Max Weber as an Economist and as a Sociologist: Towards a Fuller Understanding of Weber's View of Economics - Critical Essay

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Oct, 1999 by Richard Swedberg

Weber's course in introductory economics can be summarized in the following way. The course began with a discussion of "the tasks and methods of theoretical economics." The reading list indicates that Weber, when tackling this task, discussed the theoretical approach of the German Historical School and the challenge to this type of analysis from the Austrians, especially Menger. He then introduced the basic concepts of economics (Book I). This was followed by three sections, which we would not expect an economist today to discuss so thoroughly in an introductory course: the natural foundations of the economy (Book II), the evolution of economic history (Book III), and the history of economic thought (Book IV). Weber's account of the last of these three topics seems to have been fairly standard, and what he has to say about the historical evolution of the economy similarly contains few novelties, at least for anyone who is familiar with his work in economic history. [4] In the section that Weber refers to as the natural foundations of the economy, he talks about the role of nature, population, and the biological aspects of human beings in economic life. Included in this section--and this is of special interest--is also a discussion of "the relationship of the economy to other cultural phenomena, especially to law and to the state." To properly understand this relationship, judging from Weber's reading list, another science was needed: sociology. It also deserves to be noted that by including the relationship of the economy to the legal system and to the state in his course, Weber was not content with squarely focusing on economic phenomena per Se; the economy was also linked to other spheres of society in ways which were crucial to understand.

That this was indeed the case comes out as well in the next to last part of the course, which is entitled "A Theoretical Analysis of the Modern Exchange Economy" (Book V). The major topics which are discussed here are production, distribution, exchange and consumption. The main emphasis, however, is on the institutional dimension of these phenomena. Weber also covered income distribution, unemployment, and economic crises in this part. The whole course ended with a discussion of the normative dimension of economics (Book VI). One of the works that Weber referred to here was his own installation lecture from 1895 (Weber [1895] 1989). Presumably Weber said roughly the same in his lecture course as in his installation lecture; there, however, also exist some indications that he told the students about other approaches to the normative problematique than that of his own.

While the first of the two texts that make up the Outline tells us quite a bit about the general structure of Weber's course and the way that he viewed economics as a whole, the second text focuses on a very small part of his course. On the other hand, it gives us very detailed information about what Weber actually said in his lectures. As already mentioned, Weber's course was divided into twenty sections, and the second text discusses two of these sections, on 34 pages altogether. If Weber had devoted a similar amount of space to the remaining eighteen sections, the result would have been a book of more than 300 pages; and perhaps this is also what Weber had in mind. All that we know on this score is that Weber, according to his wife, "gave his students [in the introductory economics course] a printed outline that he intended to expand into a textbook" (Marianne Weber 1975, p. 228). To this can be added that Weber also made a number of notes for this book project (Scaff 1989, p. 134).