Customer Reviews

From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (International Library of Society)

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Gerth and Mills' reader provides an excellent introduction to Weber's life and thought. This edition includes excerpts from _Economy and Society_, the brilliant essays ``Politics as a Vocation'' and ``Science as a Vocation,'' plus a brief critical biography and material from other sources.

Weber had so much to say about so many subjects that any anthology would require a well-considered method of organization; this book has that. It is easy to navigate. When I want to know what Weber said about a particular subject, I look in _From Max Weber_.

What is most curious about the home page for this classic academic work is that Amazon does not explain that this text is the fruit of one the most singularly important academic translations in the 20th century, accomplished by the team of sociologists Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (who later became an immensely influential classic sociologist himself). First published after the Second World War, the text provided access at long last to a treasure trove of previously untranslated works by Weber for the American academic community, and thus transformed the nature of the way American social scientists understood modern social theory.

It is no exaggeration to say that Weber's genius was his ability to successfully integrate the critical essence of the Marxian analysis of capitalist society with more functionally-oriented works such that even as stodgy and conservative a theorist as Talcott Parson soon found common analytical purpose with Weber's theoretical views! before long all the academic community was enthralled by the scope and verve of Weber's complex vision of a social theory informed with a comprehensive view of social action, such that all social actions can be meaningfully located within the welter of the purposes, motives, and values of the interacting individuals themselves. This was indeed an intelelctual revolution within social theory, and we can still find bibliophiles and academic devotees still poring over the nuances and variations in themes in Weber's considerable body of works.

After the publication of these essays, much more of his corpus of works was successfully translated and used in American university settings. Yet Weber's prose was never an "easy read", nor was his message about the evolving nature of contemporary bureaucratic society necessarily a heartening one; he was convinced we were turning toward a dark and mechanistic age, what he himself frequently characterized as being the "iron cage" of rationalization. His was the dark vision later shared by intellectuals like Aldous Huxley of a brave new world of petty diversions and a systematic but innocuous autocratic manipulation of everyman. Still, Weber's works stand as a testament to the power of an individual intellect. I recommend this book for anyone interested in better understanding him and his theoretical views. Enjoy!

I strongly recommend that you don't buy that edition in any circumstance! It's just a photocopy, with lots of underline. Some pages are really hard to read. Funny thing: it's a expensive "edition". My opinion: Amazon must drop out this item from the bookstore. Really.

This is the worst quality book I have ever purchased. The publisher (it appears to be booksllc.net) just photocopied at 1946 Oxford University Press edition, complete with faded print and the previous owner's UNDERLINING (!!!!), and made a print run. I will be returning this outrage immediately and purchasing the 1958 Oxford edition instead.

I bought this book and was given a refund, but I want to let people know that they're better off buying a printed copy of the book. The Kindle version is a cheaply produced version.

This Kindle version has numerous errors in spelling and formatting. It was obviously scanned and OCR'd from the printed text, but has not been proofread. For instance, these words are at the first Kindle location: "X rel;" and "reiace." I assume that's supposed to be something like page "X" and "Preface." But if Amazon can't be bothered to fix simple errors like that at the first location in the text (which would be the first page of the printed edition), then what other errors have been allowed to slide through the rest of the text? My favorite error is between locations 21-33. I found this word, "5jBa039." I can't even guess what that's supposed to say.

I'm an academic and it's quite important that I have a reliable text to work with. This book is not ready for prime time, and needs serious word-by-word editing by a professional. They shouldn't even be selling this book.

As another review has mentioned, this is just a photocopy -- literally, a photocopy, printed and bound, complete with UNDERLINING by the previous owner. This is absolutely ridiculous and I can't believe Amazon sells it. I'll be returning this immediately, calling amazon and complaining very loudly, and buying a real book.

Meticulously translated, this collection of essays is a great place to start for a person only familiar with Weber's seminal work "The Protestant Ethic". I found the essays to be very readable, and Weber's unique style makes it a joy to read.

This is a great place to start for anyone interested in beginning to study sociology.

While Weber's Essays in Sociology has predominantly only been required reading within the field of sociology, this work equally informs other fields of intellectual study, such as political science, history, and social justice studies.

Like Bordieu, Weber argues that sociology is most clearly understood through interpretations of social stratifications and divisions. Weber defines sociology as "a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its cause and effect."

Weber's interpretation of social action can be used as a framework to further analyze prestige and power. His analysis of power structures illustrates how the political understanding of social actions becomes meaningful not only for defining the role of the individual, but more importantly, for the effect an individual's action has in engaging and re-defining the political community.

Weber's arguments draw on how power finds expression institutionally through state structures and the role social action has both on the individual and community in addressing power relations. Weber underscores that while various social actors relate to power structures differently, all power structures employ force to continue dependency as a means of control. This "dynamic of power" constructs a system of competition in which each political organization must to some degree let go of its isolationist and less dependent attitudes in order to gain more prestige and "further political expansion." Weber explains that political structures that alienate themselves run the risk of curbing their power gain.

