ABSTRACT
The idea that Weber is a theorist of “rationalisation” can suggest that he thought of processes as being essentially unidirectional, homogenising; that there was some kind of underlying, progressive logic to social, political and economic changes. I show that in the last year of his life, Weber wrote about the emergence and transformation of “capitalism”, and that, when coupled with his increasing emphasis on the concept of Chance, his understanding of capitalist development was one that involved contingency, not determinacy. He was an analyst of conjunctures whose outcomes depended upon the forces present at that moment, forces that would then shape how the future turned out. There was certainly a sense of cultural pessimism in this, but no nostalgia for a past that was gone, and irrecoverable. This is evident in his early agrarian writings, in his analyses of party democracy in the later part of the First World War, and especially in his final lecture course on economic history, delivered while he was drafting Chapter 2 of Economy and Society. I focus on his account of economic development, questioning how far this can be aligned with conceptions of capitalist development that gained ground later in the 20th century.
