ABSTRACT
Weber’s Rechtssoziologie (hereafter RS) is a section of his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft which has generated relatively little discussion. 1 This is not surprising. Law is a technical subject best left to lawyers, who tend to leave sociology to sociologists, and Weber himself (a lawyer turned sociologist) 2 must be said to have done his best to perpetuate these tendencies by burying his theories in a general handbook as notable for its obscurity as for its erudition. 3 In the first instance the RS is a work for glossators. 4 It also has a certain appeal to exegetes who, in an attempt to find or supply overall coherence to Weber’s thought, explicate its theories at a level so exalted that they cease to have much bearing on law. 5 But down-to-earth historians and sociologists of law tend to ignore the RS altogether or, at best, to limit themselves to occasional criticism of its better known propositions and occasional use of the minor insights in which it abounds. It is hard to blame them: to the non-Weberite, the RS is not only a difficult but also a profoundly unilluminating work. Still, it remains one of the most ambitious attempts since Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth to explore the relationship between law and society, 6 a subject on which neither sociologists nor lawyers tend to have much to offer; 7 and historians of Islamic law are certainly among those in need of typological and developmental schemes for the evaluation of the object of their study. 8 It is thus worth examining what is wrong with the RS and how we might reformulate its questions.
