ABSTRACT
Max Weber’s economic sociology offers a perplexing array of approaches. There are, effectively, case studies like the Roman Agrarian History and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which are major interventions in the literature of economic history. Then there are major policy analyses such as Weber’s empirical analyses of the state of Prussian agriculture and the implications for Germany’s economic development. In this category also belongs his analysis of the German stock exchange, the reasons for financial speculation and the case for grain futures. In addition we now have available his lectures on economics and finance which he gave at Freiburg and Heidelberg in the 1890s. These early lectures have a comparative scope, or as Wolfgang J. Mommsen puts it, they show Weber as a universal historian examining the various ways in which economic needs are met and the polities that enforce and benefit from those provisions. Weber’s students not only received a course on modern economics, as it existed at the end of the nineteenth century with its move from classical economics to marginalism, but also the position of capitalism in the Middle Ages and in Antiquity. Much of Weber’s early lecture course acquired a new construction in the final version of Economy and Society (its first four chapters) (Weber 1968). The pedagogic function of Economy and Society was to relate what Weber called the ‘orders of society’ – law, politics, community, religion and culture – to the economy. Because of the success of modern rational capitalism, the economy had attained primacy in the overall composition of society through inter alia the structures of rationally ordered production and labour and the operation of credit money and banking. The meeting of consumer needs through factory-based mass production was locked into modern society, as indicated by the vivid metaphor of the iron cage (or, depending on translation, the shell as hard as steel). The primacy of the economy and the consequent rationalisation of all spheres of life – a result of the triumph of calculative rationalism – was achieved and (is) sustained by the supporting roles of law, politics and the state – with conflictual implications for community and culture. Michael Sandel’s latest book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012) is a reminder that we, as a modern consumer-mass production society, are still in the vice of the rationalising forces of modern society.
