject. Fichte is conventionally seen as an arch-proponent 

of philosophical idealism, a post-Kantian who switched German philosophy 

in the direction Hegel developed further. In this account, there is nothing 

Fichtean about Weber. The young philosophy don at Heidelberg, Emil Lask, 

wrote on Fichte, and we know that Weber was in conversation with Lask around 

1900. At the same time, Marianne Weber wrote a dissertation on Fichte and 

Marx, with both Lask and Max Weber acting in the role of supervisors. There is 

a sense in which Fichte was talismanic for the Heidelberg circle. In the preface of 

his book on Fichte, Lask makes clear that he is indifferent to Fichte’s own philosophical 

system but is drawn to the individuality and irrationality problematic, 

which is revealed by a historical treatment of Fichte’s philosophy; see his Fichtes 

Idealismus und die Geschichte, Tübingen: Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1902, p. vi. 

2 Turner, S.P., ‘Defining a Discipline: Sociology and its Philosophical Problems, 

from its Classics to 1945’, Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 15: 

Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, Turner, S., and Risjord, M. (eds), 

Amsterdam: Elsevier; Eliaeson, S., Max Weber’s Methodologies, Cambridge: Polity 

Press, 2002. 

3 Harrington, A., Hermeneutic Dialogue and Social Science: A Critique of Gad-

280 Notes 

amer and Habermas, London, Sage, 2001. Friedman, M., A Parting of the Ways: 

Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 

2000. Turner, S. ‘The Continued Relevance of Weber’s Philosophy of Science’, 

Max Weber Studies, 7.1, forthcoming 2007. 

4 See the glossaries in Hodges, H.A., Wilhelm Dilthey. An Introduction, London: 

Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1944, pp. 157–60; and Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected 

Works, Vol. 1, Makreel R.A., and Rodi, F. (eds), Princeton, NJ: Princeton 

University Press, 1989, pp. 503–9. 

5 See “Max Weber on the Road to Prague”, transcribed and translated by Messer, 

E., Max Weber Studies, 3.2., 2003, pp. 223–6. 

6 ‘Introduction’ to W. Dilthey. Selected Writings, Rickman, H.P. (ed.), Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 12. 

7 Dilthey, W., Introduction to the Human Sciences, Makreel R.A., and Rodi, F. 

(eds), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 56. 

8 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, pp. 57 and 96. 

9 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 57. 


11 Weber takes this line of thought furthest in his research on the industrial psychology 

of workers – see ‘Zur Psychophysik der industrielle Arbeit (1908–09)’, 

in Weber, M., Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik, Tübingen: 

J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1988, pp. 61–255. 

12 It is worth noting the similarity of Simmel’s definition of desire to that of 

Dilthey’s definition of will. On Simmel, see above, pp. 42–3. 

13 Weber, M., ‘Logic of the Cultural Sciences’, Weber, M., The Methodology of the 

Social Sciences, Shils, E.A., and Finch, H.A. (eds/transl.), New York: Free Press, 

1949, p. 124. 


15 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 92. In the sciences of biology 

and zoology in Germany, there had been a tendency – actually stemming from 

Goethe – for life to be defined by an essence, a ‘vital’ life force that was part 

of nature. This naturalism was carried over only too enthusiastically into the 

human and cultural subjects, and allowed the contemporaneous formulation of 

nation and race on biological lines, leading eventually to social Darwinism and 

eugenics. See Whimster, S., ‘Liberal Eugenics and the Vitalist Life Sciences: Incongruities 

in the German Human Sciences in the 19th Century’, History of the 

Human Sciences, 8, 1, 1995, pp. 107–14. It is entirely to Dilthey’s credit that he 

saw what a mistaken approach this was. 



18 Popper, K., The Open Society and its Enemies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 

Press, 1950, and The Poverty of Historicism, London: Routledge and Kegan 

Paul, 1957. What lacks from Popper’s criticism is a distinctive way forward for 

the human sciences, other than a reflection of the correct protocol of the natural 

sciences. 








26 In a letter to his mother (24 January 1886), Weber relates Frensdorff ’s uncanny 

ability to make the student doubt what he at first thought was certain. 

27 See Evans, R.J., In Defence of History, London: Granta, 1997.

Notes 281 

28 Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, Rickman, H.P. (ed./transl.), Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 247. 

29 Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, pp. 248–9. 

30 Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, p. 249. Emphases are Dilthey’s. 

31 Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, p. 256. 


33 See Graf, W.F., ‘Friendship between Experts: Notes on Weber and Troeltsch’, in 

Max Weber and his Contemporaries, Mommsen, W.J., and Osterhammel, J. (eds), 

London: Allen & Unwin, 1987; and Whimster, S. ‘R.H. Tawney, Ernst Troeltsch 

and Max Weber on Puritanism and Capitalism’, Max Weber Studies, 5.2, 2005, 

pp. 297–316. 



36 See Weber’s footnote in his first reply to Rachfahl, where he quotes the Puritans’ 

dictum: ‘We must obey God rather than men’ – a sentiment that was lacking 

in the Lutheran formation of German political culture; The Protestant Ethic 

Debate, Chalcraft, D., and Harrington, A. (eds), Liverpool: Liverpool University 

Press, p. 83. 

37 Modern hermeneutics would insist on a greater separation of explication and the 

different phases of understanding. See Mueller-Vollmer, K., The Hermeneutics 

Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 12 and 45. 



40 For the full exposition of the categories of life, see Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected 

Writings, pp. 231–45. 


42 See the introduction by his editors, Makreel and Rodi, pp. 3–43. 

43 Smith, Woodruff, D. Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany, 1840– 

1920, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. 

44 Marianne Weber, p. 260. See the argument in Hans Henrik Bruun that, even by 

1903, Weber was sceptical of the metaphysical implications of Rickert’s value 

selection position – ‘Weber on Rickert: From Value Relation to Ideal Type’, 

Max Weber Studies, 1.2, 2001, pp. 138–60. Rickert himself acknowledged that 

Weber’s own paths led him away from a Rickertian philosophy of values and 

retained only a pragmatic use of his ‘logic’. For Rickert’s (almost tearful) assessment 

of Weber’s relation to his writings, see the Preface to the 3rd and 4th editions 

of Rickert, H., The Limits of Concept Formation in the Natural Sciences, 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 8–11. 

45 Quoted in Bruun, H.H., Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology, 

Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1972, p.85. 

46 Weber, M., Roscher and Knies. The Logical Problem of Historical Economics, 

New York: Free Press, 1975, pp. 55–73. 

47 Bruun, H.H., Science, p. 89. 

48 An example of this might be Michael Thompson’s Theory of Rubbish, Oxford: 

Oxford University Press, 1979. 

49 Bruun, H.H., Science, pp. 91–2. 

50 This procedure also carries with it a danger of imposing current public values 

on to the past, what Skinner terms retrospective interpretation. In large part, 

historians contemporary to Weber were guilty of this on a massive scale. The 

search for the state in the medieval period, in German nineteenth-century historiography, 

predetermined what was studied and, in part, how it was studied. 

