On Behalf of Economy and Society and himself

[MWS 16.2 (2016) 250-253] ISSN 1470-8078 http://dx.doi.org/10.15543/MWS/2016/2/8© Max Weber Studies 2016, Clifton House, 17 Malvern Road, London, E8 3LP. On Behalf of Economy and Society and himself (A comment on Uta Gerhardt, ‘Comparing Translations of Max Weber’s Works into English’, MWS, 16.1, 2016: 11-38) Guenther Roth In her essay ‘The Crux of Authenticity. Comparing Some Translations of Max Weber’s Works into English’, Uta Gerhardt judged that ‘the troublemaker seems to be Economy and Society… whose translation needs revision, if not complete redoing urgently’ (Abstract).1 She concludes: ‘The next best thing to plan for might be a complete retranslation of the undoctored manuscripts of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft ’ (31). This is certainly a desideratum, but the prospects appear to me very dim. In the seventies, previous attempts by the German publisher (Siebeck) and me to arrange for a coordinated translation of at least the most significant works on the basis of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (MWG) found no support among English and American publishers. At the time I attended the planning meetings of the MWG until it became clear that I should not become a senior editor because I did not have the advantages of an Institute with staff of my German colleagues and was too far removed at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 2013 I got the opportunity to write a new foreword for a reissue of Economy and Society by the University of California Press and to explain the relationship between the sixty-year-old English edition (finished by me and my co-editor Claus Wittich in 1966 but not published until 1968) and the MWG, in which the older parts of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft were edited in five volumes from 1999 to 2005 and the unfinished new version in 2013. The critical edition has documented a paradoxical history: the work never existed in Weber’s intention. But like Marianne Weber in the nineteen twenties, the 1. The German version appeared in Zyklos 2 (2015) under the title: ‘Max Weber auf Englisch. Zu Text und Werk bei Übertragungen ins Englische’, 31-72. Roth   On Behalf of Economy and Society and himself 251© Max Weber Studies 2016. post-war editor Johannes Winckelmann was absolutely convinced that he was dealing with a unified opus. In my introduction of 1968, I already called attention to the discontinuity by treating the older version before the new one of 1920, but I was bound by the German publisher to use Winckelmann’s fourth edition of 1956. In the new foreword I point out that ‘the English edition contains all the parts that are now in the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe… Substantively, this makes no crucial difference for general readers, and thus the 1968 English text can continue to serve its purposes. But readers must be aware of the vagaries of translation. For better or worse, the re-issue contains translations as old as sixty year [in fact going back to the 1930s] which Claus Wittich and I had to revise without being able to achieve complete consistency. Even our retranslations and new translations are by now [more than] half a century old. In the following decades much serious scholarship was done on Weber, focusing on concepts that were not part of older interests. An edition cannot anticipate what future interests will be. For readers of German, the critical edition provides as reliable a text as is possible in view of the lack of original manuscripts. Scholars with German competence will retranslate concepts and passages according to their own interests : there are no ‘definitive’ translations. But other readers, especially students, will continue to rely on the present edition’ (xxxiff.). Uta Gerhardt appropriately deals with issues of terminology and consistency, but readers should realize how precarious the edition was at the very beginning. Under the circumstances of the time it is almost miraculous that ES ever appeared. The complete edition of ES arose out of conversations with my publisher Hans Zetterberg (1927–2014), whose Bedminster Press was to publish my The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany. A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration in 1963. Zetterberg was...