ABSTRACT
For a num ber o f years, W eber’s work has been the subject of renew ed in terest am ong economists. It essentially concerns economists who identify themselves specifically with the revival of econom ic sociology and of the Austrian school. These two distinct sources have launched an historical study o f W eber’s econom ic thought. In term s of the revival o f econom ic sociology, it is im portan t to m ention R. Swedberg’s work M ax Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology (Swedberg 2000); as for the revival o f the Austrian school, in particular the version initiated by the work o f L. Lachm ann, whose book The Legacy of Max Weber (Lachm ann 1971) undoubtedly provided a decisive im petus. This in terest in W eber’s ‘econom ic th ink ing’ responds to a specific need expressed by heterodox economists, w hether in relation to econom ic sociology (G ranovetter 1990, Swedberg 1991, 2000, Gislain and Steiner 1995), Austrian econom ics (Boettke and Storr 2002, Zafirovski 2002) o r herm eneutics applied to econom ics (Lavoie 1991, Prychitko 1995), with a view to em bedding econom ic activity within an institutional and cultural dim ension, o r to b roaden the no tion of econom ic rationality to include a cognitive approach, or bo th at the same time, as part o f an interpretive paradigm of econom ic sciences (Reckling 2002).
