Max Weber's 'Economy and Society': A Critical Companion by Charles S. Camic , Philip S. Gorski , David M. Trubek (review)

Abstract

246 Max Weber Studies with a sense of naiveté and an absence of critical thinking really misses the point. For although commodification and consumption can doubtless involve stupidity, indo lence and whatever else, it can also 'enliven, energise, and, under the right circum stances, support ethical generosity' (p. 128), and this can then be added to an account of the creation of the self as a work of art, a work of enchantment, in a tradition that runs from Kant and Schiller to Michel Foucault. And in trying to circumnavigate the Marxist critique that this is really to aestheticize politics without any recourse to the strategies for changing the world that would actually allow people to transform their conditions, Bennett offers the following rejoinder: What is the content of my ethic of enchanted materialism, and what are the sources upon which it draws? The content, in important respects, is Thoreauian. Its appreciation of nonhuman, as well as human, sites of vitality—of what might be called its hyperecological sense of interde pendence—proceeds from and toward the principle of treading lightly on the earth... [But] The source or rationale for this ethic is more dif ficult to articulate. Why ought enchanted materialists tread lightly, be humble, remember interdependencies, pay attention to details? (pp. 157f.). The disposition 'in favour of life' (p. 158) is the unifying feature of this ethic, and it is an open-ended ethic of generosity and respect for others, both human and non human, that is grounded in the fluid ontology of enchantment. This is a provocative thesis about the ontological and ethical character of individuals understood materi ally, and offers a distinctive challenge to more traditional theories of ethics. It is itself also quite an enchanting book, which does, as one of the dust jacket adverts for the book suggests, actually make one think about the world in slightly new ways. To that end, it is certainly a fitting complement to Max Weber's own analyses of the dis enchanted world and the possibilities of maintaining ethical life within it. Duncan Kelly University of Cambridge Charles S. Camic, Philip S. Gorski and David M. Trubek (eds.), Max Weber's 'Economy and Society': A Critical Companion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 385 + index. ISBN 0-8047-4717-2. $29.95. The essays collected in this volume were first presented in 2000 at a symposium held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, whose working title was 'Economy and Society: Max Weber in 2000'. Consequently the presenters, mostly sociologists, gener ally addressed themselves to what Max Weber might contribute to our understand ing of the modern world. This is a rather different project to what might be expected from a 'critical companion'. We might reasonably anticipate that a 'critical compan ion' would be directed to specific sections or themes in Weber's Economy and Society, although of course the work that bears this title is only partly 'his book' — itself a problem that forms part of Wolfgang Mommsen's presentation but one which eludes most of the other contributors. A minority of the contributors adopt this approach: besides Mommsen's piece, Richard Swedberg considers the significance of chapter 2, Hans Kippenberg outlines the sections on religious communities, and Duncan© Max Weber Studies 2008. Book Reviews 247 Kennedy seeks to illuminate the manner in which the sections on the sociology of law related to contemporary legal thinking. That is four essays out of fourteen in which Weber's 'book' is explicated, dissected, or expounded. Apart from Guenther Roth's opening biographical essay, the rest of the contributions belong to the famil iar routine of Weber the sociologist. The editors clearly think differently. 'This volume provides a critical and up-to date introduction to Weber's magnum opus. While much has been published about the various parts of Economy and Society, this is the first book to cover all its major sec tions and themes, as well as to discuss the methodological vision that unites them' we can read on the back cover. Exactly whose methodological vision might that be, one might reasonably ask? And what sort of vision is it? Mommsen is the only contributor who outlines the tortured...