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Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, July, 1999
Richard Swedberg, Princeton University Press, 1998. ISBN 0 691 02949 0. Index.
This is a superb monograph that ranges the entire body of Weber's scholarly writings. Swedberg paints a satisfying picture of what else was going on in the German-speaking world when Weber was actively exploring new insights about the origins of capitalism. Each part of Weber's work was written with an image of a larger and more complete set of questions in mind. Swedberg takes us back in time so we can appreciate Weber's broader visions and interests. Weber's arguments are not just summarized (in good text-book fashion) but, rather, their significance and broader web of implications is deftly laid out for further investigation. With care and expert precision, the nature and significance of the Weber arguments are made clear and accessible. The text contains many important notes in which the secondary literature is discussed so that the interested reader is directed to complementary discussions of these same issues.
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Unlike many recent attempts to provide a viable platform for an economic sociology, Weber tried to unite "interest driven behavior and social behavior" (p. 4). Swedberg's book chronicles that effort. For Weber, individual behavior was social insofar as "its subjective meaning [took] account of the behavior of others" (p. 5). Weber's search at the end of the 19th century for a replacement term for "political economy" - an effort that occupied the attention of many other economists of the day - took him to the door of "social economics." Swedberg offers a most complete account of the emergence of terms like "Sozialoekonomik" and "Wirtschaftssoziologie" and compared and contrasted their respective meanings with the current "network theory" approach.
Network theorists such as Professor Mark Granovetter emphasize how economic relationships are embedded within a wider framework of social meanings and social relationships that economists wilfully ignore (pp. 165-170). Network theorists offer their approach as an alternative to the interest-driven behavior studied by economics. Swedberg's considered conclusion - the same as Max Weber's - is worth repeating: "[the] idea that one must unite an interest-driven analysis with a social one is as important today as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century" (p. 170). That is why Weber's path-breaking writings contain lessons for our times.
There is a huge amount of information about Weber in the secondary literature. Much of this is useful and interesting but fails to do justice to the enormous breadth and scope of Weber's contributions. For example, I admired Weber's facility with law and the development of legal institutions. Until reading Swedberg's book, however, I had not appreciated that the "reason why Weber pays so much attention to law in his economic sociology . . . has to do with his interest in and vast, comparative knowledge of the subject" (p. 82). Weber "was better trained in law than in any other subject" (p. 82). Weber's erudition about law and its history led him to challenge Werner Sombart's influential conclusion that the "Jews had invented some of the most important legal institutions of capitalism" (p. 94). The forms of commercial practice were of more ancient origins and the Jews had at best transmitted several commercial forms to the West. Weber's central thesis was that the "major legal institutions, on which modern capitalism rests, have their origin in medieval law and not in Roman law" (p. 96). Weber placed enormous emphasis on law and economics, yet his pioneering efforts are still not appreciated by the contemporary law and economics movement.
There is so much else in Weber's work that has not been digested by the modern generation that Swedberg's book can be read as a veritable brochure suggesting novel lines of research. Consider what Weber had to say about the interaction between geography and social organization: the control of water rights on society is as much a problem in modern California as it was in ancient Egypt. Unfortunately, modern discussion makes no use of Weber's prescient theory of "'hydraulic bureaucracy" although, thanks to Swedberg, the concept reaches out for a modern writer to adopt it and give it a new home. This book is a most valued edition to our recent literature on the problems connecting modern economics and modern sociology. This monograph by itself is interesting enough to spark another Weberian revival about the connections between economics and sociology that can and should be made.
COPYRIGHT 1999 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
