The Archiv, the Protestant Ethic and the Grundriss der Sozialokonomik
In July 1903 Edgar Jaffe purchased the academic journal Archiv fur soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik from its owner Heinrich Braun largely, it seems, with Max Weber in mind. Werner Sombart had previously been in discussion with Braun concerning the future of the journal, and all three men now became the new editors of the retitled Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Ghosh 2010).
This rapidly established itself as the world’s leading social science journal, very much due to the editorial direction which Max Weber gave, and not least to the fact that most of his essays henceforth appeared in its pages. The first issue appeared in April 1904, for which the “Objectivity” essay was composed as a set of guidelines on the management of a journal devoted to a new domain of study - the Sozialwissenschaften - as well as to topical problems of the day - Sozialpolitik. As an instance of the latter, in August 1906 Weber published in the Archiv his 250-page “essay” on the aftermath of the 1905 Russian Revolution, representing the kind of political journalism which the new journal sought to foster. In February the following year the journal carried his critique of Rudolf Stammler, which was to provide a red thread in his thinking through the 1913 essay on sociological categories, to his lecture course in Vienna in 1918, to chapter 1 of Economy and Society. The Protestant Ethic was also published here as two essays in November 1904 and June 1905, his replies to various critics reaching through to 1910. During these years he also wrote for newspapers about university politics, became involved in the creation of the German Sociological Society, and contributed to discussions at meetings of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik. However, in terms of his core intellectual interests, the Archiv was the key vehicle for scholarly writing, besides providing him with a means of constructing an academic network for the new social sciences.This would prove crucial for another project; alongside his work on the Archiv Weber also became the editor of a major new social science reference work, the Grundriss der Sozialokonomik, for which Economy and Society was conceived and written. Max Weber’s work is today linked firmly to the publishing house of Mohr Siebeck; but this link was first developed through the publication of the Archiv. It was from this connection that the Grundriss emerged as a major project led by Weber.
In the early 1900s Paul Siebeck was the publisher of a well-known economics reference work, Schonberg’s Handbuch der politischen Okonomie. This had first appeared in 1882 as a two-volume work, but by 1896 revisions had expanded it to five volumes. By 1905 the text was seriously in need of updating, but Schonberg was by this time very old and no longer capable of undertaking the kind of revision that Siebeck thought necessary, and so in April he turned for advice to Max Weber. After protracted negotiations and, importantly, the death of Schonberg in January 1908, Max Weber agreed to take on the project of replacing the Handbuch, and he at once set to work devising a new structure and finding suitable contributors (Schluchter 2009). This all took up an inordinate amount of time, and eventually the first part was not published until August 1914, scarcely the most propitious time to be launching a comprehensive German account of “modern capitalism”. Weber decided that there was no prospect of continuing his own
work for the project until the war was concluded, and when he did so in 1919 the world looked very different from the way that it had in 1914. The final volume was not published until well into the 1920s, but the Grundriss as a whole remains an important indication of the breadth of Weber’s interests and scholarly contacts, as well as suggestive of his very empirical interest in “capitalism”, the recurring motif of contributions on trade, transport, credit, economic geography, forestry, agriculture and industrial structure.
Weber’s own contribution to the Grundriss has come down to us as Economy and Society, which was assembled from his papers by Marianne Weber and Melchior Palyi shortly after his death. Only the first three chapters can be said to represent Weber’s intentions at the time of his death, the remainder of the text dating from before the war and representing material that he would have extensively reworked. Quite how extensive such reworking would have been can be seen from a comparison of the 1913 essay on “Sociological Categories” with the eventual first chapter, “Basic Sociological Concepts”. In fact the first three chapters of Economy and Society present a systematic template for the new interpretive social sciences and historical analysis; but these chapters have hardly ever been read in such terms, nor is it now possible to discern precisely what shape Economy and Society would have taken had Weber completed the process of revision that was ended so abruptly with his death.