See Whimster, S., ‘Patrimonialism: Its meaning for nineteenth century German 

historians with special reference to Max Weber’s adoption and use of the term 

in his Herrschaftssoziologie’, Doctoral dissertation, London: University of London, 

1976; and Schorn-Schütte, L., Karl Lamprecht. Kulturgeschichtsschreibung

282 Notes 

zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984. 

In contrast, Dilthey’s treatment of the processes of communal and associational 

life are entirely open-ended, and his analysis is explicitly concerned with avoiding 

premature conceptual closure (see above). 

51 Rickert, H., The Limits of Concept Formation in the Natural Sciences, Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1986 (translation based on 4th edn, 1921), 

p. 145. This is a strange title, as its thrust is the possibility and conditions of 

concept formation in the historical sciences. It perhaps acknowledges a book 

that Dilthey explicitly addresses: du Bois-Reymond, E., Über der Grenzen der 

Naturerkennens, Leipzig: Veit, 1872; see Dilthey, Introduction to the Human 

Sciences, p. 61, note 10. 

52 Rickert, p. 146. 

53 Oakes, G., Weber and Rickert, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 69. 

54 Rickert, p. 141. I have changed ‘goods’ to ‘things’ in the translation. 

55 It is no less strange, however, than the work of modern logicians, such as Quine, 

who face the same problem – how do our descriptions of reality stand in relation 

to reality? A technical language is used by ‘logicians’ in the theory of knowledge, 

and this probably sounds strange to social scientists. 

56 Rickert, p. 159, note 29. 


58 Rossi, P., ‘Weber, Dilthey und Husserls Logische Untersuchungen’, in Wagner, 

G., and Zipprian, H., (eds), Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre, Frankfurt a.M.: 

Suhrkamp, 1994, pp. 199–223. 

59 Huff, T.E., Max Weber and the Methodology of the Social Sciences, New Brunswick, 


60 Weber, M., ‘Marginal Utility Theory and the Fundamental Law of Psychophysics’, 

Scheider, L. (transl.), Social Science Quarterly, 56, 1975, pp. 21–36. 

61 Quoted in Huff, T.E., Max Weber and the Methodology of the Social Sciences, p. 

61. 

62 Simmel, G., The Problems of the Philosophy of History, Oakes, G. (ed./transl.), 

New York: Free Press, 1997, p. 94. 

63 Huff, T.E., Max Weber and the Methodology of the Social Sciences, pp. 72–4. 

See also the recent article by Turner, S. ‘The Continued Relevance of Weber’s 

Philosophy of Science’, Max Weber Studies, 7.1, forthcoming 2007. 

64 Die Herausgeber, ‘Geleitwort’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 

XIX, 1, 1904, pp. I–VII. 

65 There is not, however, a direct correspondence between Kant’s triad and Weber’s 

elaboration of value spheres. See Harrington, A., ‘Value spheres and validity’, 

Max Weber Studies, 1.1, 2000, pp. 84–103. 

66 See Rickert, H. ‘Vom System der Werte’, Logos, 4, 1913, pp. 295–327. 

67 Habermas, J., Knowledge and Human Interests, London: Heinemann, 1972. 

Habermas’ position assumes, ‘contra’ Dilthey, the opposition of science and 

hermeneutics. For Habermas, the latter rests on the transcendental possibilities 

of intersubjectivity. Dilthey, in contrast, wanted to create a science of mental life 

but one made possible by a human science based on hermeneutics. 

68 Bruun, H.H., Science, p. 79. 

69 It is unclear whether Weber is saying that the world out there is irrational or 

that mankind is placed in an irrational stance because it has no secure basis for 

overcoming the divide. The first position is not strictly logical for, if you cannot 

know the nature of reality, how can one say it is an irrational chaos. Bruun has 

discussed this issue in relation to Dieter Henrich’s Kantian and perceptual attitude 

to reality and Tenbruck’s ontological assumption of the irrationality of the 

world – Science, pp. 140–4. 

70 ‘The Vocation of Science’, EW, pp. 283–7.

Notes 283 

71 We have seen this with Dilthey, but it is a position firmly asserted by Spinoza, 

whose influence over German thought at the time was considerable. 

72 EW, pp. 359–404. 

73 Weber, M., The Methodology of the Social Sciences, Shils, E.A., and Finch, H.A. 

(eds/transl.), New York: Free Press, 1949. 

74 Hollis, M., ‘Two Models’, in Models of Man, Philosophical Thoughts on Social 

Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. 

75 Durkheim said this in Suicide, and Weber in ‘The Logic of the Cultural Sciences’, 

The Methodology of the Social Sciences, pp. 126–8. 

76 In a Weberian world of infinite complexity, there would be little sense in pursuing 

a long counterfactual train of thought, as if a historical event, such as the 

Russian Revolution, had not happened. Weber is concerned with actual events 

and their attribution back to causes. 

77 See Turner, S.P., and Factor, R.A., Max Weber. Lawyer as Social Thinker, London: 

Routledge, 1994. Wagner, G. and Zipprian, H. ‘The Problem of Reference 

in Max Weber’s Theory of Causal Explanation’, Human Studies, 9, 1986, pp. 

21–42. 

78 Strauss, A., and Corbin, J., Basics of Qualitative Research. Grounded Theory 

Procedures and Techniques, Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990. On sensitizing concepts, 

see Atkinson, P., and Hammersley, M., Ethnography. Principles in Practice, 

London: Routledge, 1995. 


1 Lehmann, H. ‘Weber’s Use of Scholarly Praise and Scholarly Criticism in The 

Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism’, Max Weber Studies, 5.2, 2005, 

pp. 233–4. 

2 Quoted in The Protestant Ethic Debate, Max Weber’s Replies to his Critics, 

1907–1910, Chalcraft, D.J., and Harrington, A. (eds), Harrington, A., and 

Shields, M. (transl.), Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001, p. 27. 

3 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, Baehr, P., 

and Wells, G. (eds/transl.), London: Penguin, 2002, p. 26. 

4 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, pp. 

264–5. 

5 Troeltsch, E., Protestantism and Progress. A Historical Study of the Relation of 

Protestantism to the Modern World, Montgomery, W. (transl.), London: William 

& Norgate, 1912. 

6 Kippenberg, H., ‘Einleitung’ to Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Religiöse Gemeinschaften, 

MWG I/22-2, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001, pp. 7–8. 

7 PE Debate, p. 118. 

8 PE Debate, p. 131. 

9 Reference to Georg Siebeck. 

10 Peter Ghosh argues that capitalism ‘was the central element in Weber’s conception 

of modernity’ in the period from 1890 to around 1907–8. Thereafter 

‘capitalism was replaced as a central focus by rationality and rationalization. As 

a result Weber’s central conceptual reading of modernity would now be routed 

through bureaucracy and not capitalism, though he always supposed that the 

two were closely linked.’ Ghosh, P., ‘Not the Protestant Ethic? Max Weber at St 

Louis’, History of European Ideas, 31, 2005, p. 382. 

