In the Library
Economy and Society
Max Weber, 1922
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Reading time
- Reading time 32 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 24
- Length
- Length 444k words
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About the book
A scholar arranges his notes for a textbook on economic sociology and finds that he is writing instead a comprehensive theory of how power, belief, and money structure every human association. Max Weber died in 1920 before he could finish, and his widow Marianne assembled the unfinished text from drafts and lecture notes for publication in 1922. Across two volumes the book defines the three pure types of legitimate authority (traditional, charismatic, rational-legal), traces the emergence of bureaucracy, anatomizes the world religions, and works out a vocabulary that sociology has not yet exhausted. Weber wrote in the long Germanic sentences of a man who refused to simplify what was not simple. The book remains a foundation because nothing built since has rendered its categories unnecessary.