Finanzwissenschaft. Vorlesungen 1894–1897 by Max Weber (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 125© Max Weber Studies 2019. or a party machine driven process of party competition with popular election of the President as in the USA, is a matter of historical chance, and the opportunities for occasional and professional politicians are different in all of these political systems.6 But toward the end of the same work Weber employs his typology of legitimate ‘Herrschaft’ to predict with complete certainty that all revolutions will end up in the ‘spiritual proletarianisation [of the following] in order to achieve “discipline”’.7 Weber rhetorically plays both registers , contingency and possibility and quasi deterministic outcomes, depending on the political judgments he is seeking to draw and the positions he is seeking to discredit. Curiously, Palonen often follows a similar polemical strategy when arguing with opponents of parliamentary politics, as in his dispute with Arendt, though he claims to be merely invoking the contingent aspects of Weberian politics. This is not to say that Palonen’s ‘one-sided’ approach of focusing on ‘chance’ does not yield great interpretive insight across breadth of Weber’s political thinking. It most certainly does. It is merely to say, that given the sprawling nature of Weber’s work, we all face the danger that our ‘one–sided’ interpretations of his many concepts, categories, and developmental tendencies, may turn out to be too one-sided. Peter Breiner University at Albany, State University of New York Max Weber, Finanzwissenschaft. Vorlesungen 1894–1897, edited by Martin Heilmann, with Cornelia Meyer-Stoll (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe III/3; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), xiii + 443pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-3-16-153076-0. €194.00. In the autumn of 1894 Max Weber moved from Berlin to Freiburg, following his appointment as a Professor of ‘Economics and Financial Science’ in the state of Baden. The title was no mere formality: during the winter semester of 1894–95 he lectured four times a week on ‘general and theoretical economics’, and four times a week on ‘financial science’, what we would today call ‘public economics’. He 6. Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’, in Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 336-52. 7. Ibid., p. 365. 126 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2019. only began reading and preparing for these lectures in late July 1894; the manuscript upon which these lectures is based has all the signs of work under pressure, prepared from lecture to lecture, without time for even a properly organised expository framework. The state of Baden required those civil servants working in financial administration to have taken university courses in mathematics, agriculture, manufacturing, economics, and public finance, in addition to the core law subjects, and the university was obliged to run a public finance course every semester. However, while Weber had 24 students in the autumn of 1894, only one of them was on the public administration pathway; the remainder were law students. Other members of the faculty also taught the course; Weber only did so once more before he left for Heidelberg in 1897, and he never taught the subject again. By contrast, before he broke off his last complete course in theoretical economics in the early summer of 1898 he had taught this course five times. From this comparison, and the sometimes scrappy nature of his lecture notes on public finance, we could easily presume that he ended up teaching this subject simply because it went with the appointment. Why, however, was he able he teach the subject at all, let alone four times a week for weeks on end? Weber had lived in his parents’ Berlin house since 1886, working as an unpaid court clerk, preparing a doctoral dissertation supervised by Levin Goldschmidt, Professor of Commercial Law, and then in 1890 passing the second state law examination which formally qualified him for legal practice. But he then embarked on a second dissertation that would qualify him to teach law, eventually publishing this as a book on Roman agrarian history in October 1891, and gaining the right to teach in February 1892. From the spring of 1892 he lectured in the Law Faculty, substituting for his former supervisor , but was not even made...