Economy and Society

Max Weber is out of style…It is about time for a reappraisal, and an excellent opportunity has been provided in the form of Keith Tribe’s new translation of Weber’s masterpiece. – Nick Burns * New Criterion *A boon to first-time readers of Weber as well as specialist scholars. – Joshua Derman * Journal of Modern History *Keith Tribe is one of the best Weberians around, and has been for decades. This excellent translation will make Max Weber’s work more readily available to a new generation of scholars. Weber’s major ideas never go stale, and Tribe’s translation will assure reliable access to them. – Alan Sica, Pennsylvania State UniversityHarvard University Press could not have found a better translator than Keith Tribe for this project, and no Anglophone writer knows Weber better. Tribe has produced a fine translation that will help the non-specialist appreciate the greatness of Weber’s work. – Peter Baehr, Lingnan University, Hong KongThe great Anglo-American tradition of Max Weber translation has never been more necessary than today, when English is the near-universal language of the academy and the German-language understanding of Weber has recently undergone a revolution. Keith Tribe brings us up to date with a new and appropriately revolutionary re-presentation of Max Weber’s final text of Economy and Society. In the 1960s Economy and Society was said to be the ABC of sociological theory; now we can see it is the Everest. – Peter Ghosh, University of OxfordGenerations of sociologists have thought they really understood what Max Weber was really doing in writing Economy and Society. Historians have long known this is more mythology than reality. And Keith Tribe has been one of the leading figures in putting back into proper context the emergence of those bits of text we can be certain that Weber was most on top of before he died. Tribe’s introduction to this volume is exemplary, letting us see quite how original and still surprising the first several chapters of Weber’s approach to action, interpretation, meaning and the conceptual construction of the economy are. Furthermore, his new translation, with its greater fidelity to the original texts and clarity in its presentation of Weber’s emphatic and didactic intent, effectively gives English-language readers a completely new text, and thus a new Weber, to grapple with. – Duncan Kelly, University of Cambridge

Keith Tribe is a leading authority on Weber, a noted historian of economic and social thought, and an accomplished translator.