Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Nachlaß, Teilband 4: Herrschaft by Max Weber Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Soziologie. Unvollendet 1919–1920 by Max Weber Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Entstehungsgeschichte und Dokumente by Max Weber (review)

Abstract

[MWS 17.2 (2017) 282-296] ISSN 1470-8078 http://dx.doi.org/10.15543/MWS/2017/2/9© Max Weber Studies 2017, Rm 4-12, London Metropolitan University, 84 Moorgate, London EC2M 6SQ. Review Essay Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte. Nachlaß, Teilband 4: Herrschaft, ed. Edith Hanke, with Thomas Kroll (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/22-4; Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2005), xxx + 944pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-3-16-148694-4. €369.00. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Soziologie. Unvollendet 1919– 1920,editedbyKnutBorchardt,EdithHankeandWolfgangSchluchter (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/23; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), xxvi + 847pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-3-16-150292-7. €334.00. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Entstehungsgeschichte und Dokumente, edited by Wolfgang Schluchter (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe I/24; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), xi + 285pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-3-16-150058-9. €114.00. In 1984 the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe commenced publication with Bd. I/15, Zur Politik im Weltkrieg. Schriften und Reden 1914– 1918, edited by Wolfgang Mommsen with the assistance of Gangolf Hübinger. More than thirty years later we still await publication of the ‘methodological’ writings in the MWG; but whether this matters very much is an open question. As Wilhelm Hennis pointed out in a contemporary review of Bd. I/15, given the general lack of manuscripts , typescripts, and other materials, the MWG could never be a ‘historico-critical’ edition since the editors were chiefly limited to reprinting, correcting, and annotating published versions of Weber’s writings.1 It appears to have been Weber’s practice to discard notes, drafts, manuscripts, and proofs once he was finished with them, and so for the great bulk of his work all we have are the printed versions. 1. Wilhelm Hennis, ‘Im langen Schatten einer Edition: Zum Erscheinen des ersten Bandes der Max-Weber-Gesamtausgabe (MWG)’, originally in Zeitschrift für Politik N. F. 32 (June 1985): 208-17; cited here as in his Max Weber und Thukydides: Nachträge zur Biographie des Werks (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), pp. 73-86 (80). Tribe Review Essay 283© Max Weber Studies 2017. Of course, since he only ever published two ‘books’—an extract from his doctoral thesis and his Habilitationsschrift—these writings were scattered through journals, newspapers, and conference proceedings ; but Marianne Weber had assembled much of this work in the early 1920s, publishing the ‘methodological’ writings in 1922 as the Wissenschaftslehre. And so we have had a working version of what will, eventually, be MWG Bde. I/7 and I/12 since 1922. What the world actually needed, argued Hennis, was not an exorbitantly expensive ‘complete works’ that turned out for the most part to contain what was already in circulation, but a cheap paperback version of the existing principal writings. He even went so far as to suggest that the publisher of the MWG had a strong commercial interest in the project, since copyright would run out in 1990 and the creation of a new standard edition would refresh the publisher’s rights.2 It soon become clear that having Weber’s writings on wartime politics (Bd. I/15 1988) or on rural and economic policy in the 1890s (I/4 1993) provided a solid basis for the re-assessment of the orthodoxies of the Weber reception. When he launched his acerbic criticisms of the MWG project in the mid 1980s Hennis was engaged in his own studies of Weber, travelling to the GDR to read the correspondence in the Merseburg archives, and subjecting Weber’s writings to line-by-line examination. The essays that resulted from this work contributed a great deal to the positive reassessment of Weber in the later twentieth century; the edition formed a valuable backdrop to this ongoing revision, but for a long time did not appear to be that central to it. The publication of the first volume of letters in 1990 revealed some of the real novelty that the edition would offer, although starting with the correspondence of 1906 and taking until 2012 to arrive at the letters of 1920 led to its own frustrations. Likewise the extension of Abteilung III, devoted to lecture notes, to seven volumes...