His Early Career
In February 1892, soon after he had gained the right to teach, he agreed to write up a study of East Elbian rural labour relations, part of a national survey of rural labour that had been organized by the Verein fur Sozialpolitik.
By the end of the year he had worked through the survey questionnaires and written them up into a very substantial volume, on the basis of which he then made a summary presentation at the Verein meeting held in Berlin in March 1893. This presentation stood out clearly from all others both for its analytical clarity and substantive detail. The following month his Freiburg appointment was confirmed. He continued to lecture and write on these and related topics until the end of the decade, weaving his account of the development of agrarian capitalism in Eastern Germany into an analysis of the politics and economics of German social development (Tribe 1983).The second project with which Weber became involved at about this time related to contemporary debate over the appropriate regulatory regime for German stock and commodity trading. It is not entirely clear when or where this involvement originated; before 1894 he had written nothing on the subject, but by December 1896 he was already recognized as one of Germany’s leading financial economists and appointed as a scientific expert to a government committee alongside the elite of the business community and East Elbian landowners. During the summer of 1894 he completed a popular guide to stock and commodity exchanges for Friedrich Naumann’s “Workers’ Library”, and also worked on a longer multipart article commissioned for the Zeitschrift fur das Gesammte Handelsrecht on financial markets and regulation. During the winter semester of 1895-96 Weber lectured twice a week on “Money, Banking and Exchanges”, and with this became the first professor to lecture on stock and commodity exchanges in a German university (Borchardt 1999: 103-4).
Having successfully made his entrance into the domain of contemporary economics in Freiburg, Weber succeeded Carl Knies as Professor of Political Economy in Heidelberg, teaching there from the summer semester of 1897. Knies, the last surviving member of the “Older Historical School” and whose lectures Weber had attended some 15 years before, wished to retire, and Weber was marked out as a promising young successor. For his theory lectures in the summer of 1898 he published an extensive reading list together with a partial outline, suggesting that he had in mind the publication of his own textbook (Tribe 2010). But during the summer semester he suffered some kind of breakdown while delivering his lecture course. Recovering from this, he then prepared a course on applied economics for the following winter semester, but again broke down while presenting it; subsequently he ceased lecturing, and eventually resigned his post.
The hiatus in Weber’s life that his breakdown brought about is sometimes used to suggest that when, some five or six years later, Weber once again began to write and publish intensively, this represented a new beginning in which he discovered his true vocation, shifting the focus of his writing and of his thinking, creating in this way the canonical figure with whom we are familiar today. At this Stunde Null there can be found the 1903-05 essay on Roscher and Knies together with the 1904 “Objectivity” essay as foundational “methodological” works, and also of course the 1904-05 essays on the Protestant Ethic which went on to become his most well-known and accessible text. However, this only appears to be a new beginning for those unfamiliar with what went before. His trip to the USA in 1904 was brought about by an invitation to give a public lecture at the Universal Exposition in St Louis, where he presented a resume of work he had done ten years previously. Peter Ghosh has pointed out that the conception of Herrschaft exposed here in the analysis of German rural relations links forward to formulations in the pre-war manuscripts from 1913-14, as well as to the formulation in 1919-20 of a “typology” of rulership as presented in Economy and Society, part I, chapter 3 (Ghosh 2005: 357 n.
fe). Likewise, Weber’s initial engagement with the German Sociological Society in 1910 was connected with his interest in the organization of a wide-ranging survey of the modern media, for which he drafted a detailed research proposal (Weber 1998), confirming his continuing interest in empirical social research. There are also a number of rhetorical and substantive affinities between his Freiburg inaugural lecture of 1895 and his lecture “Science as a Vocation”, given in November 1917. Lack of familiarity with his extensive, and specialized, writings on agrarian social structure, ancient history, finance and law during the 1890s too often becomes a justification for their relegation to a formative “early” phase which can be duly neglected. This is however mistaken; while there is indeed a lull in Weber’s activity, 1898-1903 were by no means the “lost years” that Marianne Weber later suggested, and only in 1901 did Weber publish nothing at all. Furthermore, there is a real continuity from his earliest writings on ancient economic history right through to his last lecture course in 1919-20, which presents an account of the development of capitalism in Europe; while much of the material which went into Economy and Society originates in this “early” period (Bruhns 2006). While the period 1903-06 was indeed a highly productive one for Weber, there are other, similar, phases throughout his adult life: in, for example, 1892-95, 1913 and 1919-20.