Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (2 volume set) Paperback – December 19, 1978

This is a fantastic book for people who want to learn the macro-concepts of how societies function and how they all eventually become overwhelmed by government and religious bureaucracy.

Good for class... great bargain and shipped quickly. I especially appreciate the service of the vendor ane highly reccomend them

Excellent

The complete *Economy and Society* has been around a long time in this English version, but before that it was a long time coming: excerpts by Talcott Parsons were published as *The Theory of Social and Economic Organization*, which you can still buy, and that Parsons would call one of his own books *Economy and Society* indicates postwar sociologists were perhaps expecting this to never appear. Writing in the chaos at the end of Wilhelmine Germany and the beginning of the Weimar Republic, Weber tried to take the insights he had scattered in his historical-sociological writings and expound them very, very systematically in an "introductory" textbook. This massive two-volume set is based on what he did accomplish along those lines by the time of his death in 1920. The level of abstraction is fearsome, but in contradistinction to later social theory (which considered itself all the more successful the more "counterintuitive" its proposals were) Weber's *verstehende* or "interpretive" sociology studies rationality as it is patently apparent at the levels of the individual, group or "concern", and nation. If you are even moderately reflective about your life in the contemporary world, no matter where, Weber's typologies of action and organizational structure will seem like sharper delineations of your common-sensical picture of life.

At a time when the October Revolution had exploded in the European consciousness, Weber was intent on damping-down criticism of the "irrationality" of modern society and enthusiasm for Utopian experiments. As his famous *Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism* made clear, Weber was a critical supporter of the modern spirit, lamenting the "disenchantment of the world" as traditional religious and cultural orders dissolved while welcoming the freer play of what he would come to call here "purposive rationality" (*Zweckrationalitaet*). Although his attitude to efficient matching of means and ends is not negative, Weber famously described other types of rationality drawing on shared and ultimate values as equally legitimate from the standpoint of explaining human conduct, a decision that was hugely influential in the course of the social sciences up to the present date. Students of, well, "economic organization" will find his lengthy analysis of the activity of a "firm" which could be an army or a large corporation highly insightful in ways more recent accounts of business management are not.

Although sitting down to read this is a tall task, I doubt any aspiring sociologist could or would want to get away with ignoring this font of wisdom. However, if you are simply "knocking around", you will still benefit from a precise statement of where you could possibly go in life. Buy it.

Max Weber linked religious satisfaction with economic pride in his most popular book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Then he tried to expand the sociology of developmental history by writing about religion in China, India, and ancient Judaism. The end of Max Weber's life as a professor of economics in 1920 was around the time in which a Woody Wilson wet dream was falling apart without having all the Presbyterians die laughing from an overdose of World War Wit. Instead of trying to find crimes against humor in the work of Max Weber, it is more fruitful to remind ourselves of the Freudian aspects of our failure to maintain all the old ego boundaries as modern societies ride a cosmic pogo stick down the stairs to end up in the basement of as nuclear submarine.

Society is a strange combination of factors which is vulnerable to purely person relationships, which are aptly described by Max Weber in connection with vocational ethics in Economy and Society (1968, 1978) as power relationships:

subordination . . .
dominated by caprice and grace,
indignation and love,
and most of all by the mutual piety
and devotion of masters and subalterns,
after the fashion of the family. (p. 600).

Moses and God. Nixon and Kissinger, Obama and no witnesses

Moses confronted God face to face. Nixon had Kissinger to share his views on the importance of superpower activities. Since the death of Max Weber in 1920, World War Wit has expanded to make any form of social science merely an intellectual comfort zone for thinkers who find the existing dominate tricks oppressive. Max Weber pictured bureaucracy rationalizing activities, but current practice is to hide the nature of particular times by shifting money to meet capital requirements. Paper money dominated the financial problems in the times of Max Weber (who wrote that the United States had little interest in the foreign exchange value of American money, Economy and Society, p. 183) and Keynes, who wrote a Tract on Monetary Reform in 1923.

Big time societies maintain a marketing system which makes the marginal thinking of millionaires and billionaires possible. Financial extremes are schismatic. The current system of political finance just became a factor in a governor of Illinois being sentenced to 14 years in prison for corruption after being tried in federal court. The irony of justice in a cosmic pogo stick society, with everything hopping back and forth like a gambling addiction trying to play faster than the triumph of therapeutic messages coming from the highly educated spear chucker lip in the White House, is a product of worldwide acceptance of the deep unreal.

Intellect should get the Martin Luther Stonehood award when it has a sharper definition of how the importance of an isolated instant in time can equal the danger of training trashy people for high stakes World War Wit inside jobs wiping out unauthorized financial transactions when political power determines whose money has been derived from illegitimate activities:

As far as sociology is concerned,
power of command does not exist
unless the authority which is claimed
by somebody is actually heeded to a
socially relevant degree. (p. 948).

Also where war is a constant
state of affairs, the prestige of
the older men is likely to sink
below that of the warriors and
there often develops a democratic
bias of the younger groups against
the prestige of old age (sexagenarios de ponte). (pp. 950-951).

The conditions of administration
of mass structures are radically different
from those obtaining in small associations
resting upon neighborly or personal relationships. (p. 951).

The money economy is of very
great importance for the whole bearing
of bureaucracy, yet by itself it is by no
means decisive for the existence of bureaucracy. (pp. 963-964).

The increasingly bureaucratic organization
of all genuine mass parties offers the most
striking example of the role of sheer quantity
as a leverage for the bureaucratization of a
social structure; in Germany, above all the
Social Democratic Party, and abroad both of
the American parties are prime examples. (p. 971).

A direct road leads . . .
to the present position of the policeman
as the "representative of God on earth." (p. 972).

And as far as complicated tasks are concerned,
paid bureaucratic work is not only more precise
but, in the last analysis, it is often cheaper than
even formally unremunerated honorific service. (p.974).

As in the song "Cosmic Charlie" by the Grateful Dead, I am concerned that we find the deep unreal when:

the very last lately inquired about you.

Trying to see everything as dynamic, transition failures can crop up as dramatically as reverse warrior is a yoga position coinciding with a change of breath, or a financial crisis jumps on a cosmic pogo stick bouncing back and forth. The cracks in time of the deep unreal might parallel the significance of the primary question Kierkegaard raised in his book, Philosophical Crumbs. Then he wrote a Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

I'm a PHD student writing my thesis, and after juggling the monstrosities that are these two books around while writing one evening, I broke down and bought the Kindle version. But only one book showed up! Most of the references I want to use are in the second volume and Amazon reps are telling me they sent me the second volume. Well it's nowhere that I can see it. So as the other guy said, buyer beware! If this gets resolved I'll update this.

I only received one book from the 2 volume set. Other buyers, beware.

The book itself, however, is fantastic. Weber is amazing.