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

By "national economy" (Volkswirtschaft) Weber meant an actually existing economy, historically formed and part of a nation or of a state, and consequently restricted to a certain geographic area. When analyzing a national economy, as opposed to an abstract economy (Wirtschaft), a series of new factors had to be taken into account. In analyzing an actually existing economy, as we soon shall see, Weber came close to a sociological approach to the economy or, if one so prefers, to the kind of approach that the German Historical School favored.

When a price is determined according to theoretical economics, Weber says, one assumes that the demand as well as the supply are organized in an orderly manner according to the principle of marginal utility. In actual reality, however, things are more complicated; one has to take a number of imperfections in the market as well as other factors into account. The market actors, for example, usually have incomplete knowledge; they do not try to buy and sell simultaneously; and the kind of quantities of goods that are needed for the theoretical market to function properly may typically not be offered or demanded. "Demand for goods," Weber also notes, "is social, and determined by the existing income and property distribution" (Weber [1898] 1990, p. 49).

Weber adds that economic life, as it exists in reality, is always the result of a "struggle" (Kampf). The market price, for example, is the result of both an "interest struggle" (between the two actors who end up doing the exchange) and a "competitive struggle" (between those who compete with one another to do the selling and the buying). Weber's reasoning in the two theoretical sections in the Outline can consequently be summed up in the following way: in abstract questions, the economist could rely on marginal utility theory, but when the task was to investigate empirical cases, this approach was not enough and had to be complemented in various ways.

III

Weber as A Sociologist

WEBER'S NERVOUS BREAKDOWN may well have had something to do with the way that he pushed himself as a young professor of economics, eager to make a career. He not only had to learn economics from scratch, but also to teach and do research--plus a number of other tasks that he heaped upon himself, such as public speaking, participation in the Verein, and much, much more. But whatever caused his breakdown, it made Weber develop an antipathy against reading anything in economics for the next couple of years; during the few hours each day that he could concentrate on reading, he invariably chose books from other fields, such as culture, philosophy, and sociology.

Weber's attitude in the 1890s to sociology was characterized by a considerable amount of suspicion; he felt that a lot of intellectual quackery went under the name of "sociology' and that it was not a serious science. There were some exceptions, however, such as the works by Georg Simmel and Ferdinand Tonnies. Gradually, however, Weber's attitude to sociology seems to have softened. When efforts were made around 1908 to create a German Sociological Association, he, for example, helped out as much as he could. "It was during this period [roughly 1908-1910 [5]]," one reliable commentator notes, "that Weber designated himself as a sociologist for the first time" (Kasler 1988, p. 15; cf. Bendix and Roth 1971, p. 37).