14 - Review of Max Weber's Economy and Society

Summary

Shortly after getting out of graduate school, I put a good deal of effort into reading the untranslated parts of Max Weber's magnum opus with my graduate school German, living with the fear that the effort would be wasted because the part I was reading would be translated soon, but with the hope that if it were translated I would at least be sure I had got it straight. Re-reading it now, entirely in my native language and in a continuous fashion, provides an occasion to comment on whether people starting out at this time to be sociologists should start as I did. Is Economy and Society a good place to start an intellectual biography now? What is there about this work that is of continuing value to the discipline?

There are clearly some parts of the book that have become archaic. The discussion of meaning at the beginning of the book, for instance, would be written quite differently by a modern scientist of Weber's quality, incorporating the recent advances in cognitive psychology and linguistics. Much of what Weber discussed philosophically has been investigated empirically.

Likewise Weber's treatment of calculation in economic enterprises is oriented to an old-fashioned financial balances calculation rather than to the representation of a causal system with monetary measures of the variables as in modern cost accounting, or to the devices of operations research and linear programming for rational calculation in the case of unpriced inputs or outputs.