The Art of Reading and Understanding Max Weber: Reflections on Recent (and Not-So-Recent) Readers and Compilations

Karlberg, Stephen, ed. Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, 431 pp.

Swedberg, Richard, The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 360 pp.

Whimster, Sam, ed. The Essential Weber: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004, 430 pp.

Do we need yet another Max Weber reader, or even a "Max Weber dictionary"? The answer to this question is doubly contingent, in terms of the compilation's intended audience and its contents. Moreover, it may reflect changes in the ways in which Weber has been approached, studied, and understood over the past years.

When Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills published the first English-language compilation of Weber's writings and speeches in 1946, their intention was to introduce Weber to an Anglo-American audience with little previous exposure to the Heidelberg man. Of Weber's scholarship, with minor exceptions only General Economic History, by Frank Knight in 1927, and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as well as the Prefatory Remarks [to the Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion], by Talcott Parsons in 1930, had been available in English translations until then. Gerth and Mills decided to concentrate on a few of Weber's most important writings and speeches. They rendered them either in their entirety, if feasible (such as "Politics as a Vocation"), or in the form of longer sections that centered on Economy and Society and the Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion and were excerpted from the originals Their selection strategy targeted a wide audience and indeed made the reader a commercial success, undoubtedly helped by the generally good quality of Gerth's translation. The only blemish was the editors' decision to place some of Weber's footnotes in the text without further notice.

To the non-German speaking scholar, the first Weber reader was thus an indispensable tool for understanding Weber's core ideas, particularly in Economy and Society and his sociology of religion, at least until more translations became available. This indeed happened in the ensuing decades through translations of his methodological writings and his essays on the economic ethics of the world religions, and Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich's landmark edition of Economy and Society in English. Somewhat less central to Weber's oeuvre, other writings, such as the ones on antiquity, medieval law and commerce, the German bourse, and political events in Russia at the turn of the century, have also become available in English translations. Moreover, some of the early translations now have rivals, such as Parsons's version of the Protestant Ethic in the form of Stephen Kalberg's retranslation and Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells's translation of the essay's 1904–05 version and Weber's subsequent replies to his critics.

These developments appeared to have slowed, if not completely forestalled, the emergence of new Weber readers and compilations until very recently. Generally speaking, Weber readers and compilations supplementing his writings can be divided into the following categories: (1) Mass/undergraduate market readers, which seek to make Weber palatable to a general audience (hopefully) interested in, but not necessarily familiar with, the German scholar. Generally, these types of compilations place a premium on accessibility by using short texts with intermediate omissions, reducing or even eliminating footnotes in the original, and adding clarifying remarks. Weber's thoughts are typically grouped around central themes and introduced in a short overview of each theme or section by the editor. The downside of mass/undergraduate market compilations is that they will rarely satisfy the Weber specialist, as she will be dissatisfied with the status of the texts (especially when original footnotes are omitted) and the editor's broad rather than deep analyses. Glossaries, if they exist at all, remain at the elementary...