11 Briefe, MWG II/5, 26 December 1907, p. 426. 

12 Quoted in ‘Introduction’ by Roth, G., in Weber, M., Economy and Society, New 

York: Bedminster Press, 1968, p. lxiv. 

13 M.I. Finley, letter to F. Hinchelheim, 17 November 1947, quoted in Nafissi, M., 

Ancient Athens and Modern Ideology. Value, Theory and Evidence in Historical

284 Notes 

Sciences. Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley, London: Institute of Classical 

Studies, 2005, p. 213. 

14 The English translation rather garbles its title and subheadings. The Agrarian Sociology 

of Ancient Civilizations, Franks, R.I. (transl.), London: New Left Books, 

1976. 

15 Roth, Introduction, p. xlv. 

16 See Deininger, J., MWG I/6, p. 139. 

17 Weber opens the section on Mesopotamia with this paragraph: ‘Cuneiform 

scholars have astonishing achievements to their credit, but nevertheless the 

sources – including the Code of Hammurabi – have not yet been made available 

for interpretation by non-specialists, The scholar who has not mastered the field 

and must depend on translated texts cannot therefore reach definite conclusions 

regarding the Mesopotamia economy. Furthermore it is precisely the texts 

most important for legal and social history which often elude interpretation (AS, 

p. 83). 

18 Colognesi, L.C., Max Weber und die Wirtschaft der Antike, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck 

und Ruprecht, 2004. Bruhns, H., ‘Max Weber’s “Basic Concepts” in the 

Context of his Studies in Economic History’, Max Weber Studies, Beiheft 1, 2006, 

pp. 33–69. Deininger, J, ‘Einleitung’, Zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte des 

Altertums. Schriften 1896–1909, MWG I/6, 2006. Nafissi, M., Ancient Athens 

and Modern Ideology. Value Theory and Evidence in Historical Sciences. Max 

Weber, Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley, London: Institute of Classical Studies, 

2005. 

19 Bücher, C., Industrial Evolution, (trans S. Morley Wickett), London: George 

Bell, 1901, pp. 83–149. 

20 Nafissi, p. 44. 

21 Quoted in Nafissi, pp. 45–7. 

22 Quoted in Nafissi, p. 37. 

23 See Chapter 8. 

24 Sombart, W., ‘Der kapitalistische Unternehmer’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft 

und Sozialpolitik, XXIX, 1909, pp. 689–758. 

25 See EW, pp. 35–54. 

26 See Nippel, W., ‘Einleitung’ to Die Stadt, MWG, I, 22-5, 1999, pp. 12–13. 

27 Mommsen, W.J., ‘Max Weber’s “Grand Sociology”: The Origins and Composition 

of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Soziologie’, History and Theory, 39, 2000, 

p. 366. 

28 Orihara, H., ‘From “A Torso with a Wrong Head” to “Five Disjointed Body-Parts 

without a Head”: A Critique of the Editorial Policy for Max Weber Gesamtausgabe 

I/22’, Max Weber Studies, 3.2, 2003, pp. 133–68. Baier, H., Lepsius, M.R, 

Mommsen, W.J., and Schluchter, W., ‘Overview of the Text of Economy and 

Society by the Editors of Gesamtausgabe’, Harrington, A. (transl.), Max Weber 

Studies, 1.1, 2000, pp. 104–14. 

29 Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, I. Abteilung, Wirtschaft und Wirtschaftswissenschaft, 

brought to press by Bücher, K., Schumpeter, J., and Freiherrn von Wieser, 

Fr., Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1914, p. vii. 

30 The outline of materials for the ‘Handbuch der politischen Ökonomie’, which 

comes from the Siebeck archive, is reprinted in Briefe, MWG, II/6, pp. 766–74. 

31 The editorial report on this text in the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe reckons it to 

have been written in 1910, MWG, I, 22-1, p. 108. 

32 Briefe, MWG, II/8, pp. 449–50. 

33 Weber, Marianne, Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung. Eine Einführung, 

Tübingen: Mohr, 1907. On the reciprocal influences of Max and Marianne 

Weber, see Lichtblau, K., ‘Die Bedeutung von “Ehefrau und Mutter in der 

Rechtsentwicklung” für das Werk Max Webers’, in Marianne Weber. Beiträge zu

Notes 285 

Werk und Person, Meurer, B. (ed.), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004, pp. 208–9; 

and Editorial Report to ‘Hausverband, Sippe und Nachbarschaft’, MWG, I/22- 

1, pp. 282–90. Roth had already noted the link in 1968, see his Introduction, 

ES, p. lxvii. 



35 Scaff, L.A., Fleeing the Iron Cage. Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought 

of Max Weber, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989, p. 141. 

36 Scaff, p. 142. 

37 Scaff, p. 141. 

38 See Whimster, S., ‘The Secular Ethic and the Culture of Modernism’, in Max 

Weber, Rationality and Modernity, Whimster, S., and Lash, S. (eds), London: 

Allen & Unwin, 1987, pp. 278–80. 

39 Quoted in Käsler, D., Max Weber. An Introduction to his Life and Work, Cambridge: 

Polity, 1988, p. 188. 

40 Quoted in Käsler, p. 190. 

41 Quoted in Scaff, pp. 143–4. Letter to Roberto Michels, 9 November 1912. 

42 For a translation of the MWG views, see ‘Overview of Economy and Society by 

the Editors’, p. 104–14. 

43 Orihara, pp. 133–68. 

44 ‘Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology, Graber, E.E. (transl.), Sociological 

Quarterly, 22.2, 1981, p. 179. 


1 Briefe, MWG, II/8, pp. 449–50. 

2 Schmidt-Glintzer, MWG I/19, p. 31–4. 

3 Quoted by Schmidt-Glintzer, MWG I/19, p. 40. 

4 Reproduced in MWG, I/19, pp. 28–9. 

5 Quoted by Schmidt-Glintzer, MWG I/19, p. 40. 

6 The American translations were scattered over different books. The situation 

is discussed in Whimster, S., ‘Translator’s Note on Weber’s Introduction to the 

Economic Ethics of the World Religions, Max Weber Studies, 3.1, 2002, pp. 

74–98. 

7 A theme given recent prominence by Shlomo Eisenstadt. 

8 Schluchter, W., Rationalism, Religion and Domination. A Weberian Perspective, 

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 411–61. 

9 Discussion of pre-animism, magic and religion in SocRel (pp. 3–10) are to be 

found in the ‘Introduction’ (to the Economic Ethics of the World Religions) 

(EW, pp. 66–9); likewise exemplary prophecy (SocRel, p. 24) in the ‘Introduction’ 

(EW, pp. 73–4), theodicy (SocRel, pp. 138–140) in ‘Introduction (EW, pp. 

62–4), carriers of religion (SocRel, pp. 80–94) in ‘Introduction’ (EW, pp. 57–8 

and 71–2), and virtuosi (SocRel, p. 163) in ‘Introduction’ (EW, pp. 76–7). Chapters 

13 and 14 of the Sociology of Religion correspond to the main argument and 

its divisions of the ‘Intermediate Reflections’ (EW, pp. 215–44). 

10 Kippenberg, H., ‘Einleitung’ to Religiöse Gemeinschaften, MWG, I/22-2, p. 4. 

11 The Social Science Encyclopaedia, Kuper, A., and Kuper, J. (eds), London: 

Routledge, 1985, p. 871. 

12 The Social Science Encyclopaedia, p. 698. 

13 Wellhausen, J., Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1883. 

See Kippenberg, MWG I/22-2, p. 41. 

14 See Essential Weber, pp. 35–54. 

15 Kippenberg, MWG I/22-2, p. 31. 

16 Siebeck, H., Lehrbuch der Religionsphilosophie, Freiburg: Mohr Siebeck, 1893.

286 Notes 

17 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., Theories of Primitive Religion, Oxford: Oxford University 

Press, 1965, Ch. 2. 

18 Macrae, D.G., Max Weber, London: Fontana, 1974, pp. 80–1. 

19 Marett, R.R., The Threshold of Religion, London: Methuen, 1909. See the discussion 

in Kippenberg, MWG, I/22-2, p. 47. 

20 Windelband, W., ‘Das Heilige’, in Präludien, Aufsätze und Reden zur Einleitung 

in die Philosophie, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1907. 

21 Cat, p. 154. 

22 Tracing Husserl in Weber is not an easy task, but Weber had read his Logische 

Untersuchungen. In the context of Hugo Münsterberg’s psychological approach 

to understanding, Weber wrote, ‘See also Husserl, Logical Investigations, Appendix 

to Volume II, p. 703. He contests the view that inner experience possesses a 

specific “certainty” and a higher “ontological status”.’ Weber, M., Roscher and 

Knies, The Logical Problems of Historical Economics, Oakes, G. (transl.), New 

York: Free Press, 1975, p. 261. 

23 Gerth and Mills translated, presumably wittingly in the case of Hans Gerth, 

‘Heilsgüter’ as ‘cultural values’ – more homage to Rickert than confronting 

Weber. 

24 Yair, G. and Soyer, M., ‘The Golem myth in German thought’, Max Weber Studies, 

6.2, 2006, pp. 231–55. 

25 Weber’s quotes; it was Dilthey’s term. 

26 See Jenkins, R., ‘Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max 

Weber at the Millennium’, Max Weber Studies, 1.1, 2000, pp. 11–32. 

27 EW, pp. 220–41. 

28 EW, pp. 263 and 266. 

29 EW, pp. 274 and 277. 

30 See the discussion in Zubaida, S., ‘Weber and the Islamic City’, Max Weber Studies, 

6.1, 2006, pp. 111–18. 

31 See the discussion in EW, pp. 17–18. 

32 Quoted in Rickman, H.P., Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 1976, p. 44. 

33 Runciman, W.G., ‘Was Max Weber a Selectionist in Spite of Himself?’, Journal of 

Classical Sociology, 1.1, 2001, pp. 13–32; ‘Not Elective but Selective Affinities’, 

Journal of Classical Sociology, 5.2, 2005, pp. 175–87; and ‘Puritan American 

Capitalists and Evolutionary Game Theory’, Max Weber Studies, 5.2, 2005, pp. 

281–96. 

34 Runciman, W.G., ‘Not Elective but Selective Affinities’, pp. 180–3. 

35 Lepsius, M.R., ‘Eigenart und Potenzial des Weber-Paradigmas’ in Das Weber- 

Paradigma, Albert, G., Bienfait, A., Sigmund, S., Wendt, C. (eds), Tübingen: 

Mohr Siebeck, 2003, pp. 32–41. 


1 Weiss, J., ‘On the Irreversibility of Western Rationalization and Max Weber’s 

Alleged Fatalism’, in Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, Whimster, S., and 

Lash, S. (eds), London: Allen & Unwin, 1987, pp. 154–63. 

2 Innis, H.A., The Fur Trade of Canada, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1927; 

The Cod Fisheries: the History of an International-economy, New Haven, CT: 

Yale University Press, 1940. 

3 Bellah, R.N., ‘What is Axial about the Axial Age?’, Archives Européennes de 

Sociologie, 46, 1, 2005, pp. 69–89. 

4 Innis, H.A., Empire and Communications, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 

2nd rev. edn, 1972, p. 10. 

5 Innis, Empire and Communication, p. 118.

Notes 287 

6 Quoted in Fisher, H.A.L., A History of Europe, London: Edward Arnold, 1936, 

p. 490. 

7 Innis, Empire and Communication, p. 144. 

8 Nicolson, A., Power and Glory. Jacobean England and the Making of the King 

James Bible, London: HarperCollins, 2003, p. 122–3. 

9 Nicolson, p. 70. 

10 I have sought to explain this in ‘Translator’s Note on Weber’s “Introduction to 

the Economic Ethics of the World Religions” ’, Max Weber Studies, 3/1, 2002, 

pp. 74–98. 

11 Innis, Empire and Communications, pp. 139 and 165. 

12 Trevor-Roper, H.R.‚ Religion, The Reformation and Social Change and other 

Essays, London: Macmillan, 1967, pp. 1–45. 

13 Jaspers, K., Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, Frankfurt: Fischer, 1955, p. 

14. 

14 Jaspers, p. 15. 

15 Eisenstadt, S.N., Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, vol. 2, 

Leiden: Brill, 2003, p. 575. 

16 Quoted in Bellah, p. 72. 

17 Eisenstadt, p. 535–6. 

18 Eisenstadt, p. 643. 

19 Tawney, R.H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. A Historical Study, London: 

John Murray, 1926. See also Whimster, S., ‘R.H. Tawney, Ernst Troeltsch, and 

Max Weber on Puritanism and Capitalism’, Max Weber Studies, 5.2, 2005, pp. 

297–316. 



22 Quoted in Eisenstadt, p. 811. 

23 Bellah, pp. 170–1. 

24 The Religion of China. Confucianism and Taoism, Gerth, H.H. (ed./transl.) New 

York: Free Press, 1951; The Religion of India. The Sociology of Hinduism and 

Buddhism, Gerth, H.H., Martindale, D. (eds/transl.), New York: Free Press, 

1958. 

25 See FMW, pp. 293–4. 

26 ‘Prefatory Remarks’, p. 26 – translation modified. 

27 Runciman, W.G., ‘Was Max Weber a Selectionist in Spite of Himself?’, Journal of 

Classical Sociology, 1.1, 2001, pp. 13–32; ‘Not Elective but Selective Affinities’, 

Journal of Classical Sociology, 5.2, 2005, pp. 175–87; and ‘Puritan American 

Capitalists and Evolutionary Game Theory’, Max Weber Studies, 5.2, 2005, pp. 

281–96. 

28 See the discussion in Scaff, L., ‘The Creation of the Sacred Text. Talcott Parsons 

translates: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, Max Weber Studies, 

5.2, p. 220. The quote used is taken from the manuscript version of Parsons’ 

translation of PESC. 

29 Schluchter, W., ‘Weber’s Sociology of Rationalism and Religious Rejections of 

the World’, in Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, Whimster, S., and Lash, 

S.(eds), London: Allen & Unwin, 1987, p. 112. 


1 Sheehan, J.J. German History. 1770–1886, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 

1989, pp. 385–6. 

2 See Roth, G., Max Webers deutsch-englische Familiengeschichte 1820–1950 mit 

Briefen und Dokumenten, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001, p. 210. 

3 For a fuller exploration of the discourses being articulated in Frankfurt, see

288 Notes 

Vick, B., Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliament and National Identity, 

Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2002. 

4 See Barraclough, G., The Origins of Modern Germany, Oxford: Blackwell, 1946, 

p. 415; Namier, L. 1848. The Revolution of the Intellectuals, Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, pp. 24–33. 

5 Barraclough, p. 418. 

6 Barraclough, p. 424. 

7 Baumgarten, H., Hermann Baumgarten: Der deutsche Liberalismus. Eine Selbstkritik, 

Birke, A.M. (ed.), Frankfurt: Ullstein, pp. 14–15. 

8 Mommsen, W.J., Max Weber and German Politics 1890–1920, Chicago: Chicago 

University Press, 1984, pp. 148-53. 

9 Roth, G., ‘Max Weber’s Articles on German Agriculture and Industry in the 

Encyclopedia Americana (1906/7) and their Political Context’, Max Weber Studies, 

6.2., 2006, pp. 185–8; on Germany as a world power, see Roth, Max Webers 

deutsch-englische Familiengeschichte, pp. 25–57. 

10 See Wolfgang Mommsen’s assessment of this position in his Max Weber and 

German Politics, pp. 64–7 

11 Caygill, H., A Kant Dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, p. 314. 

12 See his lecture ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in EW, p. 269. 

13 Graf, F.W., ‘Ernst Troeltsch’s Evaluation of Max and Alfred Weber: Introduction 

and Translation of Letter by Ernst Troeltsch to Heinrich Dietzel’, Max Weber 

Studies, 4.1, 2001, pp. 101–8. 

14 This viewpoint is most strongly presented in Weber’s inaugural lecture at 

Freiburg in 1895: ‘The national state and economic policy’, Reading Weber, 

Tribe, K. (ed.), London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 188–209. 

15 As Wolfgang Mommsen points out he shared something of Baumgarten’s pessimism 

as well as Burckhardt’s view of politics. See Mommsen, Max Weber and 

German Politics, pp. 47–8. 

16 Poggi, G., Forms of Power, Cambridge: Polity, 2001, p. 16. 

17 EW, p. 182. 

18 Poggi, p. 19. 

19 Mann, M., The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1, Cambridge, Cambridge University 

Press, 1986, pp. 22–30. 

20 Poggi, p. 18. 

21 Hanke, E., ‘Einleitung’, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen 

Ordnungen und Mächte. Nachlass, MWG, I, 22–4, Herrschaft, 

Hanke, E. (ed.) with Kroll, T., Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2005, p. 

51. 

22 David Beetham provided a more balanced analysis of power and the role of 

parliament in Weber’s writings. See his Max Weber and the Theory of Modern 

Politics, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1985. 

23 Hennis, W., Max Weber und Thukydides. Nachträge zur Biographie des Werks, 

Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003, p. 163. 

24 Hanke, MWG, I/22-4, pp. 90–1. 

25 Hanke, MWG, I/ 22-4, pp. 45–6. 

26 Hanke, MWG, I/ 22-4, p. 53. 

27 See Mommsen, W.J., The Age of Bureaucracy. Perspectives on the Political Sociology 

of Max Weber, Oxford: Blackwell, 1974. 

28 On these themes, see Beetham, D., Democracy under Blair. A Democratic Audit 

of the United Kingdom, London: Politico, 2002, also his discussion in Max Weber 

and Theory of Modern Politics, p. 115; Hennessy, P., Rulers and Servants of the 

State. The Blair Style of Government, 1977–2004, London: Office for Public 

Management, 2004. 

29 Palonen, K., Politics, Rhetoric and Conceptual History, Jyväskulä: Julkaisuja Pub-

Notes 289 

lications, 1994; also Das ‘Webersche Moment’. Zur Kontingenz des Politischen, 

Wiesbaden: Westdeutsche Verlag, 1998. 

30 Poggi, pp. 15–28. 


1 Bellah, R.N., ‘What is Axial about the Axial Age?’ Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 

46, 1, 2005, pp. 69–89. 

2 In the United States, the most accomplished practitioner of a Weberian approach 

was Reinhard Bendix in a series of substantive studies. For an exemplary instance, 

see his Work and Authority in Industry. Ideologies of Management in the 

Course of Industrialization, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974. 

3 Rex, J., and Moore, R., Race, Community and Conflict: A Study of Sparkbrook, 

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. 

4 Dench, G., Gavron, K., and Young, M., The New East End. Kinship, Race and 

Conflict, London: Profile Books, 2006. 

5 See Roth, G., ES, p. xciv. 

6 Weber wrote to Hermann Kantorowicz in December 1913. The latter had complained 

of being unable to understand his ‘Some Categories of Interpretative Sociology’. 

Weber replied how ‘miserably he must have formulated’ the essay. ‘It is 

an attempt to eliminate all “organicist”, Stammlerian superempirical “valid” (= 

the normatively valid) and to understand the “sociological theory of the state” 

(“Staatslehre”) as a theory of the purely empirical typical human action – in my 

view the only way – and the individual categories are questions of practicality 

(‘Zweckmäßigkeitsfragen’)’ (MWG, II/8, pp. 442–3). Whether Kantorowicz was 

enlightened by this reply is not known. 

7 On archaic kingship, see Bellah. 

8 Hanke, E., MWG, I/22-4, p. 21. 

9 A ‘Verband’ and associative behaviour should probably not be taken to belong 

to the same sort of social relationships. Much of modern organizational life is 

instrumentally rational, but it is instructive to think of its controlling body as 

operating according to the rules of a clique or gang bound by norms of face-toface 

camaraderie. 

10 Sen, A., Poverty and Famines. An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Oxford: 

Clarendon, 1981. 

11 Liefmann, R., Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftlehre, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags- 

Anstalt, Vol. 1, 1917, Vol. 2, 1919. 

12 Liefmann, Vol. 1, p. 15: ‘Max Weber, among others, in his essay “The objectivity 

of knowledge in social science and social policy” in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft 

und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 19, 1904, p. 59ff, puts forward the proposition 

that the knowledge value (‘Erkenntniswert’) of economic theory is small.’ 

13 ‘Doch nun zum Einzeln. (Seite 15) Ich soll behaupten der Erkenntniswert der 

Theorie sei “gering”. Wo wäre das geschehen? Die Theorie schafft Idealtypen 

und diese Leistung ist gerade bei mir die unentbehrlichste. Dass Soziologie und 

Wirtschaftsgeschichte Theorie nie ersetzen ist eine meiner Grundüberzeugungen. 

Mich interessieren (nach Ihnen Seite 17) mehr die “spezielle” Zusammenhänge? 

Ja, wenn man die Frage: Warum nur im Okzident rationaler (Rentabilitäts-) 

Kapitalismus entstanden ist, einen “speziellen” Zusammenhang nennt! Es muss 

doch auch Leute geben, die dieser Frage nachgehen. Hierfür sind nun einmal 

höchst paradoxe Zusammenhänge massgebend gewesen. Moderne Wirtschaft 

setzt sich nur den rationalen d.h. in seinen Funktionen berechenbaren kalkulierbaren 

Staat, sondern rationale Technik (Wissenschaft) und eine bestimmte Art 

rationaler Lebensführung voraus. Warum wäre sonst der moderne Kapitalismus 

nich in China entstanden? Er hatter viele Jahrhtausende Zeit dazu! Getauscht

290 Notes 

worden ist dort seit Jahrtausenden, Papiergeld gab es vor 1100 Jahren, Münzen 

vor 2600 Jahren. Dass ich irgendwo bestritten hätte, dass man Tauschvorgänge 

anders als aus den Erwägungen der Einzelnen bestimmen könne, ist mir unbewusst 

(Seite 37).’ Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Rep. 92, 

Weber, Nr. 30, Bd. 8, Aufnahme 78. 

14 Swedberg, R., Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology, Princeton, NJ: 

Princeton University Press, 1998. 

15 Compare p. 172 of Schumpeter, J., Economic Doctrine and Method, London: 

George Allen and Unwin, 1954, with pp. 818–19 of Schumpeter, J., History of 

Economic Analysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954. See Swedberg, pp. 

158–62. 

16 Talcott Parsons made a crucial translation slip here, rendering ‘Brennstoff ’ as 

‘coal’ rather than ‘fossil fuel’.

Index 

Agevall, Ola 273 

agrarian question 13–19 

Alcuin 199 

Alfonso of Liguori 68 

Althusius 203 

anthropology 71 

Archimedes 204 

Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und 

Sozialpolitik 7, 30, 45, 74, 100–1, 

105, 149, 185, 250 

Aristotle 71, 85 

Aron, Raymond 12 

asceticism 5, 41, 69, 181 

Ashoka 208 

Augustine, St, of Hippo 65 

Barraclough, Geoffrey 222 

Baumgarten, Hermann 223, 234 

Baxter, Richard 53, 54, 62, 64, 66, 70, 

202 

Bayley, Bishop 53, 62 

Beetham, David 288 

Bellah, Robert 211, 248, 252 

Bendix, Reinhard 9, 289 

Bennett, Alan 193 

Bismarck, Otto von 16, 220, 222–3, 

242 

Blair, Anthony 245 

Bloch, Maurice 168 

Bobbio, Norbert 229 

Boccaccio 88 

Bohm-Bäwerk, Eugen von 24–5, 268 

Borchardt, Knut 22 

Bourdieu, Pierre 266 

Brahmanism 171, 202 

Brandt, Willi 225 

Braun, Heinrich 100 

Braverman, Harry 86 

Brentano, Lujo 29–31, 32, 45, 49 

Breuer, Stefan 237–40 

Bruhns, Hinnerk 126, 273 

Bruun, Hans Henrik 103, 281 

Buber, Martin 165 

Bücher, Karl 44, 127–9, 131, 141, 142, 

146, 159, 248, 260–1 

Buddha 204, 206 

Buddhism 7, 175, 182 

Bunyan, John 53, 59–62, 68, 70, 217 

bureaucracy 9, 244 

Caesar, Julius 99 

Caesarism 223, 244–6 

calling 56–7 

Calvin, Jean 86, 175, 201 

Calvinism 36–7, 38, 63–70, 190, 

193–4, 212 

capitalism 6, 20, 31–40, 55, 127–8 

Caprivi, Leo von 16 

Cassiodorus 199 

causation 7, 42, 108, 110, 123, 188–9, 

194–5, 248, 251, 268–9 

Chalcraft, David 119 

charisma 9, 236, 238, 240, 243, 244, 

266 

Charlemagne 199 

Charles I of England 69 

Churchill, Winston 243 

class 227–31 

Cleon 241–2 

Coleman, James 266 

Colliot-Thélène, Catherine 2, 12 

Colognesi, Luigi 126 

commercial partnerships 21–22 

communication 196–203

292 Index 

Comte, Auguste 77, 78, 80, 81, 91, 

153, 166, 190, 198 

Confucianism 4, 7, 135, 171, 185, 212, 

215, 217 

Confucius 204, 206 

Conrad, J. 125 

Constantine 208 

Cromwell, Oliver 194–5, 241 

cults 165–170 

Dante 57–8 

Davidson, Donald 100 

Dawe, Alan 12 

Dawkins, Richard 190, 216 

de Gaulle, General 225 

Deininger, Jürgen 127 

demagogue 241–6 

democracy 237–40; leadership 

democracy 240–6 

Demosthenes 125 

Dench, Geoff 249 

Dent, Arthur 62 

Derrida, Jacques 74 

Descartes 203 

Dilthey, Wilhelm 7, 53–4, 74, 75, 

76–83, 92, 95–9, 107, 109, 151, 

152, 153, 182, 188, 251, 265 

Diocletian 128 

disenchantment 9, 182 

division of labour 260–1 

Döllinger, Johann von 68 

Dostoyevsky 184 

Dowden, Edward 59–63, 67, 72 

Durkheim, Emile 49, 53, 73, 77, 78, 

109–110, 119, 177, 192, 252 

Ebbinghaus, H. 98 

Eisenhower, Dwight D. 233 

Eisenstadt, S. N. 8, 194, 206–210, 269 

elective affinity 120–2, 190 

Elijah 204 

elite 243, 246 

energy 42–3 

Engels, Friedrich 31, 92 

Ephialtes 241 

Erasmus 200, 202–3 

ethnography 178 

Evans, R.J. 280 

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 177 

evolutionary theory 190–1 

Fallenstein, Georg Friedrich 220–1 

Fechner, G. 91 

Feuerbach 110 

Fichte, J. G. 74, 279 

Finch, Henry A. 105 

Finley, Moses 125 

Fischer, Karl 49, 118–20, 202 

Flacius 86 

Franklin, Benjamin 37, 54–6, 67, 70, 

117, 119, 190 

Frazer, James George 166–7, 173 

Frensdorff, Ferdinand 83 

frenzy 167 

Freund, Julien 9, 12 

Friedman, Michael 75 

Froben, John 200 

Fugger, Anton 275 

Fugger, Jacob 38, 52, 54, 56 

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 74 

Gandhi, Mahatma 211 

Gavron, Kate 249 

Gellner, Ernest 229 

George, Stefan 184 

Gerhard, Paul 63 

German Sociological Society 147–50 

Gerth, Hans H. 286 

Gervinus 221–3 

Ghosh, Peter 59, 123 

Giddens, Anthony 12, 234 

Gierke, Otto von 253 

Goethe 88, 279, 280 

Goffman, Erving 86 

Goldscheid, Rudolf 149 

Goldschmidt, Levin 22 

Goltz, Freiherr von der 124 

Gothein, Eberhard 37, 275 

Gottl, Ottlilienfeld 143, 151 

Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm 271, 281 

Greenfeld, Liah 209 

Grimm, brothers 221 

Habermas, Jürgen 102, 191, 282 

Haeckel, Ernst 91 

Hammurabi 126 

Hanke, Edith 232–6, 240 

Harnack, Adolf 86 

Harrington, Austin 75, 282 

Hedstrom, Peter 51 

Hegel 181, 190 

Heidegger 84 

Hennessy, Peter 288 

Hennis, Wilhelm 9, 71, 237 

Henrich, Dieter 282 

Herder 175, 217 

Herkner, Heinrich 143 

hermeneutics 54–9, 66, 83–90, 96, 

97–8, 111, 152 

Herrenhuter 44, 111

Hettner, A. 142 

heuristics 111 

Heuss, Alfred 124, 125 

Hindenberg, Paul 174 

Hinduism 7, 171, 182 

historicism 175, 181 

Hitler 225 

Hobbes 234 

Hollis, Martin 109 

Homer 204 

Hübinger, Gangolf 202 

Huff, Toby 97, 99–100 

Hume, David 88–9, 107 

Husserl, Edmund 75, 109, 151, 180, 

286 

ideal types 111–2, 131–4, 247, 264–6 

Innis, Harold 8, 194, 196–8, 252 

instrumental rationality 9 

intellectuals 182–5 

Isaiah 204 

Islam 186, 202, 213 

Jaffé, Edgar 30, 100, 160 

James I of England 53, 69 

Jaspers, Karl 152, 194, 204–6, 248, 269 

Jellinek, Georg 233 

Jenkins, Richard 286 

Jeremiah 204 

Jesus ben Sirach 56, 118 

Jesus of Nazareth 241 

Jhering 82 

Judaism 7 

Kaelber, Lutz 21 

Kant, Immanuel 88–9, 91, 102, 107, 

224, 235 

Kantorowicz, Hermann 165, 289 

Kautsky, Karl 32, 92 

Keller, Gottfried 68 

Kippenberg, Hans 7, 122, 164–6, 172, 

175, 179, 181 

Knapp, Georg Friedrich 256 

Knies, Karl 92, 97, 175, 181 

Kuhn, Thomas 114, 266 

Kuper, Adam 166 

Kürnberger, Ferdinand 55–6 

Lamprecht, Karl 91, 124, 202 

Lao-Tse 204 

Lask, Emil 89, 151 

leadership democracy 8 

Lederer, Emil 160 

legitimacy 9, 235–40 

Index 293 

legitimation 234 

Lehmann, Hartmut 29, 45, 49, 275 

Lenger, Friedrich 276 

Lenin 184 

Lennon, John 54 

Lepsius, M. Rainer 5, 72, 139, 192 

Lexis, W. 125 

Liebersohn, Harry 57 

Liefmann, Robert 263–4, 266 

Lie-Tsi 204 

life 71, 90, 115; philosophy of 95, 99 

life conduct 9, 71, 180–1, 186, 189 

Lindenlaub, Dieter 33, 275 

Lloyd George 242–3 

Locke, John 88–9, 234 

Löwith, Karl 9 

Luther, Martin 52, 54, 56–7, 63, 68, 

70, 118, 119, 200 

McCluhan, Marshall 197 

MacCulloch, Diarmaid 64 

Machiavelli, Niccolò 68, 71, 203, 225 

MacKinnon, Malcolm H. 65–6 

Macrae, Donald 178 

magic 164–78, 182, 198 

Mann, Heinrich 235 

Mann, Michael 8, 229–31, 269 

Marett, Robert 166, 178 

Marx, Karl 31, 32, 33, 44, 45, 110, 

129, 187, 197 

Marxism 2, 30, 45, 92, 110, 183 

Marxist sociology 11 

Max Weber Gesamtausgabe 2, 3, 7 

mediation 42–3 

Menger, Carl 24–5, 75, 255, 268 

Methodism 210 

methodology 7, 74–5, 87, 264 

Meyer, Eduard 127, 129, 242 

Michels, Roberto 149, 234 

Mill, J.S. 78, 80, 81, 118, 134–5, 153, 

233 

Mills, C. Wright 233, 246 

Milton, John 57–9, 63 

Mises, Ludwig von 256 

modernity 5, 9 

Mohl, Robert von 82 

Mombert, P. 142 

Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 9, 27, 140, 

143, 233 

money 41–3, 45–6 

monism 91–2 

Montaigne 203 

Moore, Robert 249 

Momigliano, Arnoldo 206

294 Index 

monasticism 198–200 

money 41–2, 44, 46, 257 

Mosca, Gaetano 233–4 

Mozi 204 

multiple causation 7–8 

multiple modernities 8, 194, 206–12 

Münsterberg, Hugo 286 

Mussolini 225 

Nafissi, Mohammad 127 

Napoleon I 220–2, 240 

Napoleon III 240 

national-economy 5–6, 19–28, 73, 

100–1 

Nau, Heino 22 

Naumann, Friedrich 32 

Nelson, Benjamin 1–2, 4, 9, 234 

Nicolson, Adam 201 

Niebuhr, Barthold Georg 83 

Nielson, Donald, A. 70 

Nietzsche, Friedrich 75, 95, 108, 187, 

265 

Nippel, Wilfried 139 

Nipperdey, Thomas 45 

Northcliffe, Lord 243 

objectivism 105 

objectivity 100–9 

Occident 212–3, 219 

oikos 127–31, 260 

Oldenberg, K. 142 

Olivétan, Pierre Robert 201 

Orihara, Hiroshi 140, 150 

Ostwald, Wilhelm 92 

Paciola, Luca 36 

Palonen, Kari 245 

Palyi, Melchior 237 

Parmenides 204 

Parsons, Talcott 36, 58, 67, 191, 233, 

266 

patriarchal estates 18 

patrimonialism 199–200 

Pattison, Mark 200 

Paul, St 56, 167 

Pericles 241–2, 245 

Peter, St 167 

Petty, Sir William 119 

phenomenology 89 

Philippovich, Eugen von 141, 143, 145 

Phillip II of Spain 217 

Plato 83, 204 

Poggi, Gianfranco 8, 229–30, 245 

Popper, Karl 80, 114, 195 

power 8–9, 221 

pragmatism 89 

progress of knowledge 112–3 

property 258 

psychologism 91, 98, 255 

Pufendorf 203 

Puritanism 2, 43–4, 59–63, 69–70, 135, 

194–5, 201, 212, 218–9 

Quakerism 36, 44 

Rachfahl, Felix 49, 119–120, 123–4, 

202 

Ranke, Leopold von 83 

rationalism 2, 189, 213–219, 248; 

economic 36, 40, 41 

rationalization 9, 170 

Reformation 64–5, 122 

regulation 255 

Rex, John 249 

rhetoric 67–8, 71 

Rickert, Heinrich 7, 51, 53, 74, 90, 

92–7, 107, 109, 114, 151, 164, 176, 

182, 187, 265 

Riesebrodt, Martin 46 

Ritschl, Albrecht 86 

Ritzer, George 244, 266 

Robinson Crusoe 279 

Rochau, Ludwig von 223 

Rodbertus, Karl 44, 128–9, 197, 260–1 

Rohde, Edwin 167 

Rome: agrarian capitalism 20; agrarian 

history 19–20; slavery 20 

Roosevelt, Franklin 225 

Rorty, Richard 114 

Roscher, Wilhelm 92, 97, 175, 181 

Roth, Guenther 9, 49, 139, 143, 144, 

232, 234, 284 

Runciman, W.G. 190–1, 216, 269 

sacred and profane law 164–5, 174, 

177–8 

Said, Edward 212 

Scaff, Lawrence 3, 11, 148, 279, 287 

Schäffle, Albert 82 

Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst 54, 82, 

85–8 

Schluchter, Wolfgang 3, 9, 163, 217 

Schmidt-Glintzer, Helwig 158–60, 181 

Schmoller, Gustav von 14, 30–1, 32, 92 

Schönberg, Gustav von 141 

Schroeder, Ralph 12–13 

Schulze-Gaevernitz, Gerhart von 31, 32 

Schumpeter, Joseph 24, 142, 143, 268

Schutz, Alfred 109 

science 90–1, 101 

Sennett, Richard 86–7 

Shakespeare, William 59 

Sheehan, James 221 

Shils, Edward 104–5 

Siebeck, Hermann 174, 177–8 

Siebeck, Oskar 124 

Siebeck, Paul 141, 146 

Simmel, Georg 4, 6, 28, 32, 41–6, 53, 

75, 77, 92, 98–9, 148, 151, 152, 

165, 180, 234 

singularity 194–6, 269–70 

social action 42–3, 154–5, 179–80, 

251–2, 267 

Social Democratic Party 32 

social-economics 105–6, 141–5, 250, 

254–263, 267–8 

sociology: interpretative 7, 11–12, 

147–55, 251–4; structural 11–12 

Sombart, Werner 4, 6, 29, 31, 32, 

33–41, 44–6, 49, 79, 92, 100, 118, 

128, 134, 142, 197, 202, 252 

Soyer, Michaela 182 

Spencer, Herbert 118, 192 

Spener, Philip Jacob 202 

Spinoza, Benedict 46, 104 

spirit of capitalism 34–42, 79, 93, 123, 

124, 134 

Stammler, Rudolf 92 

status 227–231 

stock exchange 19, 21–2, 259 

stratification 9 

Strauss, Leo 9 

Swedberg, Richard 51 

taboo 167–8, 171 

Taoism 7 

Tawney, R.H. 209 

Tenbruck, Friedrich 162–3, 198, 282 

Thatcher, Margaret 245 

theodicy 183 

Thucydides 204 

Tiele, Cornelis 173–4, 177, 252 

Tirpitz, Alfred von 224 

Tobler, Mina 71–2 

Tolstoy, Leo 5, 184 

totemism 167–8, 171 

Trevor-Roper, Hugh 203 

Troeltsch, Ernst 4, 32, 86, 119, 122–3, 

164, 173–4, 177–8, 208, 225 

Tönnies, Ferdinand 4, 28, 31, 32, 151, 

164 

towns 135 

Index 295 

Tribe, Keith 22, 104 

Turner, Bryan 11–12 

Turner, Stephen 75, 279, 283 

Tylor, Edward Burnett 166–7, 173 

value heterogeneity 104 

value judgements 101, 274 

value, law of 273–4 

value rationality 9 

value relation 94 

value spheres 9 

Verein für Sozialpolitik 14–15, 30, 45, 

149 

Verstehen 97, 107, 151, 268 

Vierkandt, A. 151 

Vossler, Karl 75 

Wagner, Adolf 31, 32 

Wagner, Richard 68 

Weber, Alfred 4, 31, 142, 244 

Weber, Marianne 5, 32, 41, 53, 74, 

125, 139–40, 147, 158 

Weber, Max: ‘Agrarverhältnisse im 

Altertum’ 123–36; ‘The City’ 

136–9; Economy and Society 145–6, 

150, 226–32, 247–64; Grundriss 

der Sozialökonomik 138–47, 150; 

Grundriss zu den Vorlesungen 

über Allgemeine (“theoretische”) 

Nationalökonomie 23–7, 273–4; 

Herrschaftssoziologie 232–45; The 

History of Commercial Partnerships 

in the Middle Ages 21–2; as nationaleconomist 

8, 13, 19–28, 130, 137, 

232, 248; ‘The “objectivity” of 

knowledge in social science and 

social policy’ 74, 100–15; ‘Prefatory 

Remarks’ to ‘Collected Essays in 

the Sociology of Religion’ 212–6; 

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit 

of Capitalism 37–41, 48–72, 198; 

Die römische Agrargeschichte in 

ihrer Bedeutung für das Staats- und 

Privatrecht 19–21; The Sociology 

of Religion 156–82; ‘Some 

Categories of Interpretive Sociology’ 

150–5, 235; Die Verhältnisse 

der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen 

Deutschland 14–19 

Weber, Max, Sr 76 

Weiner, Myron 210 

Wellhausen, Julius 172, 175–6 

Wesley, Charles 70 

Wesley, John 54, 70

296 Index 

Whimster, Sam 279, 281 

Wieser, Friedrich von 24–5, 142, 234, 

268 

Winckelmann, Johannes 49, 163 

Windelband, Wilhelm 53, 75, 77, 90, 

92, 107, 164, 179 

Wittich, Claus 139, 143, 144, 232, 234 

worldview 187–8, 196, 203 

Wundt, Wilhelm 91 

Yair, Gad 182 

Yano, Yoshiro 253 

Young, Peter 249 

Zaret, David 66 

Zhuangzi 204 

Zoroaster 204, 206 

Zubaida, Sami 286 

Zwingli, H. 54

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