Max Weber lesen by Stephen Kalberg Max Weber: Eine Einführung in sein Werk by Hans-Peter Müller Weber: A Short Introduction by Gianfranco Poggi (review)

Abstract

[MVS 10.2 (2010) 251-260] ISSN 1470-8078 Book Reviews Stephen Kalberg, Max Weber lesen (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2006), 148 pp. ISBN 3-89942-445-X. €11.00. Hans-Peter Müller, Max Weber: Eine Einführung in sein Werk (Köln, Weimar and Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2007), 311 pp. ISBN 978-3-8252-295-8. €16.90. Gianfranco Poggi, Weber: A Short Introduction (Cambridge, UK and Maiden, MA 2006: Polity Press), 137pp. ISBN 0-7456-3490-7. £12.99. In the last few years a large number of introductions to the work of Max Weber have appeared. All of these show how, in the context of academic teaching at least, a certain worldwide standardization of understandings of Weber's ideas has been reached, based on a minimum consensus of the academics involved. This also holds for the three introductory volumes under review here. The authors are prominent sociologists, two of them long recognized as scholars of Weber, and the third—the Berlin sociologist Hans-Peter Müller—here presenting a reading of Weber based on many years of teaching. What these three introductory volumes share, alongside short résumés of Weber's biography, is a concentration on methodological issues and the basic sociological concepts, as well as Weber's writings on the sociology of religion, domination and the state. For introductory purposes this is sensible since it is clear that Weber's wide-ranging oeuvre cannot naturally be conveyed in any schematically brief way. It is, however, surprising that unlike Müller, neither Kalberg nor Poggi address the philological and related substantive controversies that have been raging for several decades now around the editorial work of the Gesamtausgabe. Perhaps this is one sign that questions of bibliographical history have still not found much reso nance in Anglophone literature. Certainly the books under review here do note the existence of both a pre-First World War and a post-First World War version of the body of writings that has come to be known as Economy and Society. Yet even Müller, despite addressing this matter, draws no further conclusions from it. My proposal here is that alongside the distinction he draws between orthodox and heterodox styles of Weber-scholarship another distinction must be considered, namely one between 'critical' and 'pre-critical' interpretations of Weber, where 'critical' refers to text-based treatment of his work (cf. 21,224ff.). Taking these three introductory volumes as examples, I'd like to make clear here some consequences that arise from a neglect of these controversies about textual history and to ask whether it is even still possible to write an introduction to Weber without taking note of them. Without fundamentally disputing the suitability of these books for teaching purposes—evidently borne of many years' experience in the ) Max Weber Studies 2011, Clifton House, 17 Malvern Road, London, E8 3LP. 252 Max Weber Studies classroom and manifest in their high didactic quality—I want nonetheless to raise a series of questions in what follows with these queries in mind. Müller's book is the most wide-ranging of the three. His is the product of a study pack created for the Open University of Hagen (FernUniversität Hagen) and used successfully for distance-learning purposes. Unlike Kalberg and Poggi, Müller is concerned to produce as an encompassing an account of Weber's work as possible, although he does not consider either Weber7s pre-1903 writings or any of the various versions of Weber's handbook article on the Agrarian Conditions of Antiquity, where Weber7s gradual transition to a comparative-historical mode of approach becomes clear. Weber7s multifaceted study of The City and sociology of law are also only cur sorily mentioned by Müller, and the question of their status in the history of Weber's corpus is left unelucidated (236-47). This is explained by Müller's basic decision to arrange Weber7s work around 'systematic' rather than 'genealogical' criteria. His claim is for a 'coherent reading that does not do violence to the sometimes contradic tory array of differences between author and work but that nevertheless outlines the basic coordinates of his thought' (9). Whether Müller...