Weber's conceptualization of "the iron cage" is the culmination of power structures that drain social actors of anything other than working to further capitalist production on behalf of the state. Weber states: "[i]n the field of its highest, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passion, which often actually give it the character of the sport." In other words, people become "specialists without spirit, sensualists with heart." Weber elaborates on how the compulsive embodying force of class reproduction supersedes social actors from breaking free of this cage. Weber illustrates how over time, the effects of class-based differences manifest themselves not only through the economic structure of society, but also in the social and cultural realms, thus making it increasingly difficult for social actors to divest themselves of this structural force that they are a part of and become locked into.

Weber's discussion of "the iron cage" also draws on analyzing the role of world religions, which is based on a particular type of economic ethics that seek to ground the effects of the economy in the historical cultural formations of concepts such as suffering, fortune, magical asceticism, community, sacrifice, ritual, and achievement. Weber underscores the ways in which the religious-determination is profoundly influenced by economic and political factors operating within given geographical, political, social, and national boundaries." However, Weber's concept of "the community cult" posits the notion that religion is not the only determining factor of the economic ethic by addressing the intersectionality of how varying religious ideas are taken on by groups of people.

In seeking to deconstruct the social embodiment of the iron cage, Weber places "legitimate domination" at the center of his analysis of social relationships. He underscores how social inequality relies on legitimate domination to provide a seemingly stable form of social order. Weber exposes how domination allows those in authority to treat groups of people with an illegitimate idea of equality--one which will inevitably result in unjust outcomes through further requiring obedience to the current social order. Weber explains how obedience is not only a materially defined interest to people, but also a habit that has become normalized across stratas and status groups.

Weber's ideas can aptly be understood as calling for a thoroughly interactive conception of the permutations of power in the political realm, its influences and its effects on the individual and community.

This copy is only a low-quality PHOTOCOPY book of the original one. DO NOT BUY THIS. It is not worth your money.
I am very disappointed to find out Amazon allows this item on shelf.

In spite of the real differences between them, Weber and Marx sometimes seem to have more in common than is often acknowledged. American social scientists' deification of Weber and limited interest in Marx has given short-shrift to the conflictual nature of social life as Weber understood it. In the process, they have also given short-shrift to the commonalities between these two classical theorists. This book helps to clarify the relationship between Weberian and Marxist social theory.

As a practical matter, with regard to historically specific phenomena, it sometimes seems that Weber tacitly shared Marx's assessment of the antagonistic relationship between capital and labor. This is especially apparent when Weber is playing the inherently ironic role of a determinedly disinterested value-free social critic.

For example, when Weber visited the United States in 1905, he was interested in studying the peculiarly intense form of American capitalism. Located at Washington University in St. Louis, Weber became interested in the large, privately owned transit system that provided transportation for people throughout the city.

Weber learned that the system had fallen into a bad state of disrepair, and serious accidents were commonplace. The owners of the system had two choices: repair and update the horse-drawn trolleys that moved people from place to place. Or continue to pay damages to passengers who were badly injured and to the families of those who were killed. A cost-benefit analysis showed the latter choice to be less expensive, and so the decision was made. For Weber, this was an obvious outcome: capitalists minimizing costs and maximizing profits, just as their social roles specified.

Weber's contemporary Werner Sombart who was favorably disposed to Marxist social theory, found much the same when he studied coal mining in relatively developed capitalist countries, including the U.S. Accidents resulting in injury or death occurred at a much higher rate in U.S. mines than in mines located in European countries. This led Sombart to conclude that American capitalism was, indeed, an especially intense sort, one in which rational calculability in pursuit of profit was practiced with a vengeance.

For those of us who lived through the the 1970's and 1980's such stories may have a familiar ring. The Ford Pinto was an inexpensive and popular subcompact. It's design, however, was flawed in that the gas tank, located in the back of the car, was likely to explode if the car were rear-ended

Ford knew about this design flaw, but according to the company's cost-benefit calculations, it would cost less to pay off victims of exploding gas tanks (or their survivors) than to redesign the Pinto. So the design flaw stayed in place, and again, rational calculability in dollar terms took precedence over other condiderations.

In spite of their commonalities, however, Weber spoke in terms of organized structures of domination, such as that which gave functional control over labor, rather than antagonistic social classes at war with each other for resources of all kinds. In addition, Weber emphasized that the rationally calculable control of labor by capital was essential for efficient production in a capitalist society. Moreover, Weber objected to Marx's assignment of priority to material and experiential phenomena rather than cultural prescriptions, proscriptions, and meanings.

As we have seen, however, Weber's and Marx's treatments of concrete instances of social organization under capitalism sometimes have more in common than is often acknowledged. There is, in fact, a good deal of class conflict, as Marx understood that phenomenon in Weber's social thought. This is something that Gerth and Mills account enables the reader to discern, but which was long hidden in Parsons' early